Three Islands, Three Worlds: Diving the Murex Resorts in Indonesia
November is perhaps one of the best months to head to the shores of Indonesia. The rainy season hasn't yet hit full stride, the water is clear, the currents are gentle, and — most importantly — the dive sites aren't crowded with the kind of traffic that turns any dive into an underwater rush hour. It was in November 2025 that we dreamed up an unusual journey: not to settle in at a single resort, but to drift along a chain of three small resorts in northern Sulawesi, all united under one banner — Murex. Three little islands, three different underwater worlds, and between them — not a single overland transfer. Just the sea.
The resorts are owned by Germans, and you feel it from the very first minute. Not in any cold, calculating way — rather in that particular precision that turns every small detail into something carefully considered. The dive schedule is timed to the minute, breakfast is ready exactly when you climb out of the water, and the towel on your sun lounger is always fresh. But let's take things in order.
Our first stop was Murex Lembeh. We flew in, made our way to the resort, and immediately found ourselves in another world — a small, immaculate, intimate hotel where everything is arranged as though they had been expecting you that very day. The level of service was such that, honestly, I wouldn't hesitate to hang a Michelin star or two on the front door. The food deserves a chapter of its own: the freshest seafood, delicate Asian flavours, and presentation so thoughtful you never wanted to rush. Every dinner turned into a small gastronomic occasion.
But that wasn't the only surprise. On the resort grounds we discovered a rental pavilion for underwater photographers — a genuine Aladdin's cave for anyone who has ever held a camera in an underwater housing. You could hire almost any top-end gear: compact macro cameras, full-frame DSLRs in housings, strobes, video lights, snoot attachments for pinpoint illumination — everything you need to hunt the tiny inhabitants of the seabed. Need a flash? Take one. Want to try a new lens? Go ahead. For those who had arrived without their own equipment, or simply wanted to try something new, this pavilion opened up possibilities I had never seen at any other resort.
And there was plenty to hunt for.
Lembeh is a place like no other. There are no brilliant coral gardens here, no turquoise walls dropping into the abyss. What there is — is sand. A dark volcanic bottom strewn with debris, old shells, and tufts of algae. At first glance it looks like a wasteland. But sink down, lie on that sand, hold still — and the world explodes into detail. A tiny mimic octopus flows from one form to another, impersonating a flatfish, then a sea snake. A hairy orangutan crab sits on a branch of soft coral, swaying gently with the current. A clownfish peers into your mask from its anemone with the expression of an affronted landlord. Nudibranchs — tiny, the size of a pinky fingernail — shimmer with colours so vivid they seem hand-painted. Pygmy seahorses hide on sea fans, and finding them requires a jeweller's patience. Right beside them, on the neighbouring square metre of seabed, some improbable mantis shrimp stares at you through compound eyes that look like hard candies.
You dive in and forget all about time. You dart from one creature to the next, shooting, staring, not believing your eyes. Forty minutes pass like five. The guide holds up the slate: time to surface. But you don't want to. You haven't even reached the corner where, rumour has it, a blue-ringed octopus is hiding.
Every evening a ritual formed of its own accord. After dinner we would gather together, spread laptops and tablets across the table, and everyone would share their day's trophies — photos and video. Someone had caught a rare nudibranch in frame. Someone had filmed a remarkable hunting moment by a frogfish. Then the real fun began: we would open AI chat apps, upload the photos, and try to identify exactly what we had seen. Because Lembeh is a place where even an experienced diver with a thousand dives under their belt regularly encounters something completely unknown. These evening review sessions turned into genuine scientific seminars — just with a glass of wine and tropical stars overhead.
In terms of dive organisation, food, and attention to detail, Lembeh was the gold standard. A benchmark I will remember and measure everything else against from now on.
And then came the thing that elevated this journey from simply excellent to truly unique.
On the fourth day the announcement came: get ready to move on. But not the usual transfer with luggage, taxis, and bustle. We were put on a dive boat and set off for a dive. A perfectly ordinary working dive — we went down, did our time underwater. When we surfaced, we found ourselves at the jetty of a different resort. While we were underwater, our bags had magically migrated from one hotel to the next. We dived at Lembeh and surfaced at Bangka. A transfer by dive. You couldn't devise anything more elegant.
Murex Bangka greeted us with a different underwater world. Here, alongside the now-familiar sandy bottom and its macro inhabitants, sheer walls appeared — vertical coral drop-offs plunging into the depths. A different landscape, different sensations, different creatures. For three days we dived here, revelling in the contrast: mornings doing macro on the sand, afternoons drifting along the walls where moray eels peered from crevices and shoals of barracuda swept past in the blue water above.
The resort itself was slightly more modest than Lembeh — a solid four out of five for food and accommodation, which was only to be expected after the Michelin-level benchmark of the first hotel. The evening entertainment, on the other hand, was a genuine surprise. Tables were set out under the open sky, strings of warm bulbs were lit, and in that soft glow a real show unfolded. The bartender turned into a conjurer: juggling bottles, putting on a fire show, spinning shakers as if the laws of physics simply didn't apply to him. The resort organised live music nights, and those evenings at Bangka remain in the memory as something especially warm — a tropical night, stars, music, and the feeling that you have stumbled into a place where time slows down.
We moved on from Bangka in exactly the same way — through a dive. We boarded the boat, went under, and the bags leapfrogged to the next hotel without any involvement on our part. The third and final point of the itinerary was Murex Manado.
And it was here that the whole journey reached its climax.
Manado is all about walls. Long, majestic, coral-covered vertical drop-offs, along which you glide in weightlessness as if skimming the hull of a colossal ship. And on those walls — turtles. Lots of turtles. An incredible number of turtles. In a single dive we counted around twenty — green turtles, hawksbills, large and small, calm and unhurried. They rested on ledges, grazed on sponges, drifted alongside us, paying no attention whatsoever to the bubbles from our regulators. It reminded me of the legendary Sipadan in Malaysia — the same wall, the same turtles, the same feeling of an underwater paradise. Only without the crowds.
And that, perhaps, was the most astonishing part. Every single one of our dives — at Lembeh, at Bangka, and here at Manado — took place in complete solitude. Not one other group nearby. Not a single stray diver in the frame. Just us, the fish, and the endless blue. Whether this was coincidence or deliberate logistics, I cannot say for certain — but I suspect the latter. The boats from the three resorts were staggered so skilfully in time and route that there were simply no crossings. For anyone who knows what it means to hang on a wall in the company of twenty turtles in absolute silence, without a single foreign bubble nearby — for those people, that is priceless.
When I look back on this journey as a whole, it settles into one big, warm feeling. Three resorts, three different underwater worlds, and between them — seamless transitions through the water. Lembeh with its sandy kingdom of macro creatures and those evening identification sessions. Bangka with sheer walls by day and fire shows by night. Manado with its parade of turtles in total seclusion. And over it all — German precision of organisation, Indonesian warmth of hospitality, and a November sea that was calm and gentle.
I would particularly recommend this journey to anyone passionate about underwater photography and videography. Lembeh is one of the world's capitals of macro diving, and the ability to try professional equipment right on site makes it an ideal playground for developing new skills. But even if you don't have a camera — simply lying on the sandy bottom of Lembeh and watching tiny creatures go about their invisible lives is reason enough to understand: this was worth flying to the other side of the world for.
