Manado diving was fantastic beyond my wildest dreams. Other than the 3 dives that I did on my last trip to the Flores in Indonesia some two years back, I’ve never seen such diversity of marine life, healthy display of hard and soft corals, superb walls and reefs, as well as large shoals of schooling fish of every type, colour and size than off Bunaken Island this time round. Every hour-long dive was consistently and memorably good, and even diving off the house reef yielded some incredible finds.
Summary of my dive log: pygmy seahorse (my best find – at 33m!), black tip shark, white tip shark, a spotted eagle ray, 2 huge green turtles, no less than 4 to 5 Napoleon wrasses, Giant trevallies, mackerels, jacks and snappers, school of 30 teira batfishes swimming Zen-ly, a teira batfish juvenile (awesome!), lots of fantastically beautiful and huge Spanish dancers (50cm hexabranchus sanguineus), the black with green dots Dusky Nembrotha (nudibranch), countless other nudibranchs which were equally beautiful, schools of clown, titan, orange-striped and redtooth triggerfish, delicious looking groupers, the pretty scrawled filefish, tiny black-saddled tobies, my favorite spotted boxfishes, yellow-margined moray eels on almost every dive, the very rare zebra moray and snowflake moray, cowries, dendronephthya crab (very camouflaged!!), a very cute mantis shrimp, slipper lobster, a cave of 5 different types of firefish and lionfishes, variety of scorpionfish and stonefishes (as well as some frogfish), panther flounder, longnose hawkfish, barracudas, all the pipefish, trumpetfish, cornetfish and flutemouths we could find in the coral reef book, the very rare cometfish (which mimics the moray eel), banded sea snake (freaked me out), lots of bumphead parrotfish, a cluster of bigfin reef squids, amazing colonial ascidians, sea fans, and a prolific display of wrasses, anemonefish, sweetlips, damselfishes, fusiliers, butterflyfishes, anthias, surgeonfish, porcupinefish and puffers etc.
We had the good fortune of diving with a bunch of cheery marine biologists from the Raffles Museum of NUS and they were rattling off and logging scientific names of marine fish and invertebrates after each dive, which made the whole trip extremely educational. The rather famous underwater photographer Michael Aw (no relation of mine) was also on a visit to the resort and we had a chance to talk to him about the amazing dives he has done around the region as well as a new book he is publishing. And lucky us also got to see schools of dolphins and pilot whales swimming alongside and around our little boat when we went out on one of our dives! Really funny fellas!
Ended the trip with a visit to the unbelievable Chinatown market, where the “everything-also-eat” Chinese populace were blowtorching dogs, bats and field rats, and cutting up everything marine from giant green turtles :( to slipper lobsters and giant mantis shrimps. We also got ourselves properly covered with fine rusty volcanic ash from Gunung Soputan, which “hiccupped” on the last day we were there.
Photos to follow. :)
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