My Private Garden

I was lucky enough to meet Christiane Waldrich on the last couple of days I spent at Scuba Seraya in December 2005 and enjoyed a very pleasant Xmas Eve chatting with her about what she calls her “private garden”.

Originally from Coburg in Germany, Christiane at that time was dividing her year roughly in half and spending six months at her home in Munich with the other six in Bali, based in Tulamben. She told me how she first came to Tulamben six years ago after a friend showed her photos of the marine life to be seen there.

In 2001 she met Patrick Schwartz, the owner of Scuba Seraya, who was looking at setting up the resort and Christiane was his first investor.

Her equity gives her a place to base herself whilst in Bali - right in front of the house reef, Seraya Secrets, the place she lovingly refers to as her private garden.

Christiane described how happy she was the day she realized the full potential of the house reef back in November 2003.

She & Patrick had been conducting numerous exploratory dives to identify alternative sites both to the west and east of Scuba Seraya, but had never really seriously explored the area right in front of the resort because Patrick's few dives there had not been productive.....

A self declared nudibranch fanatic - she calls them the butterflies of the reef - it seemed she had found her own personal nirvana because over the next three months she identified 120 different species. Since then she has logged another 200+ dives on the site and her personal total of identified species is now upto 190!

As somebody who is extremely challenged when it comes to finding anything smaller than a whale shark, I was most interested to understand how she found so many different critters and Christiane described how her background in antique & contemporary glass art has helped her. At work she has basically trained herself to filter out anything other than glass sculptures, jewelry & necklaces when she attends major art & antique fairs and flea markets. Christiane has adopted this basic technique to Seraya Secrets by tuning into the habitats and has learned to spot the subtle differences that indicate the presence of something unusual.

When I was back at Seraya in December 2007 I was quite surprised to see what appeared to be a number of luxury villas being built next door to Seraya Secrets and when I asked one of the dive guides he told me that they belonged to Christiane!

So I contacted Christiane and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the buildings were in fact part of Villa Markisa, a dive resort she has established with Pedro Wettstein who was formerly the Cruise Director on the Pindito - one of the earliest and best known liveaboards operating in Indonesia.

The resort is now finished and in operation it's web site is available on this link, or you can download the brochure Christiane sent me here.

I have not stayed at the resort or dived with them yet, but with Christiane's passion for Tulamben and Pedro's experience in Indonesia I doubt that you could go wrong!

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