Lembeh and Bunaken (Lembeh Resort and Thalassa Dive Centre)
In response to questions from a few people, here are my impressions when I look back on my recent trip. These are not intended to be a comprehensive report on these resorts, they are just my impressions. Of course we may have been unusually luck or unlucky in our experience, so feel free to post alternative impressions if things were different for anyone else. Or if you think we were too fussy ... interested to hear you views.
I may post additional comments later if I think of them.
It was a 2-week trip out of HK. We decided to do 7 days of diving at Lembeh, and 4 days at Bunaken, since both Lilac & I are macro freaks. The other couple of days were for land trips - Manahasa highlands, volcano, and Tangkoko National Park (for the monkeys). In retrospect we made a significant mistake in organising the Tangkoko visit - we should have done it while we were staying at Lembeh instead of during the Bunaken part of the trip, which would have saved us 3 hours of driving in the round trip.
This time we stayed at the Lembeh Resort www.lembehresort.com. Twice previously I have visited as part of a liveaboard on Serenade, and once previously I stayed at Sulawesi Dive Quest's "resort". Years ago I formed an impression that KBR would be permanently way out of my price range, and I didn't even think of checking it this time around, so maybe I was being unfair, since competition may have moderated their prices somewhat, for all I know.
Lembeh Resort is well organised, and fairly small. I think there were no more than 12 guests in total at any time while we were there. Our room (a standard room, as far as I know) was very comfortable, much larger than I normally expect for a diving resort, with a really great verandah out the front. The only thing I didn't much like about that was that the rooms are in pairs which share access steps and front verandah, and the people staying in the other room had to walk across in front of our room to get to theirs.
Food was OK to good; choice was limited, especially for a stay of more than a week. Mix of Western and local. Staff were very helpful and ready to accomodate special requests. Watch out for the buffet nights (twice a week) - definitely not the night to do a night dive, because the buffet is not that great to start with, and it's noticeably less great if you are late for the meal.
The dive centre is just a few metres from the water, pretty well set out, large rinse tank dedicated to cameras almost always with quite clean water (one exception when a couple came back from a shore dive late one afternoon while the main rinse tank was being refilled, and they rinsed their gear in the camera rinse tank).
There's a nicely set out camera room, with power available and a partitioned camera bench. I like this because it means we can each have a clearly defined space to put out stuff, and things don't get mixed up. Having said that, I didn't use the camera room at all, since there was so much space in our own room and it's only 1 minute from the room to the dive centre.
We used nitrox for the whole week. The dive shop's labelling of the nitrox percentage seemed to be less accurate than I am accustomed to, and it was a bit of pot luck as to what mix would be available (there were sometimes no nitrox tanks available until just before the dive), so we were adjusting computers (I use 2) before most dives. I stayed well away from no-deco limits – not usually a problem anyway at Lembeh, unless you’re after the rhinopius or the harlequin shrimp, or maybe those poor pygmy seahorses. I didn’t understand why the guides were diving on air when the guests were nearly all using nitrox. Sometimes this led to the guides going into deco, which I’m not too keen on. Good customer service focus, I suppose, but …
Dive schedule is sensible - 3 organised dives every day, with briefings at 8:00, 11:00, 2:30. Night dive available any evening at 6:00 if requested by lunchtime or so (otherwise the dive staf go home after the 3rd dive). You can also dive their house reef anytime without charge (except for nitrox fill if applicable); we did it once to get the mandarin fish shots but the vis wasn't too good. We did 2 night dives, but in the end we were having enough fun already with the daytime dives, 'cause there's already so much to see in daytime anyway.
Dives are normally 75 minutes but nobody seems to be worried about a bit of overrun ... so with nearly 4 hours a day of diving already, and the possiblity of night dives and/or the house reef, I didn't really feel they needed to try to squeeze in an extra scheduled dive. Maybe I'm getting older, but it seemed to be enough already!
The dive guides were great, and well coordinated. For a typical example, before a Jahir dive with 6 guests one afternoon (for which we had 3 guides) Bruce (who runs the dive centre) told the other two guides what he wanted them to find, and where to look for it, and they made sure that we didn't have all 6 guests looking at the same critter at the same time. They also went to a lot of trouble to make sure we didn't get mixed up with other groups of divers.
Ratio of guides to divers varied from dive to dive though, so it wasn't always quite that good. But they were always good at keeping track of where we photographers were, and coming back to collect us when they found something interesting (which was often).
On one dive, when Lilac dropped her computer when getting back into the boat, we were very pleasantly surprised when they retrieved it for us within a few minutes.
Overall, a big tip was justified!
Overall it was a very pleasant stay at Lembeh Resort. I would almost certainly stay there again if I went back.
Happy to answer any specific questions you may have... will post separately about Thalassa Dive Centre (for Bunaken). [Edit] Obviously I changed my mind about this. [/Edit]
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Comments on Thalassa Dive Centre & Santika Resort Manado
This is something completely different from Lembeh in every way! Given the difficulty of sorting out the competing claims, I chose Thalassa because it’s closest to Bunaken, of those based on the mainland. And I wanted to be on the mainland to make it easy to do the land-based trips, and to make it easy to get to the airport for our early flight out at the end of the trip.
Santika seems to me to be a peculiar place, designed for rich Manado dwellers to get out of town for a weekend. There are two 3-storey wings of accommodation. Two restaurants (of which the Italian restaurant – “The Big Tree Café” is pretty good (although not recommended by the reception staff “because it only has Italian food). One quite nice pool with swim-up bar. Two foosball tables (but apparently only one ball). Two pool tables (don’t expect competition standard here). One business centre (picture is in the link – they have one computer, one desk, one chair, and two exercise machines in a “business centre” which is on the terrace at one side of the entrance. There’s no glass and it’s open to the driveway so I don’t see why the equipment, such as it is, has not been stolen.) It’s reasonably far from town – if you want to go out for dinner, better budget about 45 minutes for travel each way. On the other hand you don’t need to drive through town to get to the airport.
Not much to do, in fact, other than dive or veg out. Our foosball skills improved somewhat during the trip.
Thalassa is next door, and they are linked financially, but there is no offer of help in carting gear from the room to the dive centre. Dive centre hours are limited; we arrived at 5:45pm and there was no chance of finding out about the arrangements until the next morning. Actually they are reasonably well organised, but …
First peculiarity: the registration form they left for us with the hotel was only in Japanese, for some reason. That made me nervous straight away.
They run 3 dives per day: 8:00, 10:00, 2:00 (or sometimes a different time for the afternoon dive). They will also do night dives if requested. Dives are for 1 hour each. They advertise that you do the two morning dives, have lunch at Bunaken, then return to Thalassa after the 3rd dive. What happened when we were there was that the dive boat returned to Thalassa after every dive. Lunch was at the dive centre (simple buffet, safe Indonesian food). I was less keen on this because it meant more time travelling, whereas if the boat waited at Bunaken for the surface interval we’d be able to read or sleep more easily. From Thalassa’s point of view the new arrangement works better because they can accommodate any combination of dives for walk-in customers as the boats return to base every dive. Because of this, they are unenthusiastic about visiting the farther dive sites, as it makes it hard to get back to base between dives.
For those who worry about these things, there was no toilet on the boat, and no time to make a toilet stop at Thalassa between dives. That’s because from the Thalassa Dive Centre to the dock is 5 minutes’ walk (in the sun with no shelter), and the return to base between dives 1 and 2 is really just a turnaround. Times like this I’m glad of my front-zipped wetsuit (although the whole problem is less of an issue for guys anyway)! The ladies had to jump back into the water after the dive if they wanted a comfort stop. Anyway Lilac told me the ladies toilets were not good at the dive centre (dodgy flush mechanism), so better not to wait for that anyway.
Dive guiding was useless (as far as I was concerned) which may be a reflection of my having done too many dives. Dive briefings really were brief. Max 30 seconds. Little indication of what’s special at any dive site. In the water, I didn’t appreciate being urgently summoned to look at something exciting – 5-10 metres above the level at which I was diving at the time – only to see it was a ray hiding under some coral, or a lobster in a hole. That was about the most interesting thing our guides found for us. They never did seem to want to stay at the same level as us. Over 11 dives the only things I thought were worthwhile which they found were a couple of ribbon eels, one notodoris, one pipefish, some sharks under a coral, and one rather nice little crab.
Having said that, they were actually very eager to please. And when I had a technical problem (leaking HP hose) they got it replaced between dives; but there was not routinely any spare gear on the boats.
Diving at Bunaken was what I expected after my previous few dives (as part of Serenade trips): usually the visibility was nothing like what you would think from the hype. One afternoon we did a very fast drift dive in about 5-8m vis. We were supposed to be looking for big stuff. I asked about it afterwards; it seemed actually if they had thought about it they already knew the vis would be bad (by Bunaken standards) because they knew of work being done nearby; but they didn’t think of selecting a different site for the dive. Presumably because that was the last dive of the day, and they wanted to dive this site because it’s closest to the dive centre and they could get away quickest.
They say they rinse all the gear for you at the end of the day. Yes … but … that consists of taking the crate in which the gear has been dumped, and immersing it wholesale in the rinse tank. They don’t straighten out the wetsuits, for example, or hang anything out to dry, and they don’t pay special attention to rinsing the regulator or the BCD. I don’t mind doing those things myself, but I object to their claim that they take care of the gear for us. One thing I did appreciate was that all the staff knew not to use the 1st stage as a handle when picking up the gear. In this part of the world a lot of dive staff don’t know that.
In common with all the other operators they have a “no-gloves” policy. But they didn’t stop one guy from wearing gloves, and that guy was a menace. I wagged a finger at him when I saw him picking up large pieces of coral, for no apparent reason, but the guides didn’t say anything to him.
One irritation was that they didn’t bother to put the two of us on the same side of the boat. They should do this by default, since the boat is quite large – and stays stationary while all the divers get in - and I think it’s pretty normal to want to see your buddy when you’re getting ready to descend. They didn’t want to swap the gear around when it was pointed out.
So having said all that, I did very much enjoy some of the dives, and most of the rest were at least OK – only that one drift as an exception. Lilac and I are very self-sufficient both for diving and for spotting, so we didn’t mind the dive guiding style too much. I did resent all the returns to base because it stopped be from reading between dives, so I feel I wasted quite a few hours of the vacation which should have been available for reading, on the basis of what Thalassa put on their website.
One thing which would make me hesitate to go back to Thalassa is that apparently they sometimes get very large groups - 50+, even 100+ - at which times they hire more boats, but I'd still hate to be trying to organise something specific when they were swamped by a large group. Apparently they are generally much busier on weekends anyway (we were not there on a weekend day), presumably because Santika is apparently designed as a local escape.
Overall: at a basic level, everything worked fine, but I didn’t feel a special effort was made to ensure that our dives were memorable. I will try somewhere else next time.
-David
