Mille & Mads - Three weeks are not enough

We were in need of a completely relaxing and adventurous holiday. And that is exactly what we got. Snorkeling has been great here and we have spent hours on the house reef.

Taking our PADI Open Water Course gave access to a number of adventures along the magnificent walls and breathtaking landscapes surrounding Bunaken and the nearby islands.

The three major highlights of our underwater adventures have been:

- numerous sleeping baby whitetip reef sharks cuddling under a coral

- two beautiful green sea turtles asleep on the wall, and one of them took off right under our fins.

- a pygmy seahorse in a gorgonian sea-fan (we are not sure whether it was asleep or not!)

Arriving during low season everything was laid back, relaxed and definitely on island time. “Stop worrying so much” Nigel and Tina kept telling us. Just what we needed - mission accomplished!

Mille & Mads, Denmark (23/01/07)

Check out pictures of Mille & Mads highlights on Two Fish at Flickr

Tina & Paul - All things Weird and Wonderful

On 11 December myself and my partner Paul left the rich and beautiful walls of Bunaken to spend 10 days at the new resort opened by Two Fish Divers at Lembeh Straits.

The trip would form one third of our month of diving in North Sulawesi with Two Fish Divers, who also have a successful resort on Bunaken Island.

We were to change environments from pristine coral, diverse reef life and blue waters to muck diving, and all the weird and wonderful critters that Lembeh is growing increasingly popular for wowing divers with.

The black volcanic sandy slopes of Lembeh are home to an enormous variety of marine life, however nothing was quite the same as anything we’d encountered before. It was really exciting. Both if us have dived in numerous locations around the world, and seen many things on a divers wish list, so it was exhilarating to discover a different and more unusual environment.

Giant frogfish and baby frogfish were all really cool to see – but hey, this was Lembeh – and we also saw the more unusual hairy frogfish. Scorpion fish were around in all kinds of shapes, colours and sizes, and in true Lembeh style we were also privileged to see the rarer Lacy Scorpion Fish, Weedy Scorpion Fish and Ambon Scorpion Fish – another three steps beyond the norm …

There were also sea horses (both pygmy and common), a wide variety of nudibranchs, mantis shrimps galore, drangonettes, flying gurnards, flamboyant cuttlefish and mimic octopus – just some of the weird and wonderful things we discovered.

Most of our dives were 75 minutes long, but passed in a flash, and every single dive introduced us to something we’d never seen before thanks to the sharp eye’s of our knowledgeable dive guide, Opo.

We’d highly recommend it to anyone, and will definitely be aiming to return. We’re sure there must still be more, just waiting to be discovered, and we’re positive the diversity and uniqueness will be hard to match.

Tina Gibbons, UK (26/12/06)

Check out Tina & Pauls favourite pictures on Two Fish at Flickr