We took two trips to Raja Ampat in 2014 on two liveaboards which were both owned by the wonderful Grand Komodo Cruise line xhttp://www.komodoalordive.com/RajaAmpat.htm, which provides delightful and truly affordable trips. Preceding the Spring trip with a few days in Lembeh, and the Fall trip with a few days at the Bloo Lagoon international village in Padangbhai, which is a great location to be in order to take day trips to see Mola Molas, Mantas, and the Liberty Wreck. We followed each trip to Raja Ampat with a week in Ambon, which is my all time favorite place to dive. I hated to stay only a week, but by the end of a month of diving, it was probably time.
In the Spring of 2014 we stayed and dove with Maluku Divers and it was fine, the dive guides were, for the most part, pretty good - Though limited to the muck diving in the Bay, without surcharges and minimum numbers of people.
Then in the Fall of 2014 we decided that we'd try "Dive into Ambon", which offers a variety of dive locations in addition to the muck dives we had done in the bay, and found it was the best decision we'd made in a long time. It is a long ways from the city, but cars are available that are owned the Hotel, and are charged by the hour with a 3 hour minimum. We had gone into the city of Ambon and visited the fish market and wondered through what seemed like a thousand booths selling everything imaginable.
The Natsepa Ambon Hotel is an expansive luxury resort built in hopes of attracting conventions and meetings as well as well-to-do Indonesians on Holiday with their families. We opted for one of the rooms closest to the lagoon and dive shop which had sliding glass doors that opened onto a semi-private fresh water pool with romantic lighting- I think that there were only 8 rooms that had access to it, and in the evenings we enjoyed a private swim - since nobody else was ever there when we were. The room was large and comfortable with a nice bathroom, plenty of hot water, Air Con, and room service, as well as a very responsive tech guy who brought us a wireless modem to have in the room, because the hotel's signal was weak in that part of the hotel. I do advise taking a strip with outlets to charge your phones, computers etc. in the room. The camera room at the dive shop has plenty of outlets, but not the rooms.
The owners of "Dive Into Ambon", Kaj and Barb, built Dive Into Ambon from the ground up, after having spent 3 years in Lembeh. The purpose built facilities have a spacious and well laid out camera room, wet and dry equipment rooms and a refrigerator for hiding snacks from your spouse, it has separate tanks for cameras and dive gear, and the guides are happy to help with as much as you want them to do. All the guides were helpful, knowledgeable and great at finding critters in the muck that might otherwise disappear into your peripheral vision. On our departure Barb gave us a sheet listing every dive spot (with correct spelling!) and most of what we saw.
Maybe the best part of diving with Dive into Ambon is it's spectacular location offering both the muck diving that Ambon Bay is famous for, from their private dock in the bay, a 15 minute minivan ride from the dive shop, and spectacular wall dives, swim-thrus, caves, and sea mounds in Baluga Bay. In addition they offer one-of-a-kind dives to places like "Hard Boiled Egg," where the dive guide boiled eggs in an underwater Hot Spring for us to have with lunch, ...I don't advise trying to eat them on the spot, no matter what the Dive guide shows you he can do....they are a choking hazard!!!! Though I was hungry, and it hit the spot! We also went to a spot where almost all of the Tobys and some of the other fish and critters which were all well below normal size, had mutations that the Tobys on a nearby bommy didn't have.
My husband, Richard, and I had visited Anilao, Dumagete, Porto Galera, Lembeh and Bali, as well as Maluku Divers, looking for just one colorful Rhinopias. We were thrilled to finally find one who posed for us, both for stills and the video in which it walked like a drunk leaving the bar. We were shown several varieties of frogfish, nudibranchs, shrimp and crabs that we'd never seen before and an octopus in a jagged broken jar, who took off her coconut shell lid and misc. trash lid, cleaned out the dead eggs, capturing the good ones that accidentally slipped out, sweeping them back into the jar, and then closing the lid again. The Big news in Ambon in the Fall of 2014 was that two weeks before our visit, one of the guides found a pair of the Psychedelic Frogfish, a species which hadn't been seen in 5 or so years, and Barb managed to get very nice images of them, though we weren't lucky enough to see them when we went to the same dive site. They've been seen since, and Barb has posted some photos of them on her website.
