Diving in Manado

After encountering multiple flight reschedule by AirAsia, which leads to hotel room cancellation and re-booking trouble, we were on our way to Manado, Indonesia for a dive-only trip.

Resort: La Rascasse Dive Resort
Stay Duration: 5days 5nights (arrived in Manado in the evening)
KL-Manado Flight duration: 3hrs++ (almost 4hrs)
Sunrise & sunset: approx. 5am & 5.30pm
Dive package + AirAsia return flights PG-KL-Manado: RM2156 per person

Location of La Rascasse Dive Resort and dive site around it

What's cool!

• Watching the dolphins swimming around our boat. The dolphins were performing for us, jumping high out of the water and racing beside our boat
• First time seeing how Mandarin fish mate
• A lot of lion fish
• Satellite TV in the room, a lot better than Astro
• WiFi available, not the fastest connection but it's good to have
  

This is the best I can get out of my point-and-shoot, check out the Manado album (link at the end of the post) for a better photo from DSLR

What's not :(

• There's no beach around our resort
• Water are not as clear or as blue in most of the dive site, not even around our resort
• It probably a low season in the month of Oct with partly clouded sky, and rain comes on and off, causing low visibility at some point
  
• Food are so-so, not much choices to choose from
• Food are not served on time and drinks (like coffee and coffee) are not provided 24/7, sometimes there are nothing to eat when we are hungry in between meals
• No land time during surface interval, we stayed on the boat whole day long!
• No other entertainment in or near our resort; pool table, WiFi and satellite TV is basically all we've got. Being 'trapped' in the resort all the time other than dive trip does not help make the trip more fun
  
• I don't see conservation effort, at least not by our group of Dive Masters from the resort. Feeding the fish? Touching corals, catching crabs and shrimps and other sea creatures? Human are merely visitors to the great underwater world, any form of contact should be avoided as much as possible

This is when I said there is not enough conservation effort...catching that poor little Pufferfish and making it 'puff' is not cool

My overall honest opinion:
Trip rating 5/10. It is good to get away from work for almost a week. It is an eye-opening vacation traveling to a new place but I feel like it's not a truly enjoyable trip, though I believe this is my own problem because the rest of the group says they have a satisfying and pleasant trip. Something is missing from the trip and to this day, I have not figure out what it is.

All of us, with one of our Dive Master

Etc:
Traffic condition is really bad in Manado City. Public transportation for locals are blue-color-Suzuki ERV-type vehicle. The way these taxis operate are equivalent to tut-tut in Thailand. They stop as they like to pick up or drop off passengers. Main road of Manado City are wide, but due to cars stopping as they like, traffic jams are common sight. Some drivers drive really really slow and some drive really really fast (for example our impatient van driver). Our driver would honk his way from the start point all the way to the destination, it's really stressful to be in the car.

One of my favorite underwater photo of the trip

Photo album of the trip:

Diving in Manado, Indonesia