Operation Wallacea - Indonesia, Hoga.
(This is very long but if you're planning to do a dissertation project with Opwall, especially in Indonesia it may save you thousands of pounds)
I am a final year marine biology student and this summer I spent almost £5000 on an Operation Wallacea(Opwall) expedition to Hoga island, Indonesia as a dissertation student. Around £900 of this was optional in that I chose to buy all my own dive gear, this decision was based on the fact that rental of dive gear was going to be £470 over six weeks anyway.
This is sadly a mostly negative review of a very disapointing experience. Note that this is a review of the Indonesian marine research site on Hoga.
Cost:
- To take part in an opwall dissertation expedition you will need to spend either 6 or 8 weeks on site. Six weeks will cost you around £3000, 8 weeks £3800.
- Then we were told we have to pay for international flights as its not included in the £3000...another £780(Return flights to and from Indonesia with Qatar airways)
- After which I had to fork out another £380 to pay for "internal travel" from Jakarta to the research site, because it's not included in the £3000.
- Also not included in £3000 is rental of dive gear. Which over six weeks will cost you around £470 according to Opwalls prices found here:
http://opwall.com/expeditions/indonesia/money/
- The main lodge on site has a shop which sells an Indonesian beer(Bintang), some sweets/biscuits/crisps. All of which come at largley inflated prices, most more than double the price charged on the non-opwall run shops on nearby islands. Pringles on Hoga cost you 30,000 Rupiah, on Kaledupa the nearby larger island they are 15,000. A beer on hoga is 50,000 Rupiah, in Bau Bau a ferry ride away 25,000 Rupiah. These are just a few examples. If you wanted to spend your money elsewhere, tough luck, the only other shops are on Kaledupa and the only time you are allowed to visit Kaledupa is if you are doing a project which requires you to be there, or if you are a research assistant helping a student who's project is there. This is the only time you are allowed off the island and it's strictly up to Opwall when and how you visit.
- Internet. Also from this shop you purchase a ticket like piece of paper which is essentially proof of purchase for internet time. You pay 50,000 rupiah for 1 hour or 200,000 for 4 hours. You give this ticket to a guy upstairs who will set up an account for you to log into their internet...thingy. The internet is just about un-usable, it took me 27 minutes to load hotmail. Hard to lay the blame for impossibly slow internet speeds at anyone's door given the location, however the extortionate prices charged are another good example of an Opwall practice which makes me question their status as a "non-profit organisation".
Accomodation:
- I went to Hoga expecting poor living conditions, after all it's an isolated island in the middle of nowhere running on mostly local infastructure, what I got was a lot worse than I anticipated.
- Accomodation on Hoga consists of sharing a very small hut with another same sex partner, you can choose to be with someone you know or a random person. The majority of these huts were in abysmal condition. I saw two huts which were actually very pleasant all things considered. These huts are built and owned by local landlords and Opwall pay them a mere $4 a day to allow you to live in them. Accomodation is included in your £3000. Unfortunatley only £168 of it is accounted for this way.
- Mosquito nets are provided for most huts, I did however know two girls who instead of mosquito nets had old net curtains draped over their bed frames. The majority of actual mosquito nets were not fit for purpose. We were promised nets treated to kill insects which land on them, this certainly wasn't the case, mosquitos and cockroaches alike ran riot in my bed at night. Waking up to a cockroach crawling across your face is never going to be a pleasant experience.
- The mattresses in the huts are what you would expect in essence. Sadly, they may have started out as perfectly acceptable but after years of marinading in all the bodily fluids under the sun, without ever seeing any method of cleaning...I can honestly say I wouldn't have been happy to let my dog sleep on that mattress. Providing no support or cusioning from the wooden frame beneath it was akin to sleeping on a concrete floor which smelt unbearably strong of urine and sweat, strong enough to smell from outside the hut, easily the worst thing I have ever smelled and ever will smell.
- The floor boards and walls in my hut were rotting, flaky and crumbling away. A misplaced step would probably have taken you through the floor.
- The roof was good. Albeit noisy because heavy rain on corregated iron is going to be loud anywhere in the world. They kept the rain off us even in days of torrential monsoon weather and no water leaked into the living area of the hut at any point.
- On Hoga you understandably don't "shower". You are provided with large barrels of water, one fresh water to wash with and one salt water to flush the squatty potty with. This water is managed by your landlord, which means it does get changed/refilled...sometimes about once a week. Other than this water is left stagnant in dirty barrels with ill-fitting lids not quite covering it surrounded by cobwebs and other general grime associated with creepy crawlies. We regularly found mosquito larvae in our water we were supposed to wash with, despite best effots to prevent it.
- You will be provided with a small bin. This is the most pointless practice on the island. Every single item that went into my bin would be tossed over the side into the jungle right beside our hut. There is no waste management system in place on Hoga.
- Sheets are supposed to be changed once a week by your landlord, this just didn't happen.
- There is a large whiteboard in the main lodge on which you write your name, your hut number and any issues you have like water being changed or new sheets/toilet roll etc. This board is regularly wiped clean by staff without the requests being fulfilled. My hut had 1 lightbulb, questionably wired up in our toilet..box which did not work the entire 6 weeks despite us asking for a new bulb from day 1, this meant washing/using the toilet in absoloute darkness at all times. One man is responsible for reading the board and passing on instructions to hut owners...with over 250 people on the island and probably hundreds of huts it is a fundamentally flawed and ill concieved system through which to manage important accomodation issues.
- Power on Hoga is achieved through the use of generators which run from 8am to 9pm. Understandable no qualms there. They use two pronged sockets like ones found in Germany I believe.
Food:
- If you canno't stomach fish, you will go hungry every day unless you fork out large amounts for pringles and oreos. Food on Hoga arrives once a week at the same time as new people arrive on the ferry, so when something runs out like the breakfast porridge did, there is none untill the next boat.
- Breakfast on Hoga is a type of breakfast rice with some sort of garlic marinade on it. The rice for breakfast is the leftover from last night's dinner which is left uncovered in the kitchen in large bowls over night. There is also SOMETIMES porridge(runs out very quickly) a small lunchbox full of stale bread rolls and a few jars of differnt types of jam
- Lunch is usually a vegetarian type snack food and or plain white rice, like nuts and noodles, vegetables which are boiled to death and then some more, if you're very, very lucky a fried egg with some noodles. Eggs come to be a tradeable commodity on the island by the end of your stay.
- Dinner is usually a small(...very small) portion of fish, usually Tuna or Trevally, in some sort of sauce, the fish was actually all very nice but far to small a portion and would be served with plain white rice. This small portion of fish, maybe about the size of a cigarette box was all I would eat most days after becoming physically unable to eat plain rice anymore and unable to afford snacks from the shop. I lost almost a stone and a half in 6 weeks and no not in a healthy "that sounds like a diet i should try!!" kind of way. This was admitedly down to mostly me being unable to bare eating plain white rice 3 meals a day, every day for 42 days. It's hard to argue with being served fish and rice though, given the location it's all you should expect not 5* restaraunt food or a big canteen. My big issue really is that you are served a lot of yellow fin tuna, a very unsustainable species caught locally in a very unsustainable manor with blast fishing and long lines both in operation in the area. For a "conservation" group like Opwall to be feeding it's volunteers/staff unsustainable food from unsustainable fishing methods is hypocrisy. There would also be days when kitchen staff would inform us that there wasn't even fish for dinner and we just had to make do with more of what ever we had for lunch, these days I would usually go hungry.
- Worth noting that food IS included in your £3000*. However when we tried to calculate how much of that £3000 would have been spent on food, given local fish prices and the price of rice in SE Asia...very little indeed was the answer. About 16 fish were used to feed 1 sitting for dinner and there would be 2 or 3 sittings(8 tables, 8 people per table, 2 fish between 8 people). A haul of about 20 small yellowfin tuna on Kaledupa cost around 150,000 Rupiah(if that) according to a few locals, thats about 450,000 RP on fish for 3 sittings, plus the cost of rice which is barely worth the sack it comes in in Asia, I think it's fair to say it adds up to no more than 1M RP to feed everyone on the island dinner, much much less for breakfast and maybe another 400,000 to feed everyone for lunch. Thats less than 1.5m Rupiah a day to feed everyone. With an average of about 200 people on the island at anyone time thats around 7,500 RP per person, per day, which is about 315,000 per person for all 6 weeks, that is equal to less than £20.
Those prices/maths are vauge estimates but are unlikely to be very far from accurate.
*Now accounted for £188 of your £3000, accomodation and food.
Diving/Snorkeling/Swimming:
- Diving on Hoga is intensley regimented and regulated, with good reason, albeit a bit anal. A strict maximum depth of 18m is imposed as is a 50 minute surface to surface time, including a 5 minute safety stop at 5m and you may only dive twice a day. This is because of the location, Hoga is a 9 hour ferry ride away from the nearesty town with a power grid, to get that ferry it has to first travel 9 hours to Hoga then 9 hours back. The emergency evacuation protocol is you get a 2 hour ferry over to a nearby island and cross your fingers that there is a plane there at the tiny local airstrip that will take you to Makassar, the nearest hospital, which is another 2 hour flight away. In an emergency getting you to a hospital is a minimum of just over 4 hours.
- You only have 3 dive sites to choose from (unless you are part of the reef monitoring team, which is temporary) all of the students on site are competing for a spot at these three sites which makes it very hard to go where you need, when you need, this greatly interrupts your data collection and will test your patience. There is a boat schedule whereby a boat goes to each site 3 times a day. You are only allowed to dive twice a day. Your project "supervisor" (ill get to this later) is responsible for arranging which sites you go to each day, the dive schedule is arranged each night and a boat meeting at the start of each week including the guy in charge of boat schedules and project supervisors. At the start of each week you must hand in a dive plan to your supervisor with which sites you need to visit and how many times. They are supposed to use this to get you on the right boat to the right site, it is completley hit and miss if this works and the boat meetings are basically pulling straws. I needed 2 dives at one site to complete my data collection and i got the wrong sites 7 dives in a row, that was 3 days wasted, not a single person in the dissertation team was happy about the boat schedules.
- The sites are good but not the best or most pristine reefs in the world as is boasted by Opwall. It is true that it's hard to dive the Wakatobi region without doing it through opwall but because of the volume of inexperienced divers being put in the water at these sites, those endanged and disapearing reefs are littered with chunks of dead coral where sub-standard divers have kicked the crap out of the reef by accident. People who have never dived before should not be allowed to try and undertake scientific surveys which require close quaters interaction with fragile reef environments. Opwall divers cause more damage to the reefs than they do good.
- Very little conservation work is in place on and around Hoga. Opwall sell themselves as all about conservation and sustainability but the island is run like a factory at the expense of locals, the environment and the volunteers. The island at times is like taking a stroll through a landfillm years of carelessley discarded rubbish litter both the beaches and the jungle. The only thing I saw that remotley suggests conservation initiatives are at work on Hoga was a once fortnightly beach clean...on ONE of the island's beaches. While taking part in this beach clean I found things as horrifying as dirty hyperdermic needles...washed up on the beach due to plastic attachments.
School kids of various ages, from various countries come and go on Hoga each week. The only purpose for their visit is for Opwall to rinse them for more money, they arrive, do the most basic SCUBA certification course for 1 week (and destroy some of the reefs in the process) then they move onto the forrest site. They do nothing for the environment there other than trash it. This also puts dissertation students at a large disadvantage when it comes to diving, the learner divers need a boat to take them to their confined water dives on platforms, this means less boats to take people doing scientific projects for their university and their degree to go to sites they need.
- The dive boats are dangerous. Small, very old and very breakable wooden dive boats driven by outboard engines. The floors are just pannels of wood nailed together as you may imagine, but the pannels are easily broken/splintered and have rusty nails poking out here and there. I'm aware of at least 2 ocasions when people were kitting up and their foot broke through the floor pannel throwing them off balance, with about 15kg of SCUBA gear on their back on an unstable boat covered in exposed nails...
The sitting part of the boat is also riddled with splinters, loose wood and exposed nails, several people tore large holes in expensive wetsuits and suffered small injuries backrolling into the water catching themselves on these nails. When brought to the attention of the site dive supervisor it was met with "oh yeah we loose several wetsuits ever year".
- You may only snorkel around Hoga while there is shore cover available. This means someone from the dive staff sitting on the beach with a radio and binoculars monitoring people in the water, similar to a lifeguard role, which is sensible. However as they were understaffed the entire time I was on the island they were only ever able to provide shore cover for 1 or 2 hours a day, most days. The shore cover times were supposed to be written up on a board in the lodge, this happend only sometimes, this meant that if you were diving/working during shore cover time, tough luck you can't go in the water.
- You cannot just "swim" on Hoga, you can only go in the water to dive or snorkel and both must be while in a full 3mm+ wetsuit, boots, fins, mask and snorkel. This makes just going for a casual swim to cool down/for fun impossible, even snorkelling became a chore when it was possible as having to get all the kit on and check out a surface buoy to carry with you was incredibley frustrating.
Staff:
- If you're doing a dissertation project you will be assigned an Opwall onsite supervisor in addition to your university project supervisor. The level of qualification, interest, advice and help you recieve from your "supervisor" is a lottery. Supervisors are usually just PHD or masters' students who are on site doing their own projects and get lumped with you, this leads to them often treating you like a burden they'd rather forget about. On Hoga this year an undergraduate who was awaiting his final year results was placed in charge of a mature student's masters thesis...logical?
My supervisor had no experience in the field of research I was working in and would spend the days working (admirably) hard on their own project. While I was regularly offered help in the guise of "if you need any help just come and ask". The trouble with this is, I'm an undergraduate student with no experience in field science or "grown up science" if you like. I didn't know if I needed help, it seemed to be going fine but how would I know if I'd made a mistake unless it was catastrophically wrong? I had prepared a project proposal and presented it to her and had recieved feedback a few times then once I was on site it was "yeah that looks ok off you go, need any help just ask". There is no chance that I wrote a perfect proposal that didn't need any changing at all yet I was sent on my way, as far as that suggested my project was perfect and everything was fine, which it definitaley wasn't.
- A lot of dive staff (Dive masters, Dive instructors etc) came across as arrogant with god complexes after being given a role of even slight authority and unapproachable. Pretty severe telling offs for minor "offences" were a regular occurance. This may just have been a bad year for staff, who are all drafted in temporarily through PADI and I should mention that some of the dive staff there I will be friends with for life but the majority were bad apples.
Opwall claim to be about responsible tourism but I can honestly say that I don't know where £2,812 of my £3000 went because it didn't cover my stay there nor did it contribute to any conservation programs they are running as they aren't running any.
Taken from Opwall's site:
"What is covered by the expedition costs?
The expedition costs paid to Operation Wallacea cover virtually everything from the start point of the expedition to the finish point of the expedition. This includes all accommodation, food, transfers between sites, all on-site training courses (except optional additional courses), diving, $1.5 million medical and evacuation insurance, academic supervision, provision of all the support and medical staff and participation in any of the research projects being offered. The whole science programme and subsequent reporting is supported by the expedition costs."
- Accomodation is £168 for 6 weeks
- Food is very cheaply sourced local fish and rice.
- Transfers between sites - There wasn't any, I stayed on Hoga, maybe fuel for boats, not £2800 per person's worth.
- "All on site" means PADI open water and nothing else.
- Diving - ..I don't understand this, you still pay to rent dive gear and the site isn't a dive resort so there shouldn't be fees to dive anyway?
- Insurance - is irrelevant because you have to pay for your own travel insurance anyway so are already covered for medical issues.
Academic supervision - All the staff on the island are unpaid volunteers, this is just wrong.
Medical staff - unpaid volunteers
You are essentially paying them £3000 just for the sake of taking part.
I would activley advise against going with Opwall to the Indonesia site, I have friends who went to the Honduras site and had nothing but praise for it...although the financing issue is exactly the same.
I am a final year marine biology student and this summer I spent almost £5000 on an Operation Wallacea(Opwall) expedition to Hoga island, Indonesia as a dissertation student. Around £900 of this was optional in that I chose to buy all my own dive gear, this decision was based on the fact that rental of dive gear was going to be £470 over six weeks anyway.
This is sadly a mostly negative review of a very disapointing experience. Note that this is a review of the Indonesian marine research site on Hoga.
Cost:
- To take part in an opwall dissertation expedition you will need to spend either 6 or 8 weeks on site. Six weeks will cost you around £3000, 8 weeks £3800.
- Then we were told we have to pay for international flights as its not included in the £3000...another £780(Return flights to and from Indonesia with Qatar airways)
- After which I had to fork out another £380 to pay for "internal travel" from Jakarta to the research site, because it's not included in the £3000.
- Also not included in £3000 is rental of dive gear. Which over six weeks will cost you around £470 according to Opwalls prices found here:
http://opwall.com/expeditions/indonesia/money/
- The main lodge on site has a shop which sells an Indonesian beer(Bintang), some sweets/biscuits/crisps. All of which come at largley inflated prices, most more than double the price charged on the non-opwall run shops on nearby islands. Pringles on Hoga cost you 30,000 Rupiah, on Kaledupa the nearby larger island they are 15,000. A beer on hoga is 50,000 Rupiah, in Bau Bau a ferry ride away 25,000 Rupiah. These are just a few examples. If you wanted to spend your money elsewhere, tough luck, the only other shops are on Kaledupa and the only time you are allowed to visit Kaledupa is if you are doing a project which requires you to be there, or if you are a research assistant helping a student who's project is there. This is the only time you are allowed off the island and it's strictly up to Opwall when and how you visit.
- Internet. Also from this shop you purchase a ticket like piece of paper which is essentially proof of purchase for internet time. You pay 50,000 rupiah for 1 hour or 200,000 for 4 hours. You give this ticket to a guy upstairs who will set up an account for you to log into their internet...thingy. The internet is just about un-usable, it took me 27 minutes to load hotmail. Hard to lay the blame for impossibly slow internet speeds at anyone's door given the location, however the extortionate prices charged are another good example of an Opwall practice which makes me question their status as a "non-profit organisation".
Accomodation:
- I went to Hoga expecting poor living conditions, after all it's an isolated island in the middle of nowhere running on mostly local infastructure, what I got was a lot worse than I anticipated.
- Accomodation on Hoga consists of sharing a very small hut with another same sex partner, you can choose to be with someone you know or a random person. The majority of these huts were in abysmal condition. I saw two huts which were actually very pleasant all things considered. These huts are built and owned by local landlords and Opwall pay them a mere $4 a day to allow you to live in them. Accomodation is included in your £3000. Unfortunatley only £168 of it is accounted for this way.
- Mosquito nets are provided for most huts, I did however know two girls who instead of mosquito nets had old net curtains draped over their bed frames. The majority of actual mosquito nets were not fit for purpose. We were promised nets treated to kill insects which land on them, this certainly wasn't the case, mosquitos and cockroaches alike ran riot in my bed at night. Waking up to a cockroach crawling across your face is never going to be a pleasant experience.
- The mattresses in the huts are what you would expect in essence. Sadly, they may have started out as perfectly acceptable but after years of marinading in all the bodily fluids under the sun, without ever seeing any method of cleaning...I can honestly say I wouldn't have been happy to let my dog sleep on that mattress. Providing no support or cusioning from the wooden frame beneath it was akin to sleeping on a concrete floor which smelt unbearably strong of urine and sweat, strong enough to smell from outside the hut, easily the worst thing I have ever smelled and ever will smell.
- The floor boards and walls in my hut were rotting, flaky and crumbling away. A misplaced step would probably have taken you through the floor.
- The roof was good. Albeit noisy because heavy rain on corregated iron is going to be loud anywhere in the world. They kept the rain off us even in days of torrential monsoon weather and no water leaked into the living area of the hut at any point.
- On Hoga you understandably don't "shower". You are provided with large barrels of water, one fresh water to wash with and one salt water to flush the squatty potty with. This water is managed by your landlord, which means it does get changed/refilled...sometimes about once a week. Other than this water is left stagnant in dirty barrels with ill-fitting lids not quite covering it surrounded by cobwebs and other general grime associated with creepy crawlies. We regularly found mosquito larvae in our water we were supposed to wash with, despite best effots to prevent it.
- You will be provided with a small bin. This is the most pointless practice on the island. Every single item that went into my bin would be tossed over the side into the jungle right beside our hut. There is no waste management system in place on Hoga.
- Sheets are supposed to be changed once a week by your landlord, this just didn't happen.
- There is a large whiteboard in the main lodge on which you write your name, your hut number and any issues you have like water being changed or new sheets/toilet roll etc. This board is regularly wiped clean by staff without the requests being fulfilled. My hut had 1 lightbulb, questionably wired up in our toilet..box which did not work the entire 6 weeks despite us asking for a new bulb from day 1, this meant washing/using the toilet in absoloute darkness at all times. One man is responsible for reading the board and passing on instructions to hut owners...with over 250 people on the island and probably hundreds of huts it is a fundamentally flawed and ill concieved system through which to manage important accomodation issues.
- Power on Hoga is achieved through the use of generators which run from 8am to 9pm. Understandable no qualms there. They use two pronged sockets like ones found in Germany I believe.
Food:
- If you canno't stomach fish, you will go hungry every day unless you fork out large amounts for pringles and oreos. Food on Hoga arrives once a week at the same time as new people arrive on the ferry, so when something runs out like the breakfast porridge did, there is none untill the next boat.
- Breakfast on Hoga is a type of breakfast rice with some sort of garlic marinade on it. The rice for breakfast is the leftover from last night's dinner which is left uncovered in the kitchen in large bowls over night. There is also SOMETIMES porridge(runs out very quickly) a small lunchbox full of stale bread rolls and a few jars of differnt types of jam
- Lunch is usually a vegetarian type snack food and or plain white rice, like nuts and noodles, vegetables which are boiled to death and then some more, if you're very, very lucky a fried egg with some noodles. Eggs come to be a tradeable commodity on the island by the end of your stay.
- Dinner is usually a small(...very small) portion of fish, usually Tuna or Trevally, in some sort of sauce, the fish was actually all very nice but far to small a portion and would be served with plain white rice. This small portion of fish, maybe about the size of a cigarette box was all I would eat most days after becoming physically unable to eat plain rice anymore and unable to afford snacks from the shop. I lost almost a stone and a half in 6 weeks and no not in a healthy "that sounds like a diet i should try!!" kind of way. This was admitedly down to mostly me being unable to bare eating plain white rice 3 meals a day, every day for 42 days. It's hard to argue with being served fish and rice though, given the location it's all you should expect not 5* restaraunt food or a big canteen. My big issue really is that you are served a lot of yellow fin tuna, a very unsustainable species caught locally in a very unsustainable manor with blast fishing and long lines both in operation in the area. For a "conservation" group like Opwall to be feeding it's volunteers/staff unsustainable food from unsustainable fishing methods is hypocrisy. There would also be days when kitchen staff would inform us that there wasn't even fish for dinner and we just had to make do with more of what ever we had for lunch, these days I would usually go hungry.
- Worth noting that food IS included in your £3000*. However when we tried to calculate how much of that £3000 would have been spent on food, given local fish prices and the price of rice in SE Asia...very little indeed was the answer. About 16 fish were used to feed 1 sitting for dinner and there would be 2 or 3 sittings(8 tables, 8 people per table, 2 fish between 8 people). A haul of about 20 small yellowfin tuna on Kaledupa cost around 150,000 Rupiah(if that) according to a few locals, thats about 450,000 RP on fish for 3 sittings, plus the cost of rice which is barely worth the sack it comes in in Asia, I think it's fair to say it adds up to no more than 1M RP to feed everyone on the island dinner, much much less for breakfast and maybe another 400,000 to feed everyone for lunch. Thats less than 1.5m Rupiah a day to feed everyone. With an average of about 200 people on the island at anyone time thats around 7,500 RP per person, per day, which is about 315,000 per person for all 6 weeks, that is equal to less than £20.
Those prices/maths are vauge estimates but are unlikely to be very far from accurate.
*Now accounted for £188 of your £3000, accomodation and food.
Diving/Snorkeling/Swimming:
- Diving on Hoga is intensley regimented and regulated, with good reason, albeit a bit anal. A strict maximum depth of 18m is imposed as is a 50 minute surface to surface time, including a 5 minute safety stop at 5m and you may only dive twice a day. This is because of the location, Hoga is a 9 hour ferry ride away from the nearesty town with a power grid, to get that ferry it has to first travel 9 hours to Hoga then 9 hours back. The emergency evacuation protocol is you get a 2 hour ferry over to a nearby island and cross your fingers that there is a plane there at the tiny local airstrip that will take you to Makassar, the nearest hospital, which is another 2 hour flight away. In an emergency getting you to a hospital is a minimum of just over 4 hours.
- You only have 3 dive sites to choose from (unless you are part of the reef monitoring team, which is temporary) all of the students on site are competing for a spot at these three sites which makes it very hard to go where you need, when you need, this greatly interrupts your data collection and will test your patience. There is a boat schedule whereby a boat goes to each site 3 times a day. You are only allowed to dive twice a day. Your project "supervisor" (ill get to this later) is responsible for arranging which sites you go to each day, the dive schedule is arranged each night and a boat meeting at the start of each week including the guy in charge of boat schedules and project supervisors. At the start of each week you must hand in a dive plan to your supervisor with which sites you need to visit and how many times. They are supposed to use this to get you on the right boat to the right site, it is completley hit and miss if this works and the boat meetings are basically pulling straws. I needed 2 dives at one site to complete my data collection and i got the wrong sites 7 dives in a row, that was 3 days wasted, not a single person in the dissertation team was happy about the boat schedules.
- The sites are good but not the best or most pristine reefs in the world as is boasted by Opwall. It is true that it's hard to dive the Wakatobi region without doing it through opwall but because of the volume of inexperienced divers being put in the water at these sites, those endanged and disapearing reefs are littered with chunks of dead coral where sub-standard divers have kicked the crap out of the reef by accident. People who have never dived before should not be allowed to try and undertake scientific surveys which require close quaters interaction with fragile reef environments. Opwall divers cause more damage to the reefs than they do good.
- Very little conservation work is in place on and around Hoga. Opwall sell themselves as all about conservation and sustainability but the island is run like a factory at the expense of locals, the environment and the volunteers. The island at times is like taking a stroll through a landfillm years of carelessley discarded rubbish litter both the beaches and the jungle. The only thing I saw that remotley suggests conservation initiatives are at work on Hoga was a once fortnightly beach clean...on ONE of the island's beaches. While taking part in this beach clean I found things as horrifying as dirty hyperdermic needles...washed up on the beach due to plastic attachments.
School kids of various ages, from various countries come and go on Hoga each week. The only purpose for their visit is for Opwall to rinse them for more money, they arrive, do the most basic SCUBA certification course for 1 week (and destroy some of the reefs in the process) then they move onto the forrest site. They do nothing for the environment there other than trash it. This also puts dissertation students at a large disadvantage when it comes to diving, the learner divers need a boat to take them to their confined water dives on platforms, this means less boats to take people doing scientific projects for their university and their degree to go to sites they need.
- The dive boats are dangerous. Small, very old and very breakable wooden dive boats driven by outboard engines. The floors are just pannels of wood nailed together as you may imagine, but the pannels are easily broken/splintered and have rusty nails poking out here and there. I'm aware of at least 2 ocasions when people were kitting up and their foot broke through the floor pannel throwing them off balance, with about 15kg of SCUBA gear on their back on an unstable boat covered in exposed nails...
The sitting part of the boat is also riddled with splinters, loose wood and exposed nails, several people tore large holes in expensive wetsuits and suffered small injuries backrolling into the water catching themselves on these nails. When brought to the attention of the site dive supervisor it was met with "oh yeah we loose several wetsuits ever year".
- You may only snorkel around Hoga while there is shore cover available. This means someone from the dive staff sitting on the beach with a radio and binoculars monitoring people in the water, similar to a lifeguard role, which is sensible. However as they were understaffed the entire time I was on the island they were only ever able to provide shore cover for 1 or 2 hours a day, most days. The shore cover times were supposed to be written up on a board in the lodge, this happend only sometimes, this meant that if you were diving/working during shore cover time, tough luck you can't go in the water.
- You cannot just "swim" on Hoga, you can only go in the water to dive or snorkel and both must be while in a full 3mm+ wetsuit, boots, fins, mask and snorkel. This makes just going for a casual swim to cool down/for fun impossible, even snorkelling became a chore when it was possible as having to get all the kit on and check out a surface buoy to carry with you was incredibley frustrating.
Staff:
- If you're doing a dissertation project you will be assigned an Opwall onsite supervisor in addition to your university project supervisor. The level of qualification, interest, advice and help you recieve from your "supervisor" is a lottery. Supervisors are usually just PHD or masters' students who are on site doing their own projects and get lumped with you, this leads to them often treating you like a burden they'd rather forget about. On Hoga this year an undergraduate who was awaiting his final year results was placed in charge of a mature student's masters thesis...logical?
My supervisor had no experience in the field of research I was working in and would spend the days working (admirably) hard on their own project. While I was regularly offered help in the guise of "if you need any help just come and ask". The trouble with this is, I'm an undergraduate student with no experience in field science or "grown up science" if you like. I didn't know if I needed help, it seemed to be going fine but how would I know if I'd made a mistake unless it was catastrophically wrong? I had prepared a project proposal and presented it to her and had recieved feedback a few times then once I was on site it was "yeah that looks ok off you go, need any help just ask". There is no chance that I wrote a perfect proposal that didn't need any changing at all yet I was sent on my way, as far as that suggested my project was perfect and everything was fine, which it definitaley wasn't.
- A lot of dive staff (Dive masters, Dive instructors etc) came across as arrogant with god complexes after being given a role of even slight authority and unapproachable. Pretty severe telling offs for minor "offences" were a regular occurance. This may just have been a bad year for staff, who are all drafted in temporarily through PADI and I should mention that some of the dive staff there I will be friends with for life but the majority were bad apples.
Opwall claim to be about responsible tourism but I can honestly say that I don't know where £2,812 of my £3000 went because it didn't cover my stay there nor did it contribute to any conservation programs they are running as they aren't running any.
Taken from Opwall's site:
"What is covered by the expedition costs?
The expedition costs paid to Operation Wallacea cover virtually everything from the start point of the expedition to the finish point of the expedition. This includes all accommodation, food, transfers between sites, all on-site training courses (except optional additional courses), diving, $1.5 million medical and evacuation insurance, academic supervision, provision of all the support and medical staff and participation in any of the research projects being offered. The whole science programme and subsequent reporting is supported by the expedition costs."
- Accomodation is £168 for 6 weeks
- Food is very cheaply sourced local fish and rice.
- Transfers between sites - There wasn't any, I stayed on Hoga, maybe fuel for boats, not £2800 per person's worth.
- "All on site" means PADI open water and nothing else.
- Diving - ..I don't understand this, you still pay to rent dive gear and the site isn't a dive resort so there shouldn't be fees to dive anyway?
- Insurance - is irrelevant because you have to pay for your own travel insurance anyway so are already covered for medical issues.
Academic supervision - All the staff on the island are unpaid volunteers, this is just wrong.
Medical staff - unpaid volunteers
You are essentially paying them £3000 just for the sake of taking part.
I would activley advise against going with Opwall to the Indonesia site, I have friends who went to the Honduras site and had nothing but praise for it...although the financing issue is exactly the same.
My name is Charlotte Palmer and I am the Indonesian country manager for Operation Wallacea. I have worked with Operation Wallacea since I was a student and I had my first expedition with them in 2006, where I was a dissertation student. Since then I have worked on the Honduras project for four years and the Indonesia site for 3 years. I also have an extensive background in conservation working with many other organisations, mainly charity based, both abroad and in the UK. For the majority of the year I work in our Lincolnshire head office and then I spend the summer out on the projects in Indonesia, overseeing the expedition. Anyone who comes to Indonesia will have plenty of contact with me and I have left my contact details at the end for anyone who has any questions about Operation Wallacea at all.
The first thing to know about Hoga and Operation Wallacea in general is our strong emphasis on evidence based conservation and a strong science program. The Wakatobi Marine National Park, where Hoga is located has one of the best studied coral reef systems in the world. The marine park has recently been designated a Marine Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO and recognised as a site of special interest which promotes excellence in research and education.
Much of the research undertaken by both volunteers and staff are related to conservation, by increasing our knowledge of the biodiversity, productivity and functional ecology of these systems. Examples of direct research that has led to better informed management includes research on local fisheries, research on the rates of change in key system characteristics over time driven by different management regimes, detailed monitoring of the health and biodiversity of reefs in the region, research in to the environmental impact of agar farms, research in to the extent to which reefs of the region are impacted by biological agents, in particularly Crown of Thorns Starfish and coral disease, investigations in to the recruitment of reef building corals on to different reef systems to determine if degraded systems have the potential to recover and hence what drives reef resilience, and finally social and anthropological and research investigating the connection between local stakeholders and coral reefs including management authorities, islanders and Bajo .
Most of the activities in one way or another are related to conservation and increasing global knowledge of coral reef systems. Having said that there are some projects (the vast minority) that purely address a specific ecological question and as long as it adds to our knowledge base then we are happy for such projects to be included in the programme. The most difficult task is to bring all these projects together and use it to produce reports and presentations that are delivered to management authorities and policy makers and in doing so ensure that the park remains a site which has value and that that higher value is related to a higher quality environment.
The Hoga site is a fantastic research program and has produced over 90% of the publications that have come from the whole of the coral triangle region (an area that includes the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands). The research and conservation of the area is the driving force behind the whole project and that is what we want our volunteers to experience.
The second aspect of the projects that all Opwall staff are very proud of is our interaction and contribution to local communities on all of our projects. Our aim is to involve as many people from the local community in the project as possible, through employment, training and capacity building and finally education. We are able to provide income to local people in a number of ways. You meet numbers of Indonesian staff on site, running the boats, the dive shed, the ladies that work in the kitchen and many many more. A secondary way we are able to provide income is through the housing that all of our volunteers stay in. We asked, and then helped many people from the island of Kaledupa (neighbouring Hoga) to build small traditional style Indonesian houses on the island that house two people. Operation Wallacea then rents these houses giving income to the landlord of the house. As an organization this is obviously not the most cost effective way to house people on the island, the cheapest way would have been to build the houses ourselves and then no rent needs to be paid, but the decision was made to do it the way we do currently to support the communities on Kaledupa. There are many other examples where Operation Wallacea does very similar things to make sure the local communities are always involved and supported by our projects.
The final thing that all Operation Wallacea volunteers should know is where their money goes and this is something we are open and honest about. Something that needs to be clear is that Operation Wallacea is not a charity, nor do we ever promote ourselves as one. We have a counterpart charity that we work with, The Operation Wallacea Trust. It is important to note that none of the directors are the same and so they run as independent entities but we can work together to apply for large scale funding and when this is achieved the money goes straight to the trust and then can be spent supporting our conservation outcomes on our projects worldwide.
When you sign up as a research assistant or dissertation student you pay a fee to Operation Wallacea for the support and advice we give you in planning your trip, the project out on site and also to make sure we look after you in the interests of safety at all times. Of the fee you pay to Operation Wallacea over 60% goes out to the field projects. As a company we are very proud of this figure and if you do a little research you will soon see that this much higher than most other organisations and charities as well. The money that goes out to the field project goes into a huge number of areas, which really until you have planned a project like this it is hard to see what it takes to set up a field station. There are things that are obvious, your accommodation, food etc and then many hidden cost such as research permit, land rental, purchasing and delivering of food, the list goes on. Just to mention that our food is all cooked by local ladies and is all traditional Indonesian food. We try to source food as locally as we can, but because of the remoteness of the island most food has to be shipped in from Bau Bau (a twelve hour boat ride away) and buying the food from a different location and shipping it to the island comes at a price. One product we always source locally is our fish. We mainly serve tuna, which is not the yellow fin species, which is locally caught on short lines from small dug out canoes or single engine boats, we never serve unsustainably caught fish and would never purchase fish that has been caught on a long line or through blast fishing.
The money that stays in the UK is used to run our office (in a rural location in Lincolnshire, not an expensive city location), the wages of the full time members of staff such as myself, the costs of putting on presentations in Universities to recruit our volunteers and the medical insurance that covers you while you are on site.
It is important to note that safety is something that we as a company take extremely seriously, which is why we have a specialized insurance policy that will cover you for an evacuation from our site if the need arose. We have full evacuation plans published on our website, along with risk assessments and we also publish our medical statistics every year. There are procedures on Hoga that are set up for your safety, and at times I can understand students being frustrated by them, for instance having to wear a full length wetsuit whenever you are in the water but this is simply to avoid you coming into contact with and being stung by venomous animals in the water. We appreciate that our volunteers understand any rules we make are for your safety and for no other reason.
On a last note I would like to say that the reality of conservation work is very difficult and no, our projects are not perfect, no conservation project is. Something that Operation Wallacea and myself as the manager of the Indonesia project will always want to do is constantly improve everything we are doing. For all Operation Wallacea staff we work for the company because we have a background in biology, conservation or education and because we believe in what we are trying to achieve which is locally driven, conservation management of some of the most biologically important places in the world, which students are able to experience and support through joining us on an expedition. For anyone who would like to know about the conservation projects we are currently working on or anything else about the expeditions then please feel free to contact me.
Charlotte Palmer, Operation Wallacea, [email protected]
The first thing to know about Hoga and Operation Wallacea in general is our strong emphasis on evidence based conservation and a strong science program. The Wakatobi Marine National Park, where Hoga is located has one of the best studied coral reef systems in the world. The marine park has recently been designated a Marine Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO and recognised as a site of special interest which promotes excellence in research and education.
Much of the research undertaken by both volunteers and staff are related to conservation, by increasing our knowledge of the biodiversity, productivity and functional ecology of these systems. Examples of direct research that has led to better informed management includes research on local fisheries, research on the rates of change in key system characteristics over time driven by different management regimes, detailed monitoring of the health and biodiversity of reefs in the region, research in to the environmental impact of agar farms, research in to the extent to which reefs of the region are impacted by biological agents, in particularly Crown of Thorns Starfish and coral disease, investigations in to the recruitment of reef building corals on to different reef systems to determine if degraded systems have the potential to recover and hence what drives reef resilience, and finally social and anthropological and research investigating the connection between local stakeholders and coral reefs including management authorities, islanders and Bajo .
Most of the activities in one way or another are related to conservation and increasing global knowledge of coral reef systems. Having said that there are some projects (the vast minority) that purely address a specific ecological question and as long as it adds to our knowledge base then we are happy for such projects to be included in the programme. The most difficult task is to bring all these projects together and use it to produce reports and presentations that are delivered to management authorities and policy makers and in doing so ensure that the park remains a site which has value and that that higher value is related to a higher quality environment.
The Hoga site is a fantastic research program and has produced over 90% of the publications that have come from the whole of the coral triangle region (an area that includes the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands). The research and conservation of the area is the driving force behind the whole project and that is what we want our volunteers to experience.
The second aspect of the projects that all Opwall staff are very proud of is our interaction and contribution to local communities on all of our projects. Our aim is to involve as many people from the local community in the project as possible, through employment, training and capacity building and finally education. We are able to provide income to local people in a number of ways. You meet numbers of Indonesian staff on site, running the boats, the dive shed, the ladies that work in the kitchen and many many more. A secondary way we are able to provide income is through the housing that all of our volunteers stay in. We asked, and then helped many people from the island of Kaledupa (neighbouring Hoga) to build small traditional style Indonesian houses on the island that house two people. Operation Wallacea then rents these houses giving income to the landlord of the house. As an organization this is obviously not the most cost effective way to house people on the island, the cheapest way would have been to build the houses ourselves and then no rent needs to be paid, but the decision was made to do it the way we do currently to support the communities on Kaledupa. There are many other examples where Operation Wallacea does very similar things to make sure the local communities are always involved and supported by our projects.
The final thing that all Operation Wallacea volunteers should know is where their money goes and this is something we are open and honest about. Something that needs to be clear is that Operation Wallacea is not a charity, nor do we ever promote ourselves as one. We have a counterpart charity that we work with, The Operation Wallacea Trust. It is important to note that none of the directors are the same and so they run as independent entities but we can work together to apply for large scale funding and when this is achieved the money goes straight to the trust and then can be spent supporting our conservation outcomes on our projects worldwide.
When you sign up as a research assistant or dissertation student you pay a fee to Operation Wallacea for the support and advice we give you in planning your trip, the project out on site and also to make sure we look after you in the interests of safety at all times. Of the fee you pay to Operation Wallacea over 60% goes out to the field projects. As a company we are very proud of this figure and if you do a little research you will soon see that this much higher than most other organisations and charities as well. The money that goes out to the field project goes into a huge number of areas, which really until you have planned a project like this it is hard to see what it takes to set up a field station. There are things that are obvious, your accommodation, food etc and then many hidden cost such as research permit, land rental, purchasing and delivering of food, the list goes on. Just to mention that our food is all cooked by local ladies and is all traditional Indonesian food. We try to source food as locally as we can, but because of the remoteness of the island most food has to be shipped in from Bau Bau (a twelve hour boat ride away) and buying the food from a different location and shipping it to the island comes at a price. One product we always source locally is our fish. We mainly serve tuna, which is not the yellow fin species, which is locally caught on short lines from small dug out canoes or single engine boats, we never serve unsustainably caught fish and would never purchase fish that has been caught on a long line or through blast fishing.
The money that stays in the UK is used to run our office (in a rural location in Lincolnshire, not an expensive city location), the wages of the full time members of staff such as myself, the costs of putting on presentations in Universities to recruit our volunteers and the medical insurance that covers you while you are on site.
It is important to note that safety is something that we as a company take extremely seriously, which is why we have a specialized insurance policy that will cover you for an evacuation from our site if the need arose. We have full evacuation plans published on our website, along with risk assessments and we also publish our medical statistics every year. There are procedures on Hoga that are set up for your safety, and at times I can understand students being frustrated by them, for instance having to wear a full length wetsuit whenever you are in the water but this is simply to avoid you coming into contact with and being stung by venomous animals in the water. We appreciate that our volunteers understand any rules we make are for your safety and for no other reason.
On a last note I would like to say that the reality of conservation work is very difficult and no, our projects are not perfect, no conservation project is. Something that Operation Wallacea and myself as the manager of the Indonesia project will always want to do is constantly improve everything we are doing. For all Operation Wallacea staff we work for the company because we have a background in biology, conservation or education and because we believe in what we are trying to achieve which is locally driven, conservation management of some of the most biologically important places in the world, which students are able to experience and support through joining us on an expedition. For anyone who would like to know about the conservation projects we are currently working on or anything else about the expeditions then please feel free to contact me.
Charlotte Palmer, Operation Wallacea, [email protected]
Thanks Shark Bait - Been looking for ideas for my dissertation and was seriously considering OpWall, After reading your experience I think you just saved me a bucket load of money for a service that's absolutely not fit for purpose.
Quick Reply
Related discussions
- Which one of these unis best for Supply Chain Management MSc
- Need Masters degree advice, running out of time
- Aide financial for an international student
- Is it a right choice to study at China?
- Applying to canada with these grades
- Switching Schools Between Year 1 and Year 2 of IBDP
- How many countries have you been to?
- UCL English Language Requirement - MA in Legal and Political Theory
- Help quick please abt Marketing @ uni!!
- UK Universities for a Masters in Public Health on Scholarship (Int Students)
- How many countries have you been to?
- How to get into marine biology
- RAF application and Travelling
- I need advice on what to do concerning missing my enrolment deadline for Durham!
- Name a country or city with the last letter of the previous one
- Feedback on 25 marker
- How long before an operation is pre-op?
- Kaplan International College London’s foundation program
- Make it More Magazine-ey !!
- Make it More Sweets-ey !!
Latest
Trending
Last reply 2 weeks ago
NCS Sixth form? Should I go if given the opportunity?Trending
Last reply 2 weeks ago
NCS Sixth form? Should I go if given the opportunity?