Mari Crucero de buceo, Indonesia

Amazing! Diving + Crew + Fellow Divers + Food = Travel Magic!

A truly great experience, diving with the amazing crew and guests on the Mari!! The boat is older and a traditional wooden build. It has character, that is to say it is not a gleaming white fiberglass and stainless steel mass. The cabins are small, but larger than other liveaboards we have done, and include a private bathroom. The cabins are cleaned each day during your first dive, which is a very welcome touch. Mari has everything you need to enjoy your diving trip. And diving is what you will do, starting as early as 6 am or 7am when the Mari's wonderful Dive Director, Ungke, gives the first briefing, and finishing up after dark when you opt to do a night dive. The routine for dive liveaboards (for any 1st timers) is dive, eat, rest, dive, eat, rest…. rinse and repeat. But don’t worry about your gear, the crew will take care of that. Our dive guide was Irvin and he was great - friendly, safe and fun! We appreciated that he reminded everyone to check, check, double check your gear before the dive launches left the Mari. The launches are simple outboard boats that comfortably fit 4-6 divers. There were 13 (of 14 max capacity) guests on our trip and 2 of them were snorkeling only. So with 3 dive boat runs (one boat makes 2 trips to the sites) we had a maximum of 4 divers per dive group - yippee! The diving itself was as you would expect for Raja Ampat - Amazing! That said the visibility on our days to the south, off the east coast of Misool, was not that good at 5-10 meters. But even with limited viz there was an amazing amount and variety of coral and fish. Above water the scenery in that area is fantastic with picture postcard “gum drop” islets. The calm seas made it easy to spot the dolphins as they cruised by. We hiked up to an observation deck for a once in a lifetime view of Heart Lagoon you do not want to miss. We were on the trip for both Christmas and New Years and were treated to a Christmas afternoon visit by a whale and calf, magical. It was 1 of several whale sightings on our 12-day trip. Dives up north had much better visibility, at about 20-30 meters. But your experience may be different, diving is always an adventure. Wobbegong sharks, walking sharks, manta rays, reef sharks, turtles, eels, sea snakes, cuttlefish, squid, crocodile fish, nudibranch, pygmy seahorses (so many pygmy seahorses), schools of everything, the list goes on and on. As retired dive instructors we were blown away on a daily basis by the insane variety and quantity of marine life and the mind-blowing assortment of corals, sponges, anemones... WOW!! The kitchen staff of the Mari is fantastic, the food we had for every meal was abundant and well-prepared and delicious. And there were so many meals! We started each day with a quick breakfast before the first dive. After the first dive, there was a full breakfast (that's right Hobbit fans there is a “second breakfast”). Lunch follows the 2nd dive of the day, and snacks follow after the 3rd. Dinner follows the night dive, when it is time to take a nap before 1st breakfast and do it all again. So much food!! But quantity aside, the chef was wonderful. We were expecting a steady diet of fried rice and fried noodles, like we have experienced in other parts of Indonesia, but that was far from our Mari experience. The chef spent years working in high-end hotels and other liveaboards, and his experience showed in the variety and quality of every recipe! The variety of meats, fresh fruit and veg, and accompaniments of rice, potato, pasta and bread was insane, given that we were on a boat in the middle of Raja Ampat. And the kitchen took special requests too, like the from-scratch sambal they made every day for our group, and the ginger and palm sugar tea that sometimes appeared for snack time. No first class restaurant would be complete without the front- of-house staff, in this case Ever, who had his hands full with our diverse group. But he took great care of us all, was charming and on to

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Diving. Crew and Food. Fellow Passengeres.

The good the bad and the ugly

Food was great, the bad was the bug issue and the ugly was the safety. Not one person on the boat check our nitrox cards and i know for sure there were people diving who weren’t certified to dive on nitrox. Big problem was we were told everyone has tanks at 31% (should have known right there that’s not right) one person in our group and 5 other people got bad air, some tanks had to get filled from another boat, we were told the compressor wasn’t working ….also turned out i held 3 tanks until they could be analyzed myself and to come find out after throwing a fit that also two tanks had regular on top of nitrox, to give a 26% mixture. O2 was given 30 after the dive when they could locate the o2 tank…and had to pass on the next dive. Extremely dangerous. They apologized to me but i can tell you what somebody is going to get seriously hurt. This was the first time nobody checked our certification. Also because of the lack of maintenance we lost 2 days of diving in Misool. After the tank issue the staff started analyzing tanks with 1 person from each group.

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Our dive guide, food for sure, itinerary

Fantastic

The crew was extremely welcoming and really goes out of their way to make your trip the best experience. The dive sites and guide knowledge was top class, the chef was phenomenal and the underwater life was fantastic. Couldn’t have been more pleased with The Mari.

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The amazing boat crew, the device guides and the dives sites,

Absolutely Great

Of course the diving was the highlight. We saw lots of Wobbegon and reef sharks and spent 2 dives at the manta cleaning station with friendly mantas. We swam with swirling schools of a thousand plus fish. I highly recommend the Mari!

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The staff took care of our every need. We didn’t lift or carry any tanks. The Tender Boats were set up with all our gear and we were helped putting it on and off. The food was great and more than we could eat. The Indonesian boat was homey and comfortable.

A low cost alternative which is better for experienced divers rather than beginners

Night dives

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Food, Friendliness, Sunrises

The Mari is a beautiful ship with skilled crew, fabulous dive masters, and wonderful food.

Each consecutive dive seemed to push the limits of the words FABULOUS, AMAZING, AND MAGNIFICENT. The huge diversity and vast amount of flora and fauna seen on this trip demonstrates the other-worldliness of reef life in Raja Amput. The diving is some of the best in the world and to have warm water, pleasant living conditions, and great food seemed like the tasty icing on a scrumptious cake.

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Our dive masters highlighted the stunning coral gardens, searched and found the tiniest of micro organisms like pygmy seahorses and nudibranchs, and set us up to see the oceanic and reef mantas, woebegone sharks, and scads of reef sharks. The crew coordinated our dives so we never had our experiences negatively impacted by other divers. Our food and lodging was top shelf.