Eighteen turtles on one dive. Not a good week, not a lucky season. One dive, counted because after the tenth it stopped feeling believable.
Scored below
The walls are the reason to come. They drop steeply from a shallow reef top, hard coral cover is genuinely healthy after thirty-five years of protection, and green turtles are essentially guaranteed on every dive. Not likely. Guaranteed. That is a rare enough sentence that it is worth writing plainly.
Here is the structural thing nobody tells you, and it decides your week. Unlike Wakatobi, Misool or Raja Ampat, the small subjects are not inside the marine park. The park is wall and reef. For those you take a different boat, twenty-five minutes across to the mainland coast, where the darker bottom does work a wall never will.
So the boat you get on in the morning decides what kind of photographer you are that day. Park or mainland, wide or macro. Most people work that out on day three, having brought the wrong port. Decide the night before and tell the guides, because they will happily build the week around it.
Siladen itself is white sand, a volcanic island opposite and Bunaken beyond it. Ana and Miguel built the way it runs after moving across from Lembeh in 2014, and the standard has held.
Bunaken became one of Indonesia's first national marine parks in 1991 and the head start shows: steep walls, hard coral in condition, and green turtles in numbers that make a sighting stop being an event. Siladen Resort sits on its own white sand island, twenty minutes by boat from the Bunaken sites.
Scored on the same rubric as every other place here, and published whether or not the number flatters. Seven of the seventeen came in under seventy; the lowest is forty-five.
The dot is Bunaken; the pale band is where the other sixteen places on this site fall on that axis. How the scoring works
Comfortable for most certified divers, with one caveat. The park walls can carry real current on an exchanging tide, and they drop away below anything you should be diving. Stay shallow, watch your depth on the wall, and it is an easy week.
April to October is when Bunaken is at its best. Tap any month for what the water is actually doing.
Visibility, sea state, what is in the water and how much of it you can count on. The season turns at April and again after October.
Manado is the gateway. Bunaken, Lembeh and Bangka are all reachable from it, which makes a three-area trip straightforward.
Twelve of the fifty-six photographs from Bunaken, the prints among them marked.
Any frame on this page can be licensed for editorial use. Licensing terms.
From the lens recorded in each frame. The settings are what was used here, not a recommendation. Lighting on the print frames: Dual Retra Strobes.
For underwater photographers, Bunaken offers remarkable variety. Wide-angle photographers will find sweeping reef vistas, dramatic wall compositions and charismatic turtles, while those willing to slow down can discover ornate ghost pipefish, pygmy seahorses, nudibranchs and an impressive collection of cryptic macro life tucked into the reef.
Every frame here was made in Bunaken. Prices in US dollars. Printed on Canson Platine and shipped from British Columbia.
Six I dived more than once and would plan a week around, named as the resort names them.
The definitive wall
Sheer, deeply pocketed and enormous. This is the vista most divers picture when somebody says North Sulawesi, and it holds up.
Topography and schooling fish
More structural relief than most of the park: ledges and overhangs that the fish use to break the current. Better for composition than a flat wall face.
A slope, for a change
Departs from the wall format entirely. Giant tridacna clams and cleaning stations on a gentle profile, which makes it the easiest wide-angle dive in the park.
Hard coral at scale
Some of the tightest, healthiest hard coral fields inside the park boundary. Thirty-five years of protection, visible in one dive.
Quiet and immediate
Straight off the island. Useful for the dive you take on your own schedule rather than the boat's.
Twenty-five minutes, and a different trip
The macro is not in the park. Cross to the mainland coast for dark sand, nudibranchs and pipefish against backgrounds a wall can never give you. Choose this boat the night before, not on the jetty.
There is one place to stay here, so the reef score and the operator score arrive together. It is still worth separating them. The five trip axes below belong to the operation alone, and the final rating is the baseline score of the reef plus that operator's score.
White sand, a volcano across the water, and a dive operation with a lineage: Ana and Miguel came here from Lembeh Resort in 2014 and spent a decade building how it runs. The à la carte kitchen and the guiding standard both trace back through that. The property is now the older of the group's two, and renovation is coming. If you want the newest building in North Sulawesi run to the same standard, that is Coral Eye at Bangka. If you want the wall, the turtles and the park on your doorstep, it is here. Ask them to split your week between park boats and mainland muck boats when you book, not when you arrive.
One things nobody tells you. They've added themed food nights — a Japanese night, an Italian night, alongside the usual Indonesian dishes. It's not something they advertise, but it's one of the best things about staying there.
Asked in the order they actually matter, answered with specifics.
This is the question that decides your week. The marine park is wall, hard coral and turtles. The macro sites are twenty-five minutes across on the mainland coast, where the darker bottom gives you the backgrounds a wall never will.
Tell the dive team what you want the night before and they will build the day around it.
Siladen Resort sits on its own small island, about twenty minutes by boat from the Bunaken park sites and twenty-five from the mainland muck.
Effectively, yes. Green turtles are on almost every dive in the park. I counted eighteen on one.
Fly to Manado, then about an hour by boat. Straightforward by Indonesian standards.
Yes, and you should. Murex sell the three-centre version as Passport to Paradise.
The right-hand column is the useful one. Bunaken asks something specific of you, and going for the wrong reason is an expensive way to find that out.
There is no trip here yet. Where they go next is decided by who puts their hand up, so this counts as a vote for Bunaken — and it also gets you each new guide as it is finished. Four or five emails a year.
Four emails a year, unsubscribe in one click, and the address goes nowhere else.
