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The Bunaken Dive
Bunaken, Indonesia |
Bunaken, Indonesia
After our fairly miserable beach experience in at Bira, Bunaken Island was Sulawesi’s last chance to redeem itself as snorkeling and diving location to rival the likes of Tulamben and the Gilli Islands. Its reputation certainly built it up to be the jewel of the island. It is a national marine park with an entrance fee to be paid to visit or stay which is always a good sign.
After a brief night in Manado the gateway to Bunaken we experienced the usual hustle and bustle of the city and were just blocks away from a massive fire which called for the local fire brigade to drive past with the crew in all their best safety gear of jeans, t-shirts and flip flops!
Refusing to pay the $50 transfer fee that our hotel was trying to charge for the 20 minute crossing to the island we headed to the pier with the intention of getting the local ferry, but luckily met a man who wanted to get home to Bunaken so offered us a cheap private transfer. The only problem was that to get into the boat we had to get ourselves and our bags down a narrow piece of wood at a 45 degree angle that served as the gang plank. Looking at the polluted rotten rubbish filled waters of the harbour falling in was almost certainly going to result in a trip to the hospital, thankfully the boat man could see the terror on our faces and took our rucksacks for us, but even empty handed we were like Bambi on ice, arms flailing trying to keep our balance and eyes focused on the end goal. Thankfully we made it, now time to head to the crystal clear waters of Bunaken…..
When we were researching Bunaken, every blog and article advised that you need to book ahead as the island gets so busy and there is not enough accommodation for everyone much like the Perhentian Islands in Malaysia. So after plenty of research we decided to treat ourselves and stay in one of the nicer hotels on the Island, Bunaken Divers. We were welcomed by the Australia owner, Terry who has been living on the island for 18 years and initially he seemed quite welcoming, but sadly this was not to last…..
We were shown to our room which was a little more rustic than the pictures and trip advisor had shown but it was clean and seemed ok. The highlight of this hotel was the restaurant and bar which had uninterrupted views over the reef and ocean. Diving on Bunaken was pretty expensive compared to the rest of Indonesia so we were hesitant to book any until we had spoken to other divers, this was not something that pleased Terry. Begrudgingly he opened the dive shop for us to be able to hire some fins so that we could go and snorkel the house reef in front of the hotel.
The house reef was pretty cool, full of stunning little blue box fish, puffa fish, a turtle or two and some stunning scorpion fish. The main problem that we had with the house reef was that it was absolutely covered in rubbish. The hotel claimed to be a PADI 5 star resort and had a reception full of prizes for beach clean-up campaigns, sadly it was clear that these beaches were no longer being cleaned and whilst sunning ourselves on the little patch of beach we even watched the owners teenage daughter finish a bottle of fizzy drink and just throw the bottle into the sea.
Seemingly we were visiting Bunaken in a low part of the season as we were pretty much alone in the resort the majority of the time, thankfully the few people that were visiting at the same time as us were great people and made up for the fact that we had made a poor decision in visiting Bunaken and had potentially booked the wrong hotel for us. The rate for the hotel included all meals as there is little outside of the resorts so when there were only three of us staying there the kitchen cooked a lesser amount of food accordingly. The problem was that Terry the manager decided that it was part of his job to dine with the guests and made it very clear that he was unhappy one day when all 3 small pieces of chicken had been prepared had been eaten before he got to dinner. For 3 days after he loudly mentioned that he had been a vegetarian for the day….. seriously customer service award of the year is not going to Terry any time soon.
Our first night in our little wooden bungalow was one of the toughest nights we have endured, at about 2am the most overwhelming stench of sewerage started to seep up through the floor of the hut, literally making us gag in our sleep. At breakfast we mentioned it to Terry who just brushed us off and had his staff throw some bleach on the over flowing, offending drain.
About half way through our week on the island a few more people turned up and so we all decided to go out on a snorkel tour together, there were two divers so we decided to see what the dive sites were like before making a decision as to whether to dive. The tour was an absolute comedy of errors. The only highlight was a pod of about 20 dolphins which skirted past our boat. The snorkel and the dive sites were so littered with rubbish you could barely see any fish, the guides gave no information as to where we were headed or what we might see and on top of that it seemed that every single dive and snorkel boat from every resort had decided to go to the exact same dive spots at the same time so there must have been 50 divers under water and 10 boats on the surface looking at one poor turtle desperately clinging to a rock. If we had ever been unsure about diving here, this about sealed the deal, especially when we were watching the divers from our resort do
ing their safety stop beneath 3 boats with their engines running, safe!!
As always Terry joined us for dinner and when he was putting the ************ us to dive we told him that we didn’t really enjoy the snorkel tour and felt that a 5 star PADI resort should probably head to the less crowded dive sites rather than following the masses and perhaps a beach clean-up or two would help make the island look a bit less like a slum. Needless to say, Terry didn’t like this too much and the following morning decided to take us aside and tell us that basically he probably wasn’t on top form and pretty much just didn’t like us. I think more accurately he didn’t like that we were not paying him a small fortune to dive! Thankfully we have pretty tough skin and couldn’t care less whether the owner liked us or not, we had made some great friends at the hotel and I was the chief Fish ID advice giver educating anyone and everyone as to what fish they had seen. We made one particularly great friend here called Debora, our crazy crazy dutch friend who had come on a two week dive holiday with the biggest chunk of Dutch Gouda that I have ever seen outside of Amsterdam. Debora was just so kind in sharing her cheese, her funny stories and even offering to pay for us to dive with her, such a wonderful soul. Sadly we were unwilling to spend anyone’s money in Terry’s dive shop, so we will have to meet again and dive somewhere in the world Debora!!!
We had a great afternoon exploring the small town on Bunaken with Debora, we snorkelled every inch of the house reef and very nearly got swept back to the mainland one day when Terry decided not to warn us (or anyone else) about the super strong dangerous currents and we even got to watch a Blood Moon, which is an eclipse of the moon caused by the earth being directly in between the sun and moon and casting a shadow over the moon, too cool.
Our last night on the island we went for a walk and amazingly found some friends that we had made in Bira Beach and Tana Toraja, what a small world. Packed and ready for our last sleep, I heard a crash in the bathroom. I foolishly ran over and opened the door to be face to face with a massive rat looking at me. Thankfully the rat decided to about turn and run up the wall and out the open roof, as had he ran at me and into the room I am not sure what we would have done. We then had to bring in the rule that we banged the door to scare any intruders before opening the bathroom door, ha ha what a luxury resort, rats and sew
erage, nice!!
Leaving the island we headed to the public boat to make the short hop back to Manado, and low and behold it turns out that we were actually on the banana boat, not the fun inflatable type, but the one loaded with actual bananas and likely a few nasty bugs lurking. As we were pulling into the local harbour which is surrounded with tiny market stalls we were greeted with a sight that made me want to bleach my eyes, skin and every item of swimwear. A man using the harbour wall as a toilet, and just to be clear he wasn’t having a tinkle!!! What a perfect comedy ending to our stay on the oh so not magnificent Bunaken Island.
Thankfully we had some great laughs with the other guests and learned a very important lesson about booking ahead, don’t do it!!! I am sure than on another day, in a different hotel, with a different dive company maybe Bunaken is a top class dive location, but sadly I didn’t see it and won’t we returning for another try.
Back to Manado for a little bit of mainland ‘normality’.
Beans Around The World 