Diving the Raja Empat Islands was one of the activities still be to be ticked off on my Indonesian bucket list so it was great to finally get there at the end of May. The RE’s are the islands at the western end of the Birds Head area of Weest Papua. They are famous for the tremendous diversity of marine life and, being pretty remote and sparsely populated, by Indonesian standards, they have not suffered from over fishing or bad fishing practices.
The flight into Sorong is only four hours but leaving Jakarta in the middle of the night, with a stop in Makassar or Ambon and a two hour time difference, it feels a lot longer. The only non-stop flight (we found out later!) is with Express Air so use that if you’re planning on going. The boat transfer to Papua Paradise was about one and a half hours so we were pretty knackered when we got there! No wonder it’s so under dived!
The accommodation was in stilt houses over the water. They were very eco – built in a traditional way (without nails) and with local products from Birie island – were well fitted out and we were very comfortable. I didn’t think much of the snorkelling at the front reef but it was only a short walk to the house reef behind the resort which was amazing. We spent a couple of happy hours snorkelling there then back for sundowners on the balcony, a great sunset with black-tip sharks circling under the hut.
So what about the diving? The first day we went to the channel behind Birie Island which was a bit of a macro dive. The reef was incredibly unspoilt and diverse and I saw at least 10 different types of nudibranch I’ve never seen before. The frills and gills and colours of these little sea slugs are totally psychedelic. We didn’t see much big stuff but the reef was swarming with fish. The second day we had a boat trip to Pulau Fam which is about 50km west of Birie. This is the island in all the RE photos and is quite beautiful karst limestone topography. Underwater the corals were superb, an amazing variety of hard and soft coral with not one spare inch of empty space. The highlight of the day was seeing a Wobbegong Shark. It was just lying on the reef, I nearly swam into it actually, and it was completely unfazed by our group of divers so we had plenty of time for a good look at it.
The third day we went across to Pulau Kris. We wanted to see some big stuff and we were not disappointed, the visibility was better too. We saw plenty of black-tips, Napoleon wrasse, turtles, bumphead parrot fish and schools of bat fish and trevally. Really awesome diving and snorkelling! The accommodation, food and diving facilities at Papua Paradise were tremendous and the staff were very special. The Raja Empats certainly lived up to our expectations. The only negative, if anything, was the visibility which made our underwater photos and videos a bit disappointing. But still . . . the memories are good!
Suzy and Neil