Maluku Divers Resort
My teenage son and I spent a week here in April of 2009. This typically is not a place where people stay for that long, but we had limited budget and air travel was pretty cheap at the height of the recession. We had been to Lembeh two years earlier and my son loved critter divers, so this seemed like a good alternative and it was.
Getting there is grueling, but the resort is quite close to the airport on Ambon (a beautiful airport at that), so once you make it here, it is quick to get to the resort. The cabins are quite large, but lacking a lot of ambience. A nice bed, a lot of place for your gear, and a very nice bathroom. The food was large Indonesian although the breakfasts were pretty much American/European. My son who is a picky eater got by just fine.
They have two dives every morning and one in the afternoon. The best muck diving is within a five minute boat ride of the resort. The dive operation facility and staff were world class. It was well organized and extremely professional. Several of our dive guides had learned their trade at Lembeh and they were great.
A couple of times a week, the resort took a trip to Tiga Palau which was about a 90 minute boat ride away. For those who like coral reefs, soft coral colors and small schools of fish, go there with your wide angle lens ready for some nice photo ops. We talked the resort in doing an extra trip there and we enjoyed it both times.
Of course, the main attraction here is the muck diving right in front of the resort. The Laha area where the resort is located is full of amazing creatures. I thought the density of "crazies" was a lot more than at Lembeh. Most dives, even good ones, have some down time and that just wasn't the case here. You dropped to the bottom and kept seeing stuff until your air ran out.
We were left on our own for the most part, unless we wanted help spotting critters. We did get help on occasion when special creatures like rhinopias were to be found.
If you have been to Lembeh or simply want a small town alternative to Lembeh, this is probably the best two miles of ocean to find all of those exotic creatures that you would like to photo. Because Maluku is really the only dive traffic here, we rarely saw other divers on any of the sites. Because this is a common departure point for Raja Ampat liveaboard, occasionally a liveaboard will pull in here, but that was only one day while we were there. I would say we saw 90% overlap with Lembeh, but several creatures were unique. We saw several clusters of harlequin shrimps which we did not see at Lembeh. We also saw a blue ring octopus, but I know that they are commonly sited in Lembeh. We also saw a lot of very pretty seahorses which we did not see in Lembeh. We also seemed to run into peacock mantis shrimps on elmost every dive and we also saw the very large ones with the piercing arms. I'm guessing if you stayed a month at both places that you would see the same critters, although the density here was much higher.
