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Quite the adventure - halfway around the world to the best diving in the world! We spent five nights diving Lembeh, off the coast of northern Sulawesi, and 12 nights diving Raja Ampat, off the coast of West Papua.
Lembeh is famous for “muck” diving; bare black sand and weird creatures, not necessarily pretty, but very well camouflaged. We dove with/stayed at Kasawari-Lembeh.
Raja Ampat is famous for spectacular coral reefs and an amazing variety and number of fish. We dove with Papua Diving (the owner Max Ammer opened up Raja Ampat to diving) and stayed at their Sorido Bay Resort .
Bottom line: Andy spent 41 hours 55 minutes underwater over 39 dives and Val spent 29 hours 26 minutes underwater over 29 dives.
Time to/from/in airports or on planes: 99 hours 15 minutes
Layovers in cities: 70 hours 30 minutes
We thought it was a "once in a lifetime" but it was so good that, as of 2014 we've been back to Indonesia twice and have a third trip scheduled in late fall 2015.
It's a long way from DC to Indonesia:
We flew DC -> JFK -> Hong Kong -> Singapore (layover) -> Manado to get to Lembeh, which is off the northeast of the island of Sulawesi
We used mileage to travel on Cathay Pacific, which is a great airline:
Business class on Cathay Pacific - cubicles!
And got our first view of China!
The layover in Singapore was necessitated by the flight into Monado, Sulawesi, Indonesia, on Silk Air. We used it both to somewhat recover from the time zone change (12 hours!) but also to explore a little of fascinating Singapore.
A hotel (not ours):
Nightime, bridge at left is a double -helix.
Downtown Singapore:
A mile and a half of malls. Both sides of the road:
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We then moved on to dive the Lembeh Strait. Along the way we became millionaires, at least in Indonesian Rupiah:
Here's where we were going:
Northern Sulawesi, Lembeh is to the upper right:
Lembeh diving is in the strait between the mainland and the island; it's also a shipping channel. Marked is our resort, Kasawari Lembeh Resort:
The island is fairly densely populated with many villages right up against the resort:
There are many dive operations in Lembeh, it's that famous, and Kasawari Lembeh is fairly upmarket.
Our room is at the left of the photo:
The view over the strait:
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From Lembeh, we moved to Raja Ampat:
To get there, we flew Monado to Makassar, southern Sulawesi, spent the night and dodged a parade clogging the streets all around the hotel, flew the next morning to Sorong, West Papua, Indonesia.
Then went by transport boat (taking staff and supplies):
to Kri Island to get to Papua Diving. We stayed at their Sorido Bay resort which we chose for two reasons: it is owned by Max Ammer, the founder of Raja Ampat diving, and it was somewhat more upmarket (read air conditioning) than other resorts in the area.
Available imagery is not particularly good, but here's the overall view:
and a closer view where Kri Island is the blue streak with little land blob in the center of this image:
Our first glimpse of Kri Island after two hours:
A couple of Papua's photos (Max flies a tiny two-seater float plane).
You can see the pier out to the boat dock, the main buildings (think meals) and the rooms fairly hidden in the foliage to the right:
And a photo of my own from the end of the pier:
And the view from a dive boat:
And looking out; it's a beautiful spot very far from anywhere:
Very relaxing:
The resort is very careful with their impact on the environment; they use raised walkways so we don't cause destruction as we go back and forth, particularly those folks with serious camera gear who use wheelbarrows to move their equipment:
Our front porch, complete with our identification guides:
The view from our deck
There are loads and loads of potential dive sites in the region:
And we did dive! Here we are coming up from a dive. There was frequently very very strong current so we'd pop up a buoy to let the boat know where we were
and they'd come get us thereby saving us a surface swim.
At the end of our stay, we were tucked into a dive boat and sent back to Sorong (they claimed the more suitable transport boat was out of service). It took 4 hours, numerous restarts of the outboard motor and watching water spouts to get us to Sorong where we caught our plane.
(Skip directly to the photos from Lembeh)
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