2011: Pulau Weh

I come back to Pulau Weh after a year to have a little more diving.  This relatively undiscovered island offers some great diving and is easily accessible from my budget airline hub, Kuala Lumpur.

This visit to Pulau Weh I did three dives over two days, again with Lumba Lumba.

The first at Arus Bale (Bastard Current) was good … the variety of marine life and the visibility reminded me why I had chosen to come back to Pulau Weh. Apart from the myriad of small colourful stuff we saw giant trevallys and lionfish.

The second at Rubiah Sea Garden was disappointing, for me, anyway. The clarity wasn’t as good and there wasn’t so much of the big stuff. Some others enjoyed it very much because they like the small stuff including manthis shrimp. The most interesting for me were the garden eels … from a distance you think that they’re cables sticking out of the seabed but they’re actually skinny eels half-buried in the sand.

The third at Batee Tokong was the best. The clarity was good and because we dived around the pinnacle, one gets both the wall and blue-water experience. There were barracudas, turtles, octopuses, moray eels, scorpionfish amongs many other varieties. Some people in the group saw some sharks but I wasn’t so lucky … but I did see them last year.

I’d love to come back to Weh and just do Batee Tokong! There are other good sites (including an underwater hotspring) but the dive masters reckon some are more suited to divers with advanced certification as one has to go deep to see the best.