After a week of fantastic diving from the pure white sand Alona Beach on Panglao Island in the Visayas, we decided to pack up our dive kit, jump on a ferry and see what nearby Dumaguete had to offer.

El Dorado Resort is just a short drive from the ferry port and the dive centre offered us a night dive as soon as we arrived. We leapt at the chance to see how much had changed in such a short distance - the water was still 28 degrees, but there the similarities stopped. The sand was dark, there were rocks and patches of seagrass plus the visibility was down a little. We looked at each other and smirked. MUCK diving - our favourite!

We spent a week diving around this area. We managed to visit well known Apo Island, an open water site with masses of good corals, turtles and schooling fish. But our hearts just weren't in it - we wanted to critter hunt so we spent dive after dive revisiting our favourite site, Dauin.

This small bay isn't for everybody. It's certainly not a pretty place, but full of the most fantastic critters. Seahorses, ornate ghost pipefish, frogfish, mantis shrimp, snake eels, flamboyant cuttlefish, pegasus seamoths and so on. We were also the first people to discover the incredible mimic octopus in the bay. He was being a snake eel when we first spotted him, then a mantis shrimp and then a banded sea snake.

This area is a photographers' dream, and combined with one of the other resorts in the region is more than enough to keep any diver happy.