Raja Ampat refers to an archipelago with more than 1500 islands with the four main islands of Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool and is part of the Coral Triangle making it one of the richest bio diversity of the world.Because his strategic location on the western Pacific Ocean, currents troughflows arriving to the archipelago from very deep water to shallow water, making stratospheric numbers more that 500 different species of corals in that area, ten times more than the Caribbean.
Raja Ampat translates from the Indonesian language to Four Kings.
Misool, the most southern island, has an abundance of marine life, a variety of underwater seamounts, smaller pinnacles, coral walls and coral gardens, covered in giant sea fans, soft corals in all colours, massive table corals and countless fish. This is a great place to find the elusive epaulette shark, or walking shark. It is a nocturnal shark that sneaks up on its pray by ‘walking’ closer and closer to it. It is largely a marine park set up by Misool Eco Resort in cooperation with all the local villages, not to fish inside this area. It gets patrolled by the park rangers.
Batanta has fantastic muck dive sites with the most colourful nudibranchs you can imagine, alien looking critters and beautiful coral bummies.
The Dampier Strait, between Waigeo and Batanta, beautiful coral gardens, underwater pinnacles or seamounts, sandy bottom with coral heads and cleaning stations. Here we can find even more nutrients bringing in bigger predators like giant trevallies, yellow fin tuna, rainbow runners and even some sharks like blacktip, grey reef, white tip sharks. It is also one of the few places in the world where we can find two species of Manta rays on the same dive sites.
Night dives are a joy in Northern Raja Ampat.
We offer you the opportunity to visit local villages or there hike up to one of the lookout points.
