You Want Me to Dive Where?!?

Lembeh Strait diving could be considered the antithesis of Bunaken coral reef diving. One does not got to Lembeh to view hordes of brightly colored tropical fish or large sea reptiles. Instead, at Lembeh, one searches the black sandy sea bottom for small but unusual critters, many no larger than your thumb. This is called "muck diving" because of the muck that is kicked up as one swims over the soft substrate. Muck diving in this area is a relatively new phenomenon (its not even in the Lonely Planet yet...but probably in the next edition). The resort we dove with is brand spanking new and it is one of the 5 resorts that have opened in the past year....many of them branches of the ones found in Bunaken. Searching the sandy ocean floor may not sound like fun, but it's actually a lot of fun playing investigator...and you never know what you may find!

To start off, we made our way from Tangkoko to Bitung. We had an interesting time trying to find accommodation in Bitung and ended up "chartering" a public mini-van. By charter we mean asking him for information on where to stay and then him proceeding to drop his other passengers off and chaffuer us around without our permission and then charging us half of what we spent on the room. My biggest beef so far with this country is that everyone seems to think its ok to charge the foreigner double, quadruple, octuple the local price for transportation. We're beginning to realize that if you ask "how much?" it really means "I have no idea what I'm suppose to pay so please feel free to take advantage of my innocence and empty my pocketbook." We've just started shoving how much we think the price should be in the driver's face then running away before he could charge us more.

Anyway...

We'd heard rumors that prices on Pulau Lembeh were a bit steeper than prices on Pulau Bunaken and since we're trying not to splurge all of our money before we reach the end of our trip we decided to head to the city of Bitung (pronounced Bit-oong) on mainland Sulawesi and see what information we could dig up about the island and diving. We hadn't anticipated that diving the area is so new that none of the locals are familiar with it! We came to the city with no information about how to get to Pulau Lembeh or contact information of any resorts. So bright and early we made our way to the wharf and began asking around. Thankfully we were able to fumble around enough Bahasa Indonesia to get our point across and actually ran into a dive guide who was on his way to work. We stopped got off at the dive shop he worked at and immediately set to work getting ready for two dives since our plan was to dive and then head back to Bitung for the night.

Muck diving is difficult to explain...its not what you'd call exhilarating and there aren't schools of fish to ogle over...but it definitely has its moments. Muck diving is more akin to playing detective and your reward is to witness the most unusual animals of the shallow seas. We saw (among other things) ribbon eels with firey nostrils, frogfish the size of a plate and pygmy seashorses no more than 1/2 an inch long. Overall, we'd both rate diving in Lembeh better over diving in Bunaken and we're hoping that we'll get to return to Lembeh Straight before it turns into a major Indonesian port.