Getting there is non-trivial: Hong Kong - Singapore (overnight in Singapore Airport hotel) - Balikpapan (visa on arrival and baggage collection to transfer to domestic) - Berau; then by car to Berau jetty (40min), and finally a 3 hour boat ride to MPR. The domestic flight is an hour, and we were booked on Batavia, an airline with Dutch heritage and a safety announcer with a deliciously heavy Russian accent (it's a recorded message, the crew are all local). For a city of 3million (mostly coal miners, we were told), Berau airport is oddly tiny and run-down. On the return trip, Batavia cancelled all flights, so we were switched by our operator to KAL-Star; we only lost an hour or so, and that too because the crew had to go to the mosque before departing (this was the month of Ramadan). A nice side-effect this travel re-arrangement was that instead of staying overnight in a crappy hotel in Berau, we got to spend the night in the really nice Bahtera hotel in Balikpapan. The next morning we were back on plan: Silk air to Singapore, and Singapore airlines back to HK.
We chose to stay in Maratua Paradise Resort (or MPR), another of those made-for-divers resorts similar to Mabul water bungalows near Sipadan (and owned, we found, by the same guy). The main reason was that the threshers live off the reef near this resort, and we figured we'd like to dive near their cleaning stations a few times. Maratua is the largest of the group of four-five atolls good for diving in this area, and is home to this as well as couple of other resorts. The other islands are Kakaban (a triangular island with a large freshwater lake in the middle, home to the famous jellyfish), Sangalaki (famous for manta encounters), and Derawan (the smallest of them all, and where we had stayed on the last trip here). Kakaban is 45min from MPR, and Sangalaki is approx an hour away by speedboat in calm seas. MPR is beautiful, the water bungalows are spacious and have A/C, hot water, cool breezes. At high tide, you can recline out on the patio and watch the odd turtle swim by, or the gangs of needlefish and trumpetfish lunge through schools of juvenile fish looking for a snack. There is a village nearby, but we hardly stepped off the resort during our 7 day stay.
MPR is an all-inclusive, so all food is prepared in the resort kitchen and served buffet style . The food is not great, but each meal had at least one really nice dish, plus they always have a couple of good local vegetable dishes. The main dishes are mainly seafood (freah grouper, squid, prawns, ...) or chicken. There is no pork, as expected, but they do have beer.
Diving: We had seven days of diving: five days at Maratua, and one day trip to each of Kakaban and Sangalaki. August is supposed to be high season, but during our stay, they had a maximum of six diving guests: us, a Dutch couple, and an Italian couple, so each dive only had four or six divers (our stay-dates didn't totally overalp). Visibility was typically 15-20m, and there were occasional thermoclines that' dip the water temp down to a chilly 23deg from the usual 27-28; the currents in the channel, midereef, gorgonzola and lighthouse were strong -- so we should have seen more big-fish action including sharks/rays/barracuda, but the numbers were low. We did see a devil ray, and eagle rays on a couple of dives. Kitty and the Dutchman (Wilhelm) saw the thresher shark once, briefly; I was too far away and it was gone by the time I caught up. The marine life overall is really thriving in Maratua, and there is some pretty interesting macro also. So all in all, I'd say this remains on of my top choice places with mix of large and small, not to mention the hundreds of turtles, the friendly bumpheads, and the always enjoyable snorkling in Jellyfish lake at Kakaban. The highlights of the sightings include the two types of pygmy seahorses, the schools of barracuda, the eagle rays, turtle, and bumpheads. The image below shows the resort's version of divesite map, and we pretty much did all of the divesites during our stay, with perhaps three afternoon dives in Maratua (out of five) at Midreef. The diving off Kakaban is great too, and I'd rate the site barracuda point as my favorite of this trip, especially since only the solitary Manta showed up over three dives in Sangalaki.
Clicking on a thumb will show a larger version of the image in a new tab. About the gear: I usedg an Olympus E-PL1 with the 14-42 lens in an Oly PT-EP01 housing; the camera flash drove an external Inon Z220s strobe in slave mode via optical cable. Kitty used a Canon G12 in a Canon WP-DC34 housing, and for the first time, a Sea and Sea YS-021 strobe driven in slave via optical cable. Sadly, her camera flooded on the second dive in Sangalaki; we're hoping the travel insurance will cover. Topside photos are from my excellent new Kayaking camera, the Panasonic TS3.
