INDONESIA (MANADO) - July 10-19, 2024

(Click here to see some pictures from this trip plus links to the SmugMug slideshow.)

It seems like every time we have a foreign vacation trip, I’m tempted to say, “This was the best visit to __________ that we’ve ever had.” In this case, that might actually be true.

We have just wrapped up our 11th trip to dive northeastern Sulawesi, Indonesia, with our good friends at Murex Dive resort. I’m writing this at 35,000 feet as we begin the 15+-hour leg of the trip from Singapore back to Los Angeles. Overall, the total travel time door-to-door is around 27 hours. (Thankfully, that's only two plane flights, LAX-Singapore and then SIN-Manado.) So if you’re going to travel for that long almost (literally) halfway around the world, the diving damned well better be good. And it is. (And you can see many of the fish and coral pictures by using the link to take you to on our SmugMug website.)

This really was one of our better Indonesia trips for a variety of reasons, some within our control, many not. Except for the first day, we had pretty good weather. Fairly calm seas, water temp generally a consistent 86º, visibility anywhere from 40-100 feet but generally averaging 60-80 on most dives, LOTS of animals, including some special treats like a pod of Pilot Whales that we saw on two different days. (On the second day, there were at least 30 of them simply resting at the surface near our boat while we gazed on in amazement for 15 minutes.)

The thing we really like about going to this part of the world is the variety of diving that is available to us. There are really four distinct types of dives that we were able to do throughout our 9-day stay at Murex.


The main ones are the dives in the Bunaken Marine Park that’s about a half-hour boat ride from the Murex Manado property. Bunaken offers spectacular coral walls, some sloping reefs, lots of activity in the shallows, and – especially around the dive sites of Lekuan 1, 2, & 3 – an incredible number of turtle encounters on every dive. (On one dive, we counted – we actually kept track on a slate – 63 turtles during the hour-long dive.) But Bunaken is not the only option.

Murex also owns a resort at Bangka Island, a 2-hour boat ride to the north and then east, which offers some of the most spectacular soft coral reefs that I’ve ever dove. Then there’s the Lembeh Straits where Murex has an affiliation with Lembeh Resort. As you may know, the Lembeh Strait is considered THE most prolific muck diving spot in the world, where you routinely see amazing creatures that are either rare of simply not found elsewhere. These include animals like the Bangaii Cardinalfish, many species of frogfish, Pygmy seahorses of various hues, octopuses like the Coconut and Mimic, Leaf Scorpionfish, and too many more to name. We did both Bangka and Lembeh as day trips with two dives, lunch at the resort, and then a third dive before hightailing it back to Manado and the Murex home base.


On top of that, there are muck-ish dives around Manado Bay, all within a 5-to-30 minute boat ride from Murex Manado. I say “ish” because a true muck dive is considered to be over black sand whereas these are a combination of sand interspersed with coral reefs. But even here, we found incredible creatures like common seahorses, Ghost Pipefish, Cockatoo Waspfish, Snake Eels, Sea Snakes, and more. Pretty cool.

One reason for this abundance of life – and the diversity applies to the corals as well as the fish and invertebrates – is that NE Sulawesi lies smack-dab in the middle of the Coral Triangle. If you look on a global map, the Coral Triangle spreads from the edge of the Maldives, through Indonesia, and then east through Papua New Guinea and into the Solomon Islands. It’s thought that life in the ocean began in the middle of the Coral Triangle and then spread outwards. As species tired to migrate further and further east and west, some didn’t make it. So you can reverse engineer this by doing species counts and what you find is that Sulawesi has the highest species count of anywhere in the world. So it would seem with such a high species count, NE Sulawesi was and still is the sweet spot. I can’t claim that we saw all of the 6,000 species that inhabit the Coral Triangle. But, had we really counted them all, it wouldn’t surprise me to know we saw 1,000 different species.

We wouldn’t have experienced any of this without our good friends at Murex Manado, which served as our home base. There are certainly other dive operators that ply the waters of Manado but we’ve always been delighted with the effort that Murex makes to ensure we have the best trip possible. That’s not only their boats and DMs but also all of the staff at the resort that make the whole thing run smoothly including the kitchen staff (the food was wonderful), the housekeeping folks, compressor and tank filling people, drivers (for when we did land tours or the overland drive to Lembeh), and more. This is all done under the watchful eyes of Danny & Angelique Charlton who own the resort (Angelique’s parents founded Murex in 1988), aided by Pim Van Shendel and other on-site managers. Here’s just one example of how they go the extra mile for you (and specifically for me).

Murex is right on the shoreline of Manado Bay. They’ve never had a dock. To board the boats, they’re pulled in as tight as possible to the shoreline, maybe ten feet out and in perhaps a foot or two of water, and you wade out to the boat, and then step up on the back to board.

I’ve never been a fan of that because I don’t like gearing up that early in my wetsuit and I don’t like walking barefoot across a pebbly/rocky beach or a sandy bottom. (I wasn’t known as “Sir Delicate” in my family for nothing.) I prefer to be in dry clothes and wearing my beloved socks and shoes. Obviously, that won’t work with this setup. So . . .

Every time we’ve come, since our first visit in 2000, they’ve built me a special ramp that’s long enough to extend from the edge of the water to the boat. Then I – and everyone else on our boat – can simply walk along the wooden ramp and board the back of the boat. No stepping into water required. And while there’s no question they’re willing to accommodate my peculiar need in this, the reality is that the ramp really does making getting on and off the boat much easier and it’s something I would hope they would do all of the time. But I truly appreciate that they always make this special effort for me.


In short, we can’t say enough good things about Murex and if you’re contemplating a trip to this area of the world – either with Reef Seekers (yes, we’ll be going back) or with another group or on your own, you’ll be hard-pressed not to thoroughly enjoy a stay at Murex.

Before we get into the diving, I want to add some thoughts about the food at Murex. Everyone in our group really enjoyed what was offered. All the meals are buffet-style with a wide variety of options from which to choose. Everything has an Indonesia flair to it, there’s always an interesting soup at lunch and dinner, and for all three meals, they even have a chef “live cooking.” For breakfast, it’s an egg/omelet station. But for lunch and dinner it was always a special extra dish like fresh-cooked-fish, chicken kabobs, and even burritos. The dishes change with every meal. Nice touch.

This year, we had 16 people who experienced all of this. Our group consisted of Murex veterans and newbies. They were (in no particular order): Vick Thomas & Elisabeth Sykes, Tom & Katy Burns, Michelle Leonard, Gayle Chin, Tony Mischel, Rik Aceves, Patti Wey, Don Banas & Mark Raske, Marilyn Lawrence, Paul Weers, Stuart Berryhill, Lou Weisberg, and me (Ken Kurtis, aka “Opa Gila” at Murex).

Because of the size of the group, we always had two boats each day. So we split people into either Group 1 or Group A, assigned the group to a boat and a pair of DMs, and then I alternated boats so I could dive with everyone over the course of the trip. That meant we generally had 7 or 8 people on a boat each day, and we’d further split the group in two, one with each DM. So you were generally never diving with more than 4 people (sometimes as few as 2) and that means when something special was spotted, everyone was afforded a chance to get a good look.

We should also point out that the spotting skills of all of the Murex DMs – lead DM Basrah Tan, along with  Alvian, Laurens, and Janri – are amazing. Granted that lot of times some of these critters are fairly territorial so that means they have a general idea of where to find them. But even so, it takes a practiced eye to find a 1-inch long Painted Frogfish that’s hiding in the coral. Pretty impressive.

And that brings up a general point about dive guides worldwide. Some are good critter spotters and some are simply diver-minders. I’ve dove with other operations where it seemed the main function of the DM/guide was to signal the group to turn around 30 minutes into a dive. Well, I’ve got a watch so that doesn’t really enhance my dive experience. But it’s unlikely I’ll be finding that Pygmy Seahorse on the seafan and I might miss the Leaf Scorpionfish perched in the branches of coral, and that’s where DMs like those at Murex really earn their keep (and their well-deserved end-of-the-trip tips).

The general plan each day was for three dives. The Murex boats, which were re-powered a few years ago, run pretty fast as I mentioned previously, so we make it over to Bunaken in 30-40 minutes. We’d leave around 8:15AM, do two hour-long dives at Bunaken (with an hour surface interval in-between), and then head back to Murex for lunch, generally arriving by 1PM. After lunch, it was a 2:30PM departure for one of the close-in Manado Bay sites, which meant we were back at Murex by 4:30PM which left time for an afternoon house reef dive (which no one did on this trip) or an early-evening night dive, which happened on two occasions.

The other option was to do all three dives at Bunaken and have lunch on the boat after dive #2. It was the same general timing. No matter the plan, all of the dives were an hour long or until you ran low on air. Most of the dives were drift dives of some sort so that when you surfaced, the boat was generally nearby and came over to pick you up.

There’s an excellent briefing before each dive with the dive site sketched out on a portable erasable whiteboard, giving you an idea of the dive site, the plan to dive it, and what we might see and where we might see it, as well as what currents we might expect along the way. Each dive guide is equipped with an Innovative Scuba Concepts Quests erasable underwater slate (6x9” and easy to read) so whenever they spot something, they write on the slate and show the name to everyone so you’ll know what you’re looking at. Nice touch. They also now carry with them another smaller slate where they keep track of all of the special critters spotted during the dive, and make that available to everyone once we’re back on the boat. A lot of people took a picture of the briefing whiteboard and the post-dive slate for their logbooks.

I mentioned earlier the amazing number of turtles, both Green and Hawksbill, that we’d see at Bunaken and especially at the Lekuan sites. The turtles were so abundant that on one dive, I took my GoPro down and decided I would ONLY video turtles and that I’d shoot every one I could find. That ended up being 36 turtles (and I know I missed a few). The video of that is called “1 Dive, 36 Turtles,” and is on our YouTube channel (links are on the Reef Seekers website).


The other thing that always amazes me is how many Red-toothed Triggerfish there at just about every single dive site. I’m not talking hundreds, or thousands, but possibly millions. They’re almost always in motion, trying to snatch a snack drifting on the current. Most of them are small, maybe 3-5” long, but there are many full-sized adults mixed in there too. Sometimes they covered the tops of the reefs and many times they were scooting around a few feet out from the coral walls. But they were always there and every now and then it was mesmerizing to stop and gaze out into the blue and watch them do their thing.


I’m an admitted fish geek but I’m not quite as good at identifying coral species. But the corals were very healthy and the reefs are in pretty good condition. We saw very little coral bleaching and because Bunaken is a marine park and protected, no evidence of anchor damage or anything like that.

The reefs are combinations of hard corals and soft. Soft corals rely on currents to thrive so anytime we were around soft corals, you’d expect some current as well. Most of the currents are mild and manageable but occasionally we’d get one that would zip us along at a fairly good clip. And sometimes you’d be drifting down a wall and realize the current had changed and that you were now heading into it. But there’s an easy solution for that: You just turn around and drift back the way you came.

We did a wonderful dive at a spot on Bunaken called Mandolin where we easily had 100-foot visibility. We were treated to views of huge barrel sponges, a Map Puffer, schools of Pyramid Butterflies, lots of turtles, some Black Snappers, crinoids galore, various species of Angelfish, numerous species of Anemonefish, and did we mention all the Red-toothed Triggerfish? It was a really lovely dive.

We also did an exploratory dive at an island – Mathehage – that lies immediately north of Bunaken and adds 30 minutes to the travel time. Basrah told me they hadn’t been there in two years. We dove a spot at the north end of the island called Barracuda Point and sure enough, we found the large school of barracuda. We also had a school of jacks, some rays, and a lot of healthy sea fans.

We followed that up with a dive at Manado Tua, an extinct volcano that’s an island in its own right, and this dive was likely our favorite of the entire trip, mainly due to the sheer numbers of fish that were present. Most of the sites we dove were fishy but I’d estimate this one was triple of what we normally got.

In addition to the schools of red-toothed Triggerfish and Pyramid Butterflies, we had Blue-and-Yellow Fusiliers, plenty of Anemonefish including some Spinecheeks, a Titan Triggerfish guarding her nest, a Sea Snake (officially known as a Banded Sea Krait), some rays, and a number of eels, wrasses and butterflies of all sorts, hawkfish, and even some baby Giant Clams. Everyone came up raving about this dive.

On two days we had a special treat as we headed back to Manado: A large pod of Pilot Whales. The first time we saw them was on the way back from Bangka Island. We first thought it was a school of dolphins, but then we realized how big and slow-moving they were and, as we got closer, we could ID them. They cavorted in and out of our bow wake for about ten minutes.

But the REALLY special treat happened a couple of days later. We were leaving Bunaken after our second dive and heading across the bay to Murex for lunch when we spotted the Pilot Whale pod about a mile out. But this time, they were barely moving. They were all lounging on the surface, perhaps resting, perhaps sleeping. But they were all breathing. They were at least 30 of them near out boat (and more near some other boats) so you could always hear that OOOOFFF sound they make when they exhale. We approached the group slowly and then brought the boat to a stop and must have spent 20 minutes there, mesmerized by what we were seeing. It was quite a unique experience.

The Manado Bay muck-ish dives involved a little more work to find things but usually were worth the effort. With the aid of our talented sharp-eyed dive guides, we saw Ghost Pipefish, Cockatoo Waspfish, Flamboyant Cuttlefish, Golden Sweepers, every species of Cardinalfish imaginable, lots of Anemonefish guarding their homes, and plenty of Blue-Spotted Rays. Because these are all near-shore dives, visibility was generally around 40 feet and sometimes as little as 20. (And, of course, an errant fin kick can stir up the sand and reduce viz even further.)

On our Bangka Island day, we did two dives at Bangka proper. One of them was at Sahaung, which has got to be one of the prettiest soft coral reefs in the world. (There’s a posted video of this dive as well.) It was also nice because the current was mild that day, so the soft corals were more or less open and you weren’t getting blown by them at lightning speed. The viz wasn’t too spectacular but the soft corals were. They came in hues of orange, yellow, purple, red, and green. The fish life was pretty good too – we even had a Pygmy Seahorse – and included an enormous school of Yellow Snappers, but the real attraction on this particular reef is the soft coral.


Diving the Lembeh Straits is a different ballgame all together. It’s not known why, but this 10-mile stretch of water is home to the largest collection of unusual creatures in the world. You’ll get Bangaii Cardinalfish (found only here and at Bangaii Island to the north), Blue-Ringed Octopuses as well as Mimic, Long-Armed, Coconut, Pygmy, and Wunderpus, frogfish of all sorts, Scorpionfish, Snake Eels, Cuttlefish, Flying Gurnards, and a whole lot more.

But Lembeh is also a very critter-dependent dive. In other words, if you see what you came for you’ll like it. If you don’t see the critters you want, it may be a dive where you go “meh.” The bottom is dark sand although there are scattered coral reefs, the water temp will be 3-4º colder than at Bunaken, and the viz will be 20-40 feet but more towards the low end than the high end.

On our Lembeh day, we did three dives. One was pretty good and the other two were so-so. (There are a total of 88 designated dive spots in the Lembeh Strait and there’s a self-regulated limit of no more than 15 divers on a spot at one time.) On our first dive, we immediately got a cute Coconut Octopus. The creatures have learned to find abandoned coconut shell halves and then the hold them together around them for protection. We also saw more Ghost Pipefish, a Cuttlefish, a bright yellow Leaf Scorpionfish, an Emperor Shrimp riding on the back of a small nudibranch, a swarm of Stinging Catfish, a small Snake Eel that I’ve yet to ID, and some pregnant common seahorses. The second dive added a jet black frogfish, juvy Silver Sweetlips, numerous small shrimp in anemones, a very small lionfish, and a Mantis Shrimp who was out and about. The third dive was similar with the addition of another frogfish species and nice little pipefish. And I fully realize that you may be saying “He saw all of that and he’s complaining?” But the point is that Lembeh sets a high bar for critter encounters and this was one of those days where the dives didn’t quite live up to the billing.

That all pretty much sums up our diving experience for this visit to Indonesia. (You can see more pix from this trip on our SmugMug site.) Overall, this was again a fabulous trip diving with people we enjoy very much and staying at a facility that’s very comfortable but which still retains a lot of local flavor.

Will we be going back? You betcha!! Will it be next year or the year after? That’s up to you. If we’ve got enough interest, we can probably work out a return next year. Whether you’ve never been to Indo before or if it would be a return visit for you, it’s a type of trip and a style of diving that will leave an indelible good mark on your brain. And certainly by doing it with our friends at Murex Dive Resort, you’ll be sure to maximize the experience.

© 2024 Reef Seekers Dive Co. All Rights Reserved.