Back in Singapore again, for a one night stay before continuing onwards to Philippines. After eating rice and fish for two weeks a pizza in an Italian restaurant tasted excellent. :)
Diving in Lembeh was an interesting experience, especially the night dive yesterday. It's mostly just plain black sand with a bit blurry visibility, but there's a huge amount of different kinds of small animals.
Especially the night dive was a real monster show. There was more (mostly mini-size) sea monsters than in most horror movies and all of them were stranger than each other. Many of them live only here in Lembeh, in this small shipping channel.
Otherwise not much to say, reasonable food with good restaurant service and a beautiful resort. Having an AC and hot water in the room is a nice plus after Bunaken, but otherwise the Bunaken resort was still better. :)
While waiting for our pickup to Lembeh we walked around Bunaken island a bit, visiting the actual village of the island. Beautiful place with a lot of friendly locals, everyone greeting you on the street. Obviously the island really doesn't get that much foreign visitors, even if it's kind of tourist destination.
Our pickup finally arrived and our Bunaken resort boat took us to the main island pier and a taxi to another side of the island for Lembeh resort boat to pick us up. Now we are on an another island, Lembeh, in a nice small boutique resort.
Let's see how is the diving here, should be very different from diving in Bunaken. The resort at least is a bit different, for example the restaurant is a bit more like a fine dining place while the Bunaken resort was a home kitchen buffet. Not sure I like it, but.. It's just two days and the food and everything is fine, just I prefer more the cozy home-feeling places. :)
Today were the last dives on Bunaken, similar as the previous ones with a lot of turtles and great visibility. Tomorrow we should move some 100 kilometers to another side of the peninsula, to a completely different kind of diving destination, Lembeh.
Where Bunaken is full of life and clear water Lembeh is a shallow, sandy strait with no corals and mostly bad visibility, a shipping channel between the nearby city and the Lembeh island. It should still be an interesting place to dive, as there lives a huge amount of strange small creatures. Snails, octopus and so on.
In the next room we will even have some luxurious things like hot water and AC, neither of those we have here. :)
And the diving continues. We are both having a small annoying flu, Iryna skipped diving today but I still continued. Let's hope this disappears briefly..
Not much else to do here than to dive, so that's what all the photos are about. :)
Two morning dives with turtles and excellent visibility and a night dive with a lot of small critters. All excellent.
More diving, more turtles and a pool-like visibility with no currents today. And a huge monsoon rain for all the afternoon, preventing the night dive today.
The monsoon rain finally ended and we did our first dives today. At least here is enough turtles, more than 10-20 on every dive. :)
Strong currents too due to the tidal waters, so especially the night dive was quite challenging.. Tomorrow will bring more diving, like all the near future days.
After 15 hours of sleep in Singapore and a four hour flight we arrived to our first actual destination, Bunaken island at Indonesian North Sulawesi. The flight was relatively boring and easy, although due to the rainy weather we had our first commercial flight go around procedure ever. Nothing special, just a new attempt right before the runway and a successful landing 10 minutes later.
And the rain continued and continues.. Monsoon rain was pouring all the way on our way to the island and still continues, hopefully it ends at some point tomorrow. The island itself seems to be rather nice, a remote jungle island in middle of nowhere and a small diving resort with simple huts. :)
Our short 24h visit to Singapore became even shorted, at least for the part spent awake. We arrived around nine in the morning and tried our best to stay awake despite the jetlag, but by two in the afternoon both completely died and slept until the following morning.
Well, at least we managed to visit a sports shop for some shoe parts and diving pants. :)
