Bunaken
Northern Sulawesi is sandwiched between the Celebes Sea, and the Molucca Sea. The Capital, Manado, is just a short drive from the airport, and a 45 minute boat ride brings you to Bunaken Island, one of diving's Meccas.
With drop offs, coral, fish and turtles everywhere you look, this was touted as another truly world class location.
It is meant to be so good in fact, that the Indonesian government, in 1991, designated one of their first National Marine Parks here. Whether you are diving or not, you pay an entrance fee, which goes towards park rangers who police the water, stopping illegal activities such as dynamite fishing.
I thought it would be better than it turned out to be. A lot of the dives were very similar, sloping reef then a wall. There was also lots of broken coral, and not nearly as much soft coral as I would have hoped for. It is good, but it's not exceptional. What is exceptional however, is the way the currents can change in the blink of an eye. One minute you are barely moving, then you are flying along, next thing you might get pushed down, or up, you just never know. Not a place for beginners.
We saw sharks and turtles, but only 1 or 2 on a dive, and not on every dive. It's not even in the same league as Sipadan. The reefs look to have really suffered from the effects of dynamite fishing, with vast fields of broken staghorn coral, but the walls are alive with smaller fish. Considering what we had heard about the place, I can't help but feel disappointed - it just doesn't seem 'special'. There were no big schools of pelagics, just the odd barracuda or trevally.
We stayed and dived with Bastianos Bunaken Resort. The guides are good, and whilst we had our own kit, you could see they had modern, well maintained hire equipment. The boats seem a bit haphazard after Sipadan, but there are no great distances to cover, the longest ride we had to a site was 30 mins.
The resort is OK, rooms are basic but comfortable, although there is no hot water anywhere in the resort for washing, so it was cold showers all around. We later found out that no resort on Bunaken Island has hot water, due to intermittent power supplies. Also, I don't think they are geared up for a group of British divers though, between 4 of us, we drank every single beer they had the first night.
I would not go back to Bunaken. I found the diving boring. On some of the sites, you are effectively trapped between 2 currents, so every diver from every boat ends up in the same place, and you are just going backwards and forwards over the same part of reef. 20 divers all blowing bubbles is not conducive to good photography, as every fish for miles has gone elsewhere.
We were booked for a 17 dive package, and only did 12. Usually, we just did the 2 morning dives and didn't bother going out in the afternoon. It wasn't worth getting wet, just to see the same stuff again and again. Even the briefings for each site were the same, the only thing that changed was the name of the site