PNG or Maldives land or liveaboard

[dmorus]

I am decideding between two options for next year. We will either go to Sulwasi and PNG land option, or Maldives in October on a live aboard, The thing is I never have done a livaboard due to the fact that I get motion sickness. I have 350 dives, and am tired of avoiding the boat. I think maybe I should just take the chance. Any opinions?

 

[Tassie_Rohan]

PNG has some fantastic diving and really healthy reefs. Most of the divers I have meet who have dived the Maldives have been underwhelmed by the diving - it was affected by a bleaching event a while back, but has apparently recovered.

My own observation, from a very small sample population, is that divers who do like the Maldives haven’t visited better SE Asian/Micronesian sites – but hopefully I can be proved wrong in this thread.

Liveaboards are the best way to dive: nothing but sleep, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, drink and sleep repeated for days on end. That’s of course if you can stomach it (you can still do PNG/Sulawasi by live aboard if you so desire...). Most are quite large and stable and there are drugs you can take that may help you- but for the quality of diving I personally would do PNG a few times before the Maldives.

Cheers,
Rohan.

 

[silent running]

I am decideding between two options for next year. We will either go to Sulwasi and PNG land option, or Maldives in October on a live aboard, The thing is I never have done a livaboard due to the fact that I get motion sickness. I have 350 dives, and am tired of avoiding the boat. I think maybe I should just take the chance. Any opinions?

Hello dmorus, I agree with what has been said by t.r. Maldives are very pretty above water, in that tropical atoll kind of way and I'm sure that there is good diving to be had. But the species diversity is much, much less than PNG, which due to all the deep water surrounding it, had almost no coral bleaching in the last 10 years. PNG also has one of the best liveaboards in the world-MV Golden Dawn, which has active stabilization and is by far the most seaworthy, comfortable boat I've ever been on. She can handle almost any conditions and is very well appointed, great food too. PNG has the best diving in the world IMHO-plenty of big stuff, high species diversity and a variety of marine environments. Indonesia is a very close second and great value for the money and has many good land based diving options. PNG, on the other hand, has less land based operations and lots of sparsely populated areas with fantastic diving that can only be done on liveboard.

I would go for land based in Indo, given the excellent value and that many of the Indo boats are not the most stable, and do the liveaboard in PNG.

From what I hear South Sulawesi is much less traveled and probably has better diving than the much more popular North, never been to either. I've been to Komodo twice, Ambon, Bali and Alor once and can recomend those 3 for great, land based diving at great value... -Andy

 

[dmorus]

thank you to both of you!

 

[diveborg]

Here's some info to help you deal with the motion sickness.

From Doc Vikingo: Tame the Technicolor Yodel: Managing Mal de Mer

 

[dmorus]

Thank you for the advise> Now, which liveaboard would you recommend?

 

[caymaniac]

Here's a thought, you could try StarDancer out of New Britain. We did have one night that we had some waves we did feel a bit queasey, otherwise it was quite flat, here is a few shots of the conditions we encountered:

underway it was so calm we could see the dolphins clearly riding on StarDancers bow

 

[dmorus]

Great pictures! What time of year was that?

 

[caymaniac]

Great pictures! What time of year was that?

Thanks
The time was summer, end of June. The 28th of June is our anniversary so it was really June/July. We spent one night in Cairns Australia then one night at Walindi then 7 days on StarDancer then 2more nights on Walindi then two days at Loloata near Port Moorseby, back for a night in Cairns. Then about half way back we stopped in Hawaii to visit a friend for four days before coming home.

Of course you could stay at Walindi for a week but the prices are a bit high, but the diving is the best I've ever had.
Our cottage at Walindi looked like this:

 

[dmorus]

That sounded like a great trip! Are you saying that walindi was as good as the live aoard?

Who did you use to book your vacation? We are coming from Ohio.
If you could only do one extra stop, which would you recommend?