Spring sem was pretty hectic for me, but got a chance to take 5-6 days off at the end of May. Originally we were planning to stay at Crystal Blue, but it was all booked, so we ended up staying and diving with Aiyanar. All good, because Aiyanar turned out to be pretty decent: the larger rooms are very spacious, and the resort is really well maintained with loads of staff keeping all facilites clean. The restaurant is also fairly decent, with three normal meals: breakfast (mostly western style with eggs, plenty of fruits, bread, cereal etc), lunch (typically one veg and two meat/fish dishes with rice), and dinner (similar, plus dessert). Notable is the Aiyanar home made mango ice-cream, which Kitty ate almost every day. We were on an all-inclusive, but I think there is also an a la carte .
Diving:
Diving conditions were excellent: warm water ~28-29deg, and dive spots picked to minimize current/swells. I love the diving arrangement. The resort has excellent dive facilities, and recruit
freelance guides; we were lucky to dive with the excellent Romeo Corpuz Jr (JunJun) - he had amazing eyes. Before the trip, I had made a list of approx 15 critters I wanted to find
over the four days of diving -- and I'd checked off over 10 in the first two days. We did a total of 12 dives (including 2 night dives), and each dive was probably
70~80 min, which is normal for easy muck diving, with almost no dive deeper than 25m. I didn't track which site we were diving at, since JunJun would decide (based on the current and the next critter on the list)
about where to jump in. Strategy worked perfectly, since we had the boat and guide to ourselves. I have a feeling we will be down there again, soon.
About the photos
Gear: Sony Nex7 with stock 18-55 lens with a subsea +10 wet macro wet; single Inon Z240 strobe in slave. Kitty shooting with Canon G1x mII and a Sea&Sea YS-01 strobe.
