Kungkungan Bay
Resort and Manado (Hotel Santika)
North Sulawesi
Indonesia
10-00
Trip Report
Kungkungan BayResort and Manado (Hotel Santika)North SulawesiIndonesia10-00Trip Report |
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We arrived on a Saturday Ð a hot, humid day which was quickly becoming a less hot, and very wet day.
But no matter. After more than thirty hours of traveling from cold, wet Seattle we were glad to be anywhere that wasn't the interior of a plane or an airport.
That first afternoon was for settling in at Kungkungan Bay Resort. The diving (three boat dives a day, standard, plus shore dives if desired) started in earnest the next day. Though the resort has a capacity for 30 people, they have four dive boats, so 7-8 people diving at one site is the maximum. The resort itself is beautiful. Built with native coconut wood (the site is a former coconut plantation) the accommodations consisted of double or single cottages facing the Lembeh Strait and black sand beach.
Service was quite enthusiastic, despite some of the staff's lack of familiarity with English (and my total lack of knowledge of Indonesian!)
And the diving . . . they call it "muck" diving, but it's worth putting up with a little muck in order to see the fantastic marine life: frogfish of all colors and sizes (from thumbnail-sized to frisbee-sized and above); seahorses and ghost pipefish; devilfish; scorpionfish; even a fish that looks a little like a dead bird (the pegasus mothfish). The best part of all was the underwater photography. Unlike most fishes, these critters hardly move, even when you get up close. We had six days of diving, with some "mini-walls" and even a couple of traditional, high-visibility coral reef dives thrown into the muck mix.
Then it was on to Manado, a harrowing, uncomfortable two-hour drive away. After the spaciousness and attentive service at Kungkungan, the Hotel Santika was a bit of letdown. On the other hand, it was only half the cost!
As is the usual custom in this region, the dive staff insisted on storing and setting up our dive gear. Unfortunately, they're not always too familiar with the different equipment Ð I had occasions when my hoses were twisted, and one day they reversed everything, attaching my drysuit hose to my BC instead of the BC inflator. Luckily, I was familiar with my gear and knew it was incorrect. I also came up missing a compass one day Ð a compass that had been very firmly mounted into my console. Unless some big octopus pried it out with a dive knife while I wasn't looking, there was no way I could have lost it while diving! (And if it had, it would have been worth it just to see that!)
The local diving around Manado was pleasant, but nothing really special. We found a couple of sites with stunning visibility, and saw a few sharks and octopus, but nothing like the rarity and variety of critters we saw at Kungkungan. We opted on a couple of days to cruise up to the Northern Islands (Bangka Island and around there) which we found much more spectacular. Soft coral in rainbow colors lined the sheer rock walls, and we were treated to a frogfish, a flying gurnard, and a cuttlefish laying eggs. The currents were a bit unpredictable, but that was all part of the adventure.
They had warned us that Manado was wetter than the Lembeh Strait, but after the first 3-4 days we had little rain at either place. The days were mostly sunny and blue, and the water a toasty 83-85 degrees. By the end of our twelfth diving day we were ready to go home. Unfortunately, the Manado rain we'd been warned about hit the day of our departure, preventing our outbound plane from landing and whisking us away. One more night in Manado (at Silk Air's expense) and we were able to get to Singapore, then Hong Kong, then San Francisco, then, finally, Seattle Ð a total of even more hours than I care to calculate. I've finally sorted through all the photos we took and have posted some here for your perusal.
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