Tasik Ria Dive Resort & Spa Manado
Accommodations:
I stayed at Tasik for 5 days and found my room very cozy and comfortable. I'll add, I spent very little time in my room outside of sleeping, but the pool side room I stayed in was well furnished and the AC worked very well. There was even Tv! The resort itself is spread out a bit, so when I wasn't in my room, I was down at their jetty hanging out.
Food:
The food was pretty good, it definitely wasn't bad but it also didn't stand out as above average. It was buffet style, with a mix of local and more standard dishes.
Staff:
Being a slightly larger resort, the interaction with the staff was a bit more limited. The manager of the resort was extremely welcoming and even made us sashimi and some other finger foods one of the nights while we hung out at the bar. There were a few other expats working at the resort too, who were all extremely friendly and really made the trip for me, as I was traveling alone.
Dive operation:
The dive operation isn't quite as photographer friendly as other resorts I've been too. I'm not sure if this is because the majority of their divers aren't photographers, but I assume that is the case. For my stay, I dove out of one of their bigger boats and I would guess there were around 20 divers plus another 6-8 staff. There was quite a bit of room, so it wasn't too crowded. From Tasik Ria, there is about an hour to an hour and a half ride to Bunaken, where depending on the day, we would do 2 or 3 dives.
On the days with 2 dives, we would come back toward the resort and do another dive on the main land side. Diving locally around the resort, there area mix of small walls and coral, and more mucky sites. The boat crew was very helpful and would help with your gear and change your tanks etc.
Marine life/diving:
Bunaken was pretty awesome. It's a bright contract to Lembeh, with great visibility, warmer temps (generally 86, with minimal thermoclines at around 60 ft). With the larger boat size, it was occasionally hard to frame shots with divers in every direction although at times, you get free dive models. Current was pretty minimal, and we saw lots of turtles and also a small cave with 3-4 sharks on one of the dives as well. I generally shot WA and had plenty of large sponges turtles to shoot. A few dives were with my macro lens, which was a bit more challenging but still plenty of things to shoot. If you look closely, you'll find small hermit crabs living in the hard corals which were pretty cool to find.
More locally, the diving was interesting as well. The muck sites are a little different from Lembeh, but you get some overlap in the marine life. Frog fish, ornate ghost pipefish and sea horses were fairly common. Personally, I would have been ok diving Bunaken for 5-6 dives and doing the rest at the macro sites. That wasn't really an option when I was there, but they were in talks of trying that.
Overall, as I am pretty serious about photography, my review is heavily skewed towards that. For non-photographers or more "for fun" photographers, I would definitely recommend Tasik Ria! Bunaken was fantastic, and the local sites are also very unique and interesting.
