Posts Tagged ‘motorboat’
Bunaken Island has become an icon of the city of Manado, and indeed of North Sulawesi, since an underwater paradise was discovered by several North Sulawesi diving pioneers, among them Loky Herlambang and Ricky Lasut. The vertical coral reefs that seem to go down forever immediately made Bunaken one of the world’s favorite diving venues. The underwater walls of Pulau Bunaken are full of colorful corals and exotic fish.
Like mushrooms in the rainy season, in the mid 1990s diving resorts sprouted up along the beaches of Malalayang and Molas, not far from the Manado city center. Bunaken is now home to dozens of diving resorts; over 30 diving operators are eager to take you on a dive trip to Bunaken every day.
The run over to Bunaken takes only around 50 minutes on a motorboat specially designed to accommodate diving tourists. As long as the seas are fairly calm and the sun is gently shining, it’s an ideal time for those who want to sunbathe before the sun’s rays get too fierce.
There are more than 12 diving sites around Pulau Bunaken. Some of these dive sites are characterized by steep walls quite densely covered with coral to a depth of 40 meters.
Others are more gently sloping but covered even more densely with coral. Typically one will see many types of reef fish – butterfly fish Read the rest of this entry »
Since they first started coming to Bali in 1924, the Kintamani area, and specifically Penelokan, has been an important part of the travel agenda for adventure-loving tourists. From here they can gaze at the beauty of the caldera of Gunung Batur, which was formed by a massive volcanic eruption around 30,000 years ago.
Based on what I’d heard about the beauty of Batur’s crater, I was interested in exploring the area from a different perspective, by going directly down to the mountain and observing the daily activities of the villagers living near the caldera.
Gunung (Mount) Batur is actually a fairly small volcano in the middle of a crater 13 km in diameter. The mountain stands next to Danau (Lake) Batur, which is hemmed in by the caldera’s high walls. Gunung Batur lies within Kintamani District, Bangli Regency.