Spice Island Divers & Resort

Very good dive resort for mostly muck diving. Resort is very well run and organized. Staff was excellent! Dive guides excellent! Food was just ok- nothing tasted bad but nothing was very tasty either. Room was large and very clean. Property is beautiful with many tropical plants. I took one star away because I felt the price for a 3 night stay with 6 dives was too expensive, especially considering that the dive sites were all about 5 minutes away from resort. There is a large amount of trash in Ambon bay and all over the surrounding land, but the property itself it kept very clean. I found many unusual critters here and was able to get great video footage since there was not much current.

Spice Island Divers in Ambon, Indonesia offers some of the best muck diving anywhere. The diving is similar to Lembeh but without the crowds. In fact, on many sites, you will have it all to yourself. The resort has a large dive center and camera room, a jetty, comfortable boats and excellent dive guides. The rooms are a bit worn but everything works including AC and hot showers. The restaurant provides a set menu for lunches and dinner.

Excellent food and genuinely kind staff, guides, and boat captains. I stayed 8 nights in December and appreciated how flexible the team was about getting dives completed—if you’ve prepaid for a set number, they really try to make it happen. Rooms are spacious and photographer-friendly with strong A/C, the resort felt safe, and the diving offered lots of macro/photo opportunities with a good variety of life. Nitrox and larger tanks were easy, there’s a camera room available, boats worked well overall, and the airport proximity makes logistics easy. A few things held the experience back from feeling as polished as it could be. On rougher days the pier can be unusable, requiring a transfer to board elsewhere. Guide quality and English ability varied, and the resort rotates guides day-to-day; for muck diving I strongly prefer one consistent guide who learns your targets and what you’ve already seen. Surface intervals sometimes felt less guest-focused (e.g., smoking and phone videos with audio on). Dive site choices also felt a bit centralized, and when conditions weren’t ideal I had repeats early in the week and ended up diving the same sites multiple times, with a general bias toward nearby sites. Pre-arrival communication could set expectations more clearly (for example, some “bucket list” critters are extremely rare). The prepaid dive-package model is also less flexible than other resorts—unused dives may be forfeited—so it can feel like you’re forcing dives to avoid losing value. Mosquitos after sunset were significant, meal substitutions were limited, and even when the resort was very quiet there wasn’t an offered upgrade, which felt like a missed opportunity. One final note that isn’t the resort’s fault but is important context: Ambon has a very visible plastic/trash problem on land and in the water, which can be difficult to witness.