Living: The resort is just a few minutes drive from Ambon airport; Maluku organises the pickup and 30 min later, you're in your room. The rooms are typical Indonesian resort bungalows -- there is an excellent balcony, a/c, hot water in bathrooms and comfortable beds; photographers rule here, and the little touches show up -- our room had two power outlets with plug adapters to accommodate any electrical plug -- excellent to charge phones, laptops, and batteries; they also have a spacious camera room, although I never really used it. The resort is clean and functional; it's on the beach where we get into the diveboats. There is a village nearby, and some topside tourism is possible, but we never had the time to step out at all -- it was all diving for us. When not diving, pretty much all guests are either sleeping or hang out at the covered patio/reception/restaurant. The manager (and also avid diver and photog), Marcel also lives in one of the bungalows, and is pretty much around, taking care of stuff and generally hanging out with everyone.
Food: All food we had was at the resort; from reading Maluku's website, we went in with low expectations. This turns out to be wrong -- the chef is pretty talented, and the food was generally very tasty and there was plenty of variety (you eat what they cook, although they are quite accommodating on requests: they switched all seafood to chicken for one guest, and I asked for and got hot oatmeal with bananas every morning). Servings are on the small side, and there is less variety of fruit than in other places, but they did have good papaya and bananas. The kitchen staff really are well trained -- once you tell them your preferences, they remember it for the rest of your stay.
Diving: After an overnight flight (HK - Jakarta - Ambon), we reached the resort in the am. We did one dive that afternoon, and three/four on the next three days; on the last day, Kitty was a bit sick, and I did two dives in the morning, giving me around 18 hours to de-gas before the flight back. The sketch map below shows where the dive sites are. Most of the sites we dived were 3-5 min boat ride from the resort; one day we went across the bay (~30 min), doing two dives at Jetty Dak Blue and Pante Nama wall, but really it was all a similar topography everywhere. On the resort side of the coast, we probably covered sites between Mandarin city and Airport jetty. Many dives are sloping sand, and perhaps the deepest we went was around 30m on a couple of occasions. Other dives were shallow, and you'd dive till you're out of air; our dives lasted anthing between 50 and 100 min. Each boat usually went with 6-7 divers and 3 guides; most of our dives we had Sammi and Luki as our guides, both excellent fellows. The water was warm (28-29C) and really only a couple dives we had slight current, perhaps 1 knot. I didn't take any photos topside, except the Maluku diveshop board (below) showing the general site map.
Here are the underwater photos from the trip. Clicking on a thumbnail will open a new tab/window. Most photos were taken by my Olympus E-PL1 in its Olympus housing, with an Inon Z220s strobe using an optical cable in slave mode. I also have the Inon UCL165 wet macro lens. Kitty was using her Canon G12 in the Canon housing, with a Sea&Sea YS-01 strobe also running in slave via optical cable. Editing is with Photoshop elements, mostly cropping and levels. If you want the original, send me an email.
