Wednesday 18 September Setondo island

Setondo Island on the north east corner of Sumbawa island is an extinct volcano with a salt water lake in what was the caldera just a mile off the coast of the main island of Sumbawa. We visited here 7 years ago on our dive liveaboard holiday and remembered watching 4 yachts come into the anchorage in the evening and thinking one day we'll have our own boat and spend the night in places like this.

On our walk then there were no buildings on the island and a local superstition that if you tied a rock to the tree by the lake with a piece of grass and make a wish, when the grass rots and the rock falls to the ground your which will come true. Obviously David's rock stayed suspended for 2 years because we bought Jackster 2 years later.

As we approached the island this afternoon there wasn't a breath of wind. We looked at one beach and thought that's not where we landed last time, came around the corner and saw a visitor centre and cluster of buildings with a shallower (20m surrounded by reef on three sides) patch in front.

Tourism has reached Setondo in the intervening years. Tourism and capitalism. As we came ashore we were greeted by the park ranger, it's a national park now, requesting fees for anchoring and fees for walking the 100m to the lake. We hadn't anticipated this and therefore didn't bring any money. Mr Ranger was in a generous mood so instead of turning us away offered us a complimentary visit. Fees may have gone towards the cost of building the visitor hut and a concrete path over the small rise from beach up and then down to the lake, it hasn't paid for rubbish collection. Sadly there is litter everywhere; plastic bottles, paper, sweet wrappers. The monkeys, macaques I think, raid the rubbish bins and tip them out and the six or seven people who now live here permanently prefer to sit in the shade of a tree than to keep their land clean. You may think this is a harsh observation. It's a sadness to see nature abused. We've seen so much man made jetsam in the sea, on the beaches and on the land. Compared to the Pacific islands, for example Marquesas, where everyone took a pride in their land, no rubbish and groomed gardens around each house.

It's rare that second visits compare well with our memories of the first. I did go for a snorkel on the reef just behind us and enjoyed that. Plenty of fish here; a large lobster less than 2m below the surface, the largest Trigger fish I've ever seen and puffer fish arms' length below me being cleaned by small wrasse. What I also saw was if the wind picked up from the south we were on a lee shore with some nasty coral bommies right behind us.

I'd only been back on board 10 minutes when the wind did pipe up from the south. Neither of us was happy to stay here overnight – we wouldn't have gotten any sleep – so we upped anchor and moved across to sit in the lee of Sumbawa, albeit less picturesque, safer.

Seangang, N Sumbawa - large version of Setondo