Frantic is a word synonymous to my packing and getting ready for each trip involving Air Asia. No doubt that it has enabled me to go many places that I hadn’t been before, one of them being Manado in North Sulawesi, a mountainous area and landing point to Lembeh Island where I was to spend eight blissful days diving in the Lembeh Straits. Known for the weirdest and most bizarre creatures, some say that if they were live-sized, they would make great monsters in alien movies!

Armed with the housed LX3, my bag had some serious arsenal. On a mission to track down the weediest of the weedies, hairiest of the hairies and deadliest of the spikeys, I was not going to leave Lembeh’s volcanic seabed unturned. And some European divers sure took my unspoken mission literally by kicking up a storm of black sand when they piled on the weights without sufficient buoyancy control in the water. My Flamboyant Cuttlefish was smogged by the powdery soot as soon as I began filming the undulating iridescence on the torso. My first sighting so I wasn’t going to be drawn into a midwater commotion.

The sea urchins here are bright & colourful but deadly and I wasn’t going to sit on one anymore. Examining each one for tenants became a preoccupation on every dive, only to have me surfacing to ask the Divemaster, Ramli for Udang, Ketam & Cacing!

A predominantly Christian population in Manado, I managed to climb over several mountains to get to the local church. Plagued by a persistent cough before I got there, I was severely drugged in between dives.

Almost every creature that we had wanted to see was shown to us by our beloved Ramli.

Without further wasting another minute, here are the bizarre creatures of Lembeh….

The comical Box Crab…..

The hideous but colourful version of the Devil Scorpionfish

Look at the grain of the sand, this Hairy Frogfish is only about 6cm…..