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Manado, Northern Sulawesi

by Tim Digger

My wife and I went to North Sulawesi, Bunaken National Park and Lembeh Straits in March 2004. The trip was organised at very short notice by Divequest and all arrangements worked perfectly.
We travelled via Singapore on Singapore Airlines. I was concerned about baggage allowance and asked Divequest about it, the reply was interesting, "it depends who you book with" it would appear some agents can arrange extra with some airways, we had extra 10kg each so total of 30kg each plus hand luggage. This was stated on our booking. No problems with weight even though slightly over that limit.

Dive Boat at Lembeh

We did a 48-hour stopover in Singapore travelling from Heathrow on Sunday and onto Manado Airport, North Sulawesi Indonesia on Wednesday, this is a small airport and has no bad weather landing kit although the World Development Organisation has offered this. This meant that some who arrived 2 days later were delayed as landing was impossible, and returned for 2 hours to Borneo arriving 8 hours late eventually.

We then went by minibus to Hotel Santika and Thallassa dive centre. Both of these looked after us very well. We arrived at 2pm and did a night dive that day! Our kit was taken for us each day, up a very long and well built jetty through the mangroves to covered hard boats with twin outboards. The kit was washed down each evening and stored and then taken up the jetty each morning. We managed 3-4 dives per day; these are mainly wall dives in the Bunaken National Marine Park. The state of the corals and life in general is excellent although visibility is typically in the 10-20m range and occasionally less, not the 20+m typical of offshore red sea or Maldives. None of the diving was particularly challenging but some sites did have unpredictable currents and some up/down surge. Dive Guides were mostly local and very good, unobtrusive and very helpful. Little in the way of sharks or other really big pelagics but a herd of large bump head parrotfish and many macro shots of everything from seahorses to nudibranchs.

Breakfast at Lembeh Resort

After 6 days we went overland to Lembeh Straits, roads metalled, good transport (aircon) about 3 hours and arrived at the police pier in Bintang to be met and transported by boat to Lembeh Resort, 20 minutes across the strait. This resort has been set up for 2 years and holds a max 20 divers, we were 2 of 4-6 while we were there. The very good guides and boat crew often outnumbered us in the covered 20ft hard boats. Most of the diving here is Black or coral sand bottoms and finding the weird life forms that inhabit the debris on the bottom requires a good guide, this is one of those places where cameras outnumber divers and Lembeh Resort is set up to cope with this both in water and out.

Best Sites, Hairball (the classic muck site with Hairy frogfish), Nudifalls (name obvious in a scooped rock corner with fast current surge that can be worse than when we did it), and more conventional coral diving California Dreaming rock pinnacles further up the straits. This is a photographers paradise and with sand bottoms little to worry about damaging but don't expect large fish. It is an excellent quiet resort (though, we were told, it can be full of Italians all with huge…..cameras!) with a very nice dining area and individual chalets on the steep slopes above the cove the dive centre is based on. In a patch of coral rubble 50m off shore we reliably saw Mandarin fish every evening between 1730 and 1800hrs and on one dive blue ring and wunderpuss octopi. We did 3-4 dives daily and Nitrox was intermittently available at 32% ( it was trucked from Manado) they are setting up their own Nitrox facility "soon". In the evenings looking across the strait you can see the locals fishing from canoes with paraffin lamps to attract the fish.

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