Bunaken Island, North Sulawesi

One of the top diving sites in Indonesia, Bunaken Island (Pulau Bunaken) is unsurprisingly very popular for divers around the world. The Bunaken Marine Park is not only rich with marine lives, it is also mesmerizing for its water so clear it is truly transparent. It includes the islands of Manado Tua, Siladen, Mantehage, Nain and Nain Kecil. What visit to North Sulawesi is complete without one day to view the spectacular coral gardens of the Bunaken Marine Reserve. Declared a Marine Park in 1991, it is acknowledged as one of the top dive sites in the world. It is about 40 minutes drive from the resort to one of the dive centers or to the central harbor, where a motorized outrigger canoe or dive boat will whisk you to Bunaken Island in about 45 minutes.

Bunaken National Park is Marine Park with the most various species in the world. The fascination under water life in water territory of this a real Bunaken national park varieties, specific, on unique, and exotic, make this area as the beautiful North Sulawesi tourism and grow as one of famous marine park tourism object in the world. It is because of this location nearness with Manado city that only about 6 km from the downtown area, or from Tongkeina in Pisok foreland even only 3,5 km. Access to this location also very fluent, can be gone through speedboat within 20 up to 60 minutes.

Dive Bunaken

Most of the reefs of the Bunaken National Marine Park are rich and unspoilt, with pristine and abundant soft coral and fish life in huge concentration. Diving in and around Bunaken is mostly wall diving and drift diving, but also includes several beautiful coral slopes. We dive more than 50 different dive sites, most of them within the park. The variety of both fish and soft coral is outstanding, making this area one of the top places in the world with regards to biodiversity. In September 2012 Dr. Gerry Allen and Dr. Mark Erdmann, did the first ever scientific survey in Bunaken National Park, the result was very interesting due the extremely high per-site diversity. In general any count of over 200 fish species on a single dive is considered a very high diversity site. Of the 9 sites surveyed, 6 were higher than 200 species and two of them broke 300 species (Tanjung Kelapa/Malcolm had 310 species and Sachiko’s had 301 species)!
To put this in perspective, in over 40 years’ of survey work around the Coral Triangle region, Gerry Allen has only documented three sites that have broken 300 species: Kayoa Island, Halmahera (303 species), Tanjung Papisoi in Kaimana, West Papua (330 species) and Cape Kri in Raja Ampat (374 species). So Satchiko’s the 5th richest fish site ever recorded, andTanjung Kelapa/Malcolm is now the 3rd (and it takes only a 10 minutes boat ride from Eco Divers Manado)