First hard goodbye

After what feels like an eternity, you finally hear from me again :)

As mentioned in the last post, I was on Gili Trawagan last weekend with a group. It was exactly as one would imagine. Going out there is pretty cool because you just walk along the beach promenade and check out one club after another. We spent the days just lying on the beach and doing nothing, sometimes you need that :) The sunset was also very impressive.

Back in Tianyar, it was time to get back to work. I have only uploaded photos from my travels so far, now I will show you some of my work. Of course, they're not anything spectacular and I don't have much, but it gives you an idea of what I've been doing for the past 4 weeks.

In the morning, we mostly worked on building structures. Either we helped make the cement or we built something. It was a pretty dirty affair, but also fun because it made us feel like little kids playing in the sand and building sand castles.

I don't have more photos because my hands were always full of cement so I couldn't take any :D

In the afternoon, I was mostly at the recycling center. There was something different to do every day. It started with sorting the different types of plastic. If we weren't sure, we had a few ways to test which material it was.

Then comes the cutting, because the shredder doesn't accept pieces that are too large. This also includes removing the caps and labels from the bottles because they are made of different materials and different temperatures are needed to melt them.

Then all the pieces are washed so that there is no dirt inside later.

The next step is shredding. It's a tough task because the machine is so weak that it gets stuck if you put even a little too much in. But luckily, I was there as an expert in asynchronous motors when a problem occurred :D

After that, the shredded plastic is slowly fed into the injection machine and compressed at high temperature. When the tube is full, a mold is mounted and heated, into which the liquid plastic is then pressed.

The last step is to cool the mold and knock out the finished tile. The end product is gray-blue to colorful tiles, depending on the type of plastic, which are used, for example, as flooring for the project's new office.

On Tuesday, we celebrated the founder of the project's farewell. He is now going back to England for the next few months to do his master's degree in marine conservation. It was a fun beach party with lots of alcohol and singing.

On Thursday, we made 2 dives, as a reward because we couldn't dive last week. In the first dive, we arranged the structures. Here are some impressions of what it looks like.

The second dive was more for fun, but still with the goal of clearing the reef of plastic litter. My dive buddy and I lost the whole group after about 5 minutes and then just dived around together for the rest of the time. It was a really fun dive and we found a lot of plastic and saw some cool fish too.

On Friday, it was time for goodbyes because my time in the project is already over. It was really hard to say goodbye to some people because they had grown very dear to me during this time. But in retrospect, it was 100% the right decision to do this project because it was an incredible experience with incredibly nice people. So once again, thank you for everything ❤️

But it wasn't that hard because I drove south with my group and we rented a villa there and went surfing over the weekend. One of them is already flying home tomorrow, but I will see the rest of them next weekend and we have already planned a meeting in England for next year, so it's not that bad :D

So, until the weekend, I'm traveling alone, let's see where it takes me :)

Martin