Trip report Selayar Dive Resort November 2008

Hi!
As I could not find much about Selayar here, I post my report. Selayar is an island in South Sulawesi reached by ferry from Pantai Bira (about 4-5hours from Makassar) or by plane (Avia Star, a small plane). They build a larger airport, then Merpati will fly on this route.
On Selayar, there are two resorts, Selayar Island Resort (advertising diving, but not getting people to the best places) and Selayar Dive Resort, right next to the best dive spots, but only accessible by boat.
Selayar Dive Resort is a German resort with 16 beds in 8 some bungalows with incredible views of the small deserted beach through the front wall made of glass, with hammock, veranda, mostly fan-cooled, European bath-rooms with hot water. However in many months of low-budget backpacking in Asia, I have not found such unpleasant insects in the bathroom, and it was not low budget (120€/day for sharing a double room, full board, drinking water, 2 guided boat dives, unlimited house-reef diving). however, rooms are cleaned twice daily.
The (English-speaking) owner Jochen and a Swiss dive guide, both very seasoned instructors, guide the dives. The waiter an receptionist speaks German rather than English. When the dive stuff disappears after dives and the waiter is not there, boat or restaurant stuff speak only Indonesian... Food was European and Indonesian, quite tasty.
Jochen manages a local marine reserves just comprising the reefs nearby. You can see turtles, Napoleons, batfish, blue-spotted rays while just snorkelling on the house reef (easily accessible for divers also because of the jetty). Night dives were quite good.
Diving is done with 12 liter tanks, no Nitrox, along the walks covered with gorgonians and colourful soft coral. Jochen advertises diving with big stuff, but this requires deco dives around 40-60m and some current. Down there are also giant gorgonians, barracudas, groupers, maybe grey reef sharks, bigger rays, but I did not see anything and did not go so deep so often. Jochen keeps explaining that it is safe. The Swiss guy guides a group preferring shallow dives (30m). Both have good eyes for macro. I saw leaf fish, nudibranchs, rare kinds of scorpionfish, stonefish, kind of mantis shrimp etc., turtels aboudn. Other than that, we saw a big leopard stingray, schools of reef fish, some giant trevallies and tunas, but no shark in 13 dives (depth mostly 28 - 42m).
The resort seems to gear to Germans who are made to feel like at home, and that includes prices for beverages and high transfer cost. The 2,5-hour speed-boat transfer to Bira costs 600€ for the boat etc.
Conclusion: I liked the bungalows for the secluded beach setting. The diving is quite good, but not worth the hassle of getting there. There are plenty of places with more colourful walls, more variety and more sharks etc. in Asia and where sharks are resting on a sandy bottom at less than 30m, not at 50m!
Cheers,
Liberty

Thanks for the report.

Did I read that right? 600 Euros for a speedboat ride to the resort and 120 euros per day for accomodation?

*cough cough*

Hi!
Well, 120 € are per person in a fan-cooled twin bungalow including 3 meals, drinking water, 2 boat dives and unlimited shore dives. Dive sites are nearby.
The 2,5hours speedboat ride costs 600€ for the boat. When I asked about day trips to Taka Bonerate, I was told, the speedboat was 1000€ for the trip...
The resort owner who fancies deep deco diving raved during dinner the last night about the "consciousness-expanding effects" of both LSD and nitrogen narcosis "close to the limits"...
I would not recommend him and his resort.
Cheers,
Liberty

Hello all,

As the last review about Selayar was posted several years ago, I will give out my report of Selayar Dive Resort, stayed there a few months ago in November 2015.

Although some aspects were positive, others made it a difficult experience which we would not want to repeat. For the positives, the location is very unique and hard to come by in today’s world as it is one of the only resorts on the island. The white sandy beach is beautiful as well as the clear blue water with the jungle in the background, a wonderful sight and place to relax. The bungalows are large and comfortable and the private bathroom is decent and clean. There is a nice porch where you can hang your hammock and read a book.

The food was quite good, although they could do some minor changes and this would make a big difference. It was strange to have pasta with tomato sauce for lunch, this is something I can cook myself at home, I don’t come to Indonesia to eat spaghetti with tomato sauce… Most guests said the same thing. They also served a lot of chicken and on some rare occasions we had fish. It seems the reasons for this is because there is ongoing dynamite fishing in the area and probably they don’t want to support this fishing method by buying local fish, of course also because the fish populations are in sharp decline. The result is often the fish was not fresh, so if you are coming for the fresh seafood you will be disappointed. They make a very nice beef fillet however with mashed potatoes. The owner speaks a lot about the environment and does not want to take the fish from the ocean as they are not farmed, which is understandable, but then he flies in Australian beef to a remote island in Sulawesi, so this to me is not so green and in contradiction with his big speeches about the environment. If you stay more than 2 weeks, expect to have the same menu over again. You can purchase beer for an additional price as well as fresh juice, unfortunately for us they ran out of fresh fruits after the first few days.

As to the diving, although we can say it was overall very good, we were quite shocked with the reeftop as it is in poor condition. I can understand this is due to prior dynamite fishing and the reef was never able to fully recover, along with rising temperatures make it difficult for the coral to grow. Nevertheless, compared to other reeftops this one is significantly below average for Indonesia. It was also very sad that every day we hear dynamite explosions on almost every dive, we have never heard so many bombs. The walls however are very beautiful with lots of seafans, soft corals and sponges, and on a couple of dive sites a large amount of fish – fusiliers, jackfish, giant trevally, napoleons, turtles, seasnakes, marble ray, sometimes sharks, this is quite a special dive site. We had hoped to see more macro which we heard from some guests diving with the other guides was excellent, they were seeing pontohi and bargibanti pygmy seahorses, ruemengan’s pipehorse, pom-pom crab, leaf scorpionfish, frogfish and many more which we never saw with our guide from South Africa.

Also Jochen offers some dive sites to be dived deep, but he does not believe in technical diving. So he takes guests diving to 65 metres, sometimes deeper, on a single tank of air. We did not feel comfortable doing this without a spare tank so we never did the deep dives.

The visibility we had was not as great as advertised, we often had cloudy waters and had higher expectations. Furthermore we did not like the dive boats, even with their powerful engine it was an unpleasant experience, it was very difficult to sit up on the edge of the boat even with the help of the crew. On the boat with one engine there was no shade and both boats had terrible smells coming from the fumes. When the guests complained about this, the owner replied “you are welcome to swim to the dive site if you don’t like it” followed by his annoying laugh. This was one of the first red flags for us. On another occasion we had to walk / swim to the boat as the tide was too low for the boat to come to the jetty, it was early in the morning and we had to walk over corals to reach it, suddenly Jochen started yelling at everyone “hurry up!!!”, shouting and screaming. Then when we get to the dive site, we all had to get ready and sit up on the edge of the boat, if we were not quick enough to get in place he would also scream at us and tell us to hurry even though the current is mild and we never had to do a negative entry. And to top it all off, on another occasion coming back from the dive, one of the poor boat crew was getting yelled at by Jochen again for not pulling the boat to the jetty fast enough. This was all very disturbing, making our holiday stressful and not a holiday anymore! perhaps if they had a new owner we would return, but not otherwise.

If you really feel you must visit Selayar, I would not recommend staying more than 1 week, the area is small with not much to do. The dive sites is basically one large wall divided into sections, all reachable within 1-5 minutes by boat, there are only walls and some slopes, they say there are 16 dive sites but I think it is even less. You would see most of the interesting things within 1 week, the 2nd week would be repetitive and don’t get me started on a third week… You can visit a small cave, this takes 1 hour and you can rent a boat to see the sunset and visit the village, otherwise you cannot go anywhere, there is no road access to anything.

Thanks for the report.
Who shouts at their guests??? That is just ridiculous!
So sad to hear about the continued dynamite bombing!!