The Indonesian woman put white on their face to make their skin look lighter, I am not sure if this is the case with this woman or she is just protecting her face from the sun.

The Bajo tribe were nomadic fisherman that settled in Wakatobi. They live in villages built out over the water. Their settlement here has become more permanent, they have built foundations for their house out of lava rocks that they dig up on a neighbouring island. The walkways between the rows of houses are lava rocks, that have been paved over and they have wooden bridges between the rows of houses. seems that almost everyone has a motor scooter and this settlement is no exeption, the only thing is that the small wooden bridges are not engineered to hold their weight so often the bridges have boards missing and the scooters slow down and bump across a 25 cm gap, unbelievable if I hadn't seen it.

Kids in the Bajo village playing in a coiled water line.

Liya village men welcoming us to a display of their traditional game where 2 men held hands and then attacked another couple of men using kung fu type roundhouse kicks. It was a game played to practice war moves and to ease aggression.Members of one village would attack another and after the games were over they would all go home happy.

If you don't have a motor scooter here you own one of these to transport your farm produce. I saw one fellow pulling a generator in one of these.
A picture of contrasts. A Bajo canoe with a sail is made out of heavy plastic, a tarp material, her boat is loaded with rocks!
At the underwater marriage ceremony which Barry would not participate in, the mascot for Sail Wakatobi showed up, she is a pygmy underwater seahorse. The fellow on the left of the picture is a policeman, dozens of which have been imported to Wangi-Wangi to make sure that we are safe! They seem to be very nice and spend hours sitting a talking with us at the office where we dock our dinghies.

Kids playing football amoung the coconuts near the beach.

Visiting our guide's family on a scooter journey around the island. Her mother and her grandmother are in the background. We had a fresh coconut to drink and they served a green mango with salt, quite yummy.We stopped at a beach which was called the 100 springs beach, the springs were fresh water running down into the ocean.

We were honoured to be invited to one our guides homes for supper. Here is her husband. squatting down as he gets our supper ready. He is on a bamboo mat and he smoked the fish over a fire of coconut shells. We had smoked fish, rice, Wakatobi sushi and battered fried bananas for dessert, the banana dish is called pisang goreng.