Great Tolire Lake

it is not uncomplete if we visit Ternate, North Mollucas, without taking our opportunity to visit tourism object Tolire Lake. The lake is located around 10 kilometres from Ternate city. Beside its unique shape, the lake also has an interesting legend story.

Tolire lake is under hillside of Mount Gamalama, the highest mountain in North Mollucas. The lake itself consists of two lake. Local people call them Great Tolire lake and Small Tolire lake. The distance between the two is only 200 metres.

Great Tolire lake has an uniqueness. The shape of the lake is looked like a giant tray. It has 50 metre depth and 5 hectare wide. However, there is no one until now trying to measure the lake depth. As the story goes, it has million metres depth and has connection with the sea.

Great Tolire lake is a freshwater lake. There are a lot of various fishes there, but local people
does not dare to catch them or swim in the lake. They believe there are many ghost crocodiles there. Those crocodiles are often visible swimming in the middle of the lake.
They have white color and are 10 metre long.

Not all people can see the crocodiles. According to local people, those who are innocent have opportunity to see those ghost beasts. There is a stroy, long time ago, there was a foreign tourist who did not believe with the ghost. He then went down to take a bath in the lake. Several minutes later, he dissapeared. It was thought the tourist was ate by the crocodiles.

Another uniqueness of the lake is if someone throws something to the lake, it can not touch the lake surface, although he throws it as strong as he can.

Nobody will not believe about it when he never come to the lake before. To try it, we can buy small stones that are sold along the lake bank. It cost Rp. 1000 for five small stones. Then we can try to throws them to the lake. As the story goes, stones thrown to the lake are hindered by magic power generated from the lake bottom. It is the ghost crocodile that has the power to do it.

Local people also believe that at the bottom of Great Tolire lake there are a lot of pay dirt. The owner of those treasures was the people of Ternate Kingdom at the time of Portugis colonial at 15-th centuries. Ternate people at that time threw away their valuable property into the lake, in order not to be robbed by the invader.

So far, there are no institutions or certain organisations which try to do special investigation to ascertain the claim. However, a army staff ever tried to detect the lake bottom using sonar and the tool could detect the existence of metal objects at its bottom. Whether the metals are treasures or not, who knows.

Great Tolire and Small Tolire lakes is believed as a prosperous village in the old time. The village was cursed to become a lake by Universe Power, because there was a father living at that village that impregnated her daughter. When the father and his daughter tried to escape from the village, suddenly the village ground fell and turned into two lakes. Great Tolire lake is believed as the place of father, and Small Tolire lake is trusted as the girl place. Although the story is difficult to be accepted in modern time, the old local people still believe it.

It is not difficult to visit those lakes. It needs at around 10 minutes to reach them from Ternate. We can rent a a car with a fare of Rp. 250.000 a day. Or we can rent a motorcycle with a fare of Rp. 10.000 an hour.

Visiting The Great Tolire lake, there are many tourism objects that can be enjoyed. The panorama beauty of Gamalama peak, the Portugis castles remains, and Sultan (=King) Baabullah mausoleum are also can be visited along the way to the lakes. Sultan Baabullah formerly was an outstanding Islamic king in Ternate.

Besides lakes, tourists can also enjoy the white sand beauty of Sulamadaha beach. The beach is located around 3 kilometres from Great Tolire lake. At the beach, the tourist can rent a boat to go fishing or can go diving to enjoy the beauty of undersea panorama around the coast. It's very attractive, isn't it?