Liberty Dive Resort and MSY Seahorse Raja Ampat review

[Carlos Diver]

How many days did it take you to get there, to get back, and what was your longest continuous flight?

How many dives total?

If you take into account airfare, the live-aboard bill with any port fees and such, customary tips, hotel stays if needed to arrive a day or so early...care to give us a ball park estimate for total trip cost?

While the quality of diving can be hard to put into hard, cold numbers, travel times, dive number, trip duration and cost are amenable to it. Some of us (me, anyway) may have an Indonesian trip on our hope-to-be-blessed-with bucket list (taking well over a week off can be hard to do...maybe more a celebrate-retirement kind of trip?), but the price tag is necessary to compare it to some other options.

Enjoyed your report. Should I be blessed to go, I imagine it'll be a hard call to make between Raja Ampat and Komodo. Probably no time real soon.

Richard.

36 Dives total. 5 in Tulamben and 31 on the LOB. My longest ``hop'' was the SFO to TPE, about 14 hours. The jump from NRT (Tokyo) to Chicago was just over 12. I left the West coast late friday night and arrived in Indonesia on Sunday afternoon. On the way back, I left Sorong on Sunday afternoon and arrived in Chicago on Monday morning. You spring a ``day ahead'' on the way over and jump ``back a day'' on the way home.

I used miles to pay for my long haul flights, so that cost was minimal. If you factored in the liveaboard 10 nights (they had $400 off when I booked), domestic flights in Indonesia, a hotel one night there from DPS to SOR, tips, food, park fees and extras on the LOB, I was right around $4700. The flghts, dives and extra hotel days and associated cost in Tulamben added about $500. I spend pretty liberally on vacation though, and went well over what I was ``budgeting'' lol.

One small hack I found while researching was searching through Air Matrix from the U.S. to Sorong and traveling Qatar Air. They seem to be the only airline that code shares domestic with Garuda and can book you all the way through to Sorong on one ticket. It was also cheaper then booking them separate if you flew into either CGK or DPS then onward to Sorong.

 

[Carlos Diver]

Thanks for nice and detail report.
Glad to hear that everything worked as expected and you enjoyed the trip.
I notice you dive drop-off twice while many people in this forum incl. myself does not really favour this location and prefer the muck diving sites around tulamben.

While I enjoyed the muck, I was asked where I wanted my last dive to be and I asked to go back to Drop Off. Call me a sucker for walls lol.