13 lucky free flow divers arrived in Manado on 5th August. We first stayed at Kungkungan bay resort (KBR) on the Lembeh straits. This is a small well organised and very friendly place in its own small bay with black volcanic sand in front of jungle and little else. Very peaceful. Here we did 4 days of Muck Diving, my first experience of this. We were lucky enough to see the ‘big 3’, blue ring octopus, mimic octopus and hairy frog fish. We also saw a huge selection of the strange and unusual creatures for which this area is famous. See Jane Meeche’s photos in this site. There are about 4 sightings per year here of the blue ring. The groups were max 4 divers and 1 master, so no thrashing around trying to see things in a disorderly queue. KBR is building a spa, no firm opening date yet.
Next we transferred to Manado and the Tasik Ria resort. A very friendly place with the same dive operator (ecodivers) as KBR so next morning our gear was waiting for us on the boat ready to go. Diving here was in the Bunakan National park. The club was given its own day boat for the 4 days of diving here, which allowed for comfortable waits between dives. We also took along snorkellers from among our non divers. Many of our dives here were drift dives, in fairly gentle currents, along walls that plunged to 2000m or 3000m. This deep water gave us the chance to see a few larger creatures – black tip sharks, turtles and eagle rays included.
Several members of the group took advantage of the new spa at Tasik Ria enjoying various treatments, no complaints from anyone.
These 2 resorts work together to make moving between them easy. They took good care of us and even made last minute changes to our itinerary when asked.
We all flew back to Singapore on 14th August thankful for a safe trip and none of the airline problems that had been caused in UK, whilst we were away.
