Hi - sorry bit late but here's my view.
Went to Bunaken and Lembeh over Christmas 2008, having heard about these "magical" places every since I got certified in 2002 on the Perhentian Islands off West Malaysia. Stayed at Two Fish Divers at both sites, started with three days in Bunaken and then four in Lembeh. As someone already mentioned, Two Fish's Lembeh operations is total shambles -- it is basically a camp site with a few shacks dressed up as bungalows. And at USd 25 a night it is not even cheap. But their dive guide Opu makes up for it all - this guy is just amazing. He found us a baby frogfish (looks like a tiny nudibranch), the smallest squids and all the other stuff you hope to see at Lembeh: Ambon Scorpionfish, attacking Frogfishes, cuttlefish large medium and small sized, and one of our divers spotted the wonderpuss on an dawn dive when the rest of us was too tired. They do long dives -- I have one in my log of 94 minutes.
Lembeh is for the lovers of weird stuff. It is basically sandy slopes with very little coral, but heaps of the cool and weird. I enjoyed it, but my buddy was a bit offended by the junk floating in the water you need to get through when you go down -- including, euh, human waste. I just considered it a matter of timing. If you have some money to spend, I think the KKB resort is the way to do it -- we looked at it with healthy envy from our camp site.
It's rainy season in Bunaken around Xmas, so we stuck mostly to diving around Bunaken island itself. The reefs are very healthy, but I was surprised that there's not that much fish. Sure there's enough fish to look at -- but not the big schools of small cute fish you sometime see elswehere in Asia. Also the variety of fish was a bit dull -- we had dives (3x a day) when we saw nothing "special". Now I am a spoiled diver ever since having the opportunity to dive (and stay) on Sipadan, which has since become my benchmark, and I enjoyed the diving around Bunaken, but I was not blown away by it. My diving buddy, equally spoiled, felt the same, as did a very nice couple of dive instructors from the Maledives who were doing some diving on their own off-season. They skipped some dives in Bunaken 'cause they didn't see the point. By contrast, they didn't stop diving in Lembeh.
I'd say that if you are sure you like the muck diving in Lembeh (which is, in my mind, really cool), then go for that and add a few days in Bunaken because you are in the neighbourhood anyway. If you are not sure about Lembeh, then I think, there's more fun places to dive in Asia then Bunaken, with more flexibilty to see different places. Like someone said, if you stay on Bunaken -- you'll be confined to your resort. We stayed at Two Fish on Bunaken Island, which was okay.
For example the Visayas in the Philippines, where you can dive six or seven different spots in say 3 weeks, all equals of Bunaken but with their own twist. Pescador Island for the whitetip sharks and the vast amount of fishes, Apo Island for the beauty of the reefs and the mandarins and weird stuff close to Dumaguette, Alona Beach because it is paradise to stay (bars, other people, various restaurants, decent hotels) and Balicasag Island rivals Bunaken in every aspect, Sohod Bay because no one goes there and there's whalesharks in season, Malapascua where you can see the threshers and the sea snakes near Gato Island which is a brilliant day trip. All within 2/3 hours travel distance from each other, with Sogod Bay the exception taken the better part of 12 hours.
I went to Bali for surfing after the week in Sulawesi, and did not try the local diving so cannot comment there. Am off to scout Pulau Weh off Northern Sumatra over Easter
and will report back how it compares to Bunaken here afterwards.
Cheers, Arie
