Trip Review / Ambon, Banda, Raja Ampat on Black Manta and at Kri Eco

This past November I was fortunate to spend three weeks diving in eastern Indonesia, at Ambon, Banda, and Raja Ampat (Misool in the South and Waigeo and Mansour in the North). As I’ve enjoyed and learned from many postings here on ScubaBoard for some time as a silent visitor, I thought I might share a trip review to encourage everyone to visit eastern Indonesia, to provide feedback on the dive operators I used, and to spark a bit of office daydreaming for the cubicle bound.

Synopsis

• What: Two weeks on the Black Manta liveaboard and one week at Papua Diving’s Kri Eco resort
• When: November 2011
• Who: Reasonably experienced diver typically given to criticism and understatement
• Why: Word of mouth, downtime at work, and concern that the reefs might not last another decade
• Review in a nutshell: Grand Canyon, High Sierras-level Awesome. A phenomenal mix of coral, macro, and huge schools of fish. Topside landscape (volcanoes, karsts, and rainforest) equally magnificent. Go!

Background to Trip
This fall, faced with a bit of unexpected down time at work I decided to take a last minute trip to Raja Ampat. Why Raja Ampat? You could call it word of mouth. On my first liveaboard a few years back, at Tubbataha, on the first dive of that trip (with maybe 20 dives in total under my belt) I rolled off the skiff and ended up just about on top of a white tip resting on the reef flat. We finned over to the sheer drop off when the sky went dark and the first of two mantas buzzed us from behind. Thirty minutes (new divers suck air fast at depth), two dozen sharks, two turtles, and a massive school of jacks later, I climbed back onto the skiff filled with amazement and delight. Cruise director Keri was kind enough to wait until later in the day to tell me that all that I had seen was nothing compared to the coral, macro, and fish diversity of Raja Ampat. A few hundred dives later that first dive at Tubbataha is still one of my three all time favorite, together with Palau’s German Channel on a full moon flood tide on my birthday, and, now, Sardines at Kri. Having been to Raja Ampat first hand, I can attest that Keri’s passion was not misplaced.

As I planned my trip on short notice, Jez at Premier Liveaboard Diving suggested the Black Manta, which was making a 10-day transition trip from the lesser visited Ambon and Banda to Misool in the southern part of Raja Ampat, ending in Sorong. I then booked one week directly with the land based Papua Diving’s Kri Eco resort in the north.

The Black Manta
The Black Manta is a custom built diving boat with room for around 20 passengers and three RIBs which was relocated last year from Thailand to Indonesia. This is the only steel hull boat I saw in three weeks in Eastern Indonesia. While perhaps a tad less romantic than the teak bugis schooner of fantasy, it compared favorably in size, appearance, and (based on other passengers’ comments) stability with the reality of the wooden liveaboards I did see. The DMs and crew were local (mostly from Manado); the French cruise director Cedric had previously spent a few years as cruise director on another boat in Raja Ampat before globe hopping on land (us cubicle dwellers dream of holiday – is it possible that those on permanent holiday dream of cubicles?). I was very happy with the Black Manta and would join another trip with them if time permits. The boat was well designed, rooms were clean and the common area and outside decks spacious. The dive deck ran like clockwork (I did 28 dives of a possible 33 dives on the trip, and had 28 full fills with right nitrox mix), and random equipment spares were always available when needed (Cedric, I still have your bungee!); Cedric’s 3-D dive briefings were accurate, informative and entertaining (“beware of current at the peanut butter jar”); and the DMs, Stanny in particular, were good guides with great critter knowledge and awareness of underwater ecology. Compared with other boats I considered it was good value too. There were about 18 divers on our trip, a mix of French, German/Swiss, Australian, and American. The seven French were in their 50s, lifelong divers with 1500+ dives apiece; the rest of us were mostly in our 30s and 40s, about half with cameras and most with 500+ dives. The only drawback I saw is that there is no special purpose enclosed camera room, though there was sufficient dry table space on the dive deck for everyone’s camera kit between dives.

Diving - Ambon
The trip was expected to start after dinner on Tuesday, so I took a red-eye flight from Jakarta to Ambon arriving at dawn, planning to spend the day exploring in Ambon before embarking. As it happens, the port is about 1 hour from downtown Ambon; as a number of divers had arrived the night before, Cedric decided to get everyone in the water a day early. Ambon Bay is long, shallow, and silty, a characteristic muck diving environment. While my previous mucky experience left me cold, the combination of greater experience and a good guide gave me a new perspective this trip, starting here with large stonefish, a bunch of different kinds of scorpionfish and frogfish, common sea horses, cuttlefish flamboyant and otherwise, and my first wonderpus octopus. Oh, did I mention the stunning purple rhinopias, white mouth half open, perched amidst green algae on the seabed? We ended one dive near a fishing dock where amidst all the muck batfish and juvenile trevally had gathered to eat discarded scraps, as dappled sunlight filtered through gaps in the wooden planking above. Shame I hadn’t organized the camera before I hopped in the water.

Banda
Tuesday night, we decided to sail from Ambon a day early to maximize our time among the corals and karsts of Misool. We spent Wednesday and Thursday around the Banda Islands. The waters here on the edge of the Banda Sea were deep, the currents in some places rippingly strong (goodbye, new split fins), and the marine life correspondingly diverse: turtles, black tip reef sharks, large schools of rainbow runners, snapper, and barracuda. The Banda Islands includes two main islands Banda Neira (the small island and capital) and Banda Besar, curling around the Gungam Api (sp) volcano. In the late 1980s, lava flows from the volcano smothered a reef offshore. The lava flow remains a sterile black scar, with large glasslike chunks three and four feet across down to the waterline. In contrast, below the waves, the combination of temperature, nutrients and current has enabled acropora coral in table, lettuce, and staghorn forms to carpet the entire slide (perhaps 300-500 meters wide) in just over two decades. For many, this was a highlight of the trip.

Wednesday evening, I skipped what was reportedly a pretty good muck dive at dusk and opted for beers on the harbor overlooking the volcano; the following morning we spent a few hours touring the town with its Dutch and English colonial architecture and a nutmeg plantation, the source of the island’s fame and fate. Banda was for many centuries the world’s sole supplier of nutmeg and an important source of cloves and cinnamon. Chinese, Javans, Malays, and others had long traded with locals for nutmeg and other spices; in the 17^th century, however, the Portuguese and Dutch sought absolute control of the nutmeg supply, leading to the depopulation of the original inhabitants of the island and their replacement with slaves from Sulawesi. Run, a nearby, uninhabited, waterless rock claimed by the English, was traded to the Dutch in partial exchange for title to Manhattan in 1667. The spices are good, but not good enough to justify that trade unless you see Wall Street as permanently underwater and plan on doing lot of diving. Today, the 20,000 people on the islands are 95% Muslim, with a few Christians (there is at least one active Christian church) and Chinese (who dominate trade).

Thursday midday, we set off from Banda to East Seram, stopping off at Batu Kapal, a set of three evenly spaced pinnacles set off from a sea mount. Here, we found large barrel sponges and huge gorgonians at the saddle point between pinnacles and sea mount, many schooling fish on the point, hunting napoleon wrasse, and neat species including a soapfish and a neon-yellow leafy scorpionfish tucked in among the soft coral. There were also a few interesting swimthroughs, if I remember correctly.

Koon / East Seram
Koon is the easternmost island in a chain off the eastern tip of Seram, exposed to strong currents and the plankton they carry. It would be an understatement to say that there are lots of fish there. I’m not sure whether it was really early in the morning, too much plankton in the water, or just all the fish swarming everywhere and blocking out the light, but on our first dive the visibility was terrible. Huge schools of trevally, snapper, batfish, and barracuda, plus all the usual fusiliers, dusky unicornfish, silversides (sardines?), etc. A nasty downcurrent too – I remember pulling myself back up the wall at one point in the dive. The visibility had cleared by lunchtime, but even with less plankton hence fewer fish in the water this was a good dive.

Misool
North and South Raja Ampat have different reputations: the North (particularly around Mansour and the Dampier Straight) having stronger currents, more fish, larger fish, and greater diversity; the South (namely Misool) having the better visibility and more attractive coral. Having spent a week diving in each, I would generally agree in terms of visibility, currents, and coral. The fish life in Misool for both macro and schooling fish was quite impressive, if not Sardines-level smack-you-in-the-face dense. After chatting with a few different folks, I’m not sure whether fish density up north is due to underwater topography and currents, or the longer period of time the area has been subject to environmental protections and fishing restrictions.

We spent four days diving around Misool. The main island of Misool (home to some 5,000 native Papuans spread across a dozen or so villages, a land-based resort, and an under-construction airstrip) is surrounded by karst islets, with jagged vertical walls ending in snaggletooth tops 100 meters high and a maze of saddles, pinnacles, and swimthroughs below the water. The combination of forms and currents gives rise to unique dive sites and significant diversity – here a hard coral edge to a corner with large schooling fish and pelagics, around the corner a quiet patch with sponges, tunicates, and nudibranchs galore, over there a wall covered in magnificent gorgonians and a million silversides of one type or another – and filled every dive with excitement and anticipation. The larger fish we encountered included schools of great barracuda (15-20 fish in each); great, silver, bluefin, and yellow/orange trevally; rainbow runners; midnight snappers; unicornfish; several kinds of sweetlips; batfish; big herds of four foot long, two foot high bumphead parrotfish chomping away at the coral; fusiliers; many albeit solitary napoleon wrasse (of different sizes and phases); dogtooth tuna; emperor bream; barramundi; and lots of different species of puffer.

Though Raja Ampat does not have a reputation for sharks we did see a number of juvenile white tip and black tip reef sharks (mostly in ones and twos); one adult grey reef shark; and two Raja Ampat Epaulette Sharks resting on ledges.

Raja Ampat does have a reputation for pygmy sea horses and ghost pipefish, and these I saw in abundance. I certainly wasn’t looking for them explicitly, but I managed to see and photograph 6 of the 14 ghost pipefish variations in Allen, Steene et. al. There were frequent h. bargibanti sightings (in red pink and purple color schemes), and a few h. denise. One of the other divers (with Stanny, of course) saw h. colemani near Batanta as well.

Nudibranchs…there were lots of them. There were lots of different kinds of them. Solo, mating, multiple couples mating simultaneously. I had a look through a field guide on the darned things and for a brief moment was proud to distinguish dorid from aeolid and dendronotid from arminid. The Spanish dancer was pretty easy: I had not seen one before, and initially thought it was a practical joke – imagine a two foot long pink and white plush throw pillow crawling along the reef. But just which of half a dozen kinds of identical looking other dorids is that in my photograph?

There’s also a bit of coral. Some two meter wide gorgonians for instance. Some look like half moons. Some look like trees. Some are red, some are blue, some are yellow, some are white. Some are inhabited by transparent gobies, commensal shrimp, and pygmy sea horses. Almost all are in flawless condition, thanks no doubt to the natural environment and the still-low number of divers in the water. Then there were the hard coral heads, including some near-perfect hemispheres three meters in diameter…

There was also a variety of leafy scorpionfish, octopus, cuttlefish, cowries, lobsters crabs and shrimp in all sizes and colors, including transparent. And an unexpected but inquisitive manta. And many green sea turtles, and a hawksbill or two. But we need to move on or we’ll never finish this trip report. Go visit yourself for goodness sake. I’d list a bunch of dive site names but names is all that they would be. Magic Mountain, Boo Corner, The Window, Nudibranch Rock, Kaleidoscope Rock, Fiabacet, Daron – pretty much everywhere we went something special was waiting for us. There were stories that some folks were staying on Misool for a month at a time. I haven’t stayed in any place for a full month for at least fifteen years, but Misool region definitely has enough to entertain any diver with the time and $ to spare.


(CONTINUED)

Farondi-Wagmag
After four days in Misool we headed north, stopping in Farondi-Wagmag. The karst at Wagmag takes a remarkable form, similar to a silhouette of Angkor Wat. The night we sat at anchor in a cove behind Wagmag, the full moon rose over the crest of the hill shedding its soft light on all around. Truly magical, especially if you think ahead and bring a date with you on your dive trip. I’ll try to remember that next time. Why should the nudibranchs have all the fun?

I’ll spare you the rundown on the aquatic life other than to say that swimming up (pulling ourselves up) the crevasse at Three Sisters against the downcurrent, through the whip corals, past the sheltering potato grouper and sweetlips and the titan triggerfish repeatedly picking and dropping a denuded lump of dead coral, then cresting the ridge at the mouth of the crevasse and seeing, across the current, the most brilliant hard and soft corals and fish life in all colors and forms imaginable was extraordinary. This area has a number of caverns and overhangs which we were able to explore, including one with a large air pocket connected to the outside, at the mouth of which a very large school of something (it was pretty dark, and they were spooked and swam right at us) took shelter from the currents. I’d expect that similar grottos exist throughout the Raja Ampat region.

Batanta
We ended our diving in a sheltered mucky bay on the south side of Batanta. All the usual muck life were there: small crabs hiding in crinoids, three ghost pipefish, mating cuttlefish (they didn’t seem to mind us watching), plus, of all things, a herd of 20-30 bumphead parrotfish in the shallows on our ascent.

That evening, we arrived in Sorong, home to the regional airport with flights to Makassar and Jakarta, and spent the night in the harbor, surrounded by a handful of commercial vessels and half a dozen wooden liveaboards at anchor. A few of these looked fairly posh; others looked, well, like small wooden boats. I expect if you do a bit of searching and ask around you will have a sense which is which, and which is right for you. Again, I was extremely pleased with the Black Manta and would do a trip on this boat, with this crew, again in a heartbeat.

Cape Kri / Kri Eco Resort
The next morning, I transferred to Papua Diving’s Kri Eco Resort by enclosed speedboat, a roughly two hour trip. The resort is located on the eastern tip of Cape Kri, the easternmost extension of much larger Mansour Island which delineates the northern edge of the Dampier Straight. During winter months Dampier is the site of a whale migration, but we were there a bit early in the season to see any whales.

Kri Eco was founded by Max Ammer, an early explorer and diving pioneer in the Raja Ampat region, in the mid 1990s. Max lives at the sister resort Sorido, also on Kri, over the ridge and around the point from Kri Eco. The whole setup is evidently a labor of love for Max: a dozen or so open-air traditional overwater bungalows at Kri Eco, a similar number of enclosed modern cottages on the upscale Sorido, common dining areas in the style of each resort. Max seems committed to working with and supporting the local community: he has put tremendous effort into cultivating reef consciousness and negotiating no take zones on reefs around Kri with local villagers, and almost all of his staff including DMs is Papuan, rather than from Manado, Bali, or other parts of Indonesia. He is also delightful company – I spent a wonderful afternoon listening to stories of his early explorations in the Raja Ampat area. In talking to Max and his team, you feel their pride in having helped make Raja Ampat known as an amazing dive destination; you also sense frustration at their limited ability to manage overuse or misuse over time – from big things, like mining in Waigeo, to small things, like intemperate and unsustainable diving practices caused by less-diligent operators and the routine but disfiguring wear and tear to reefs caused by increasing diver numbers. In this, Papua is perhaps a microcosm of global concerns around the future of reef ecosystems.

Kri Eco Resort itself is tasteful but simple – no AC, no windows, single bulbs in room – but the setting is impeccable, perched on the edge of a lagoon adjacent to stunning diving (Sardines is more or less the house reef). You don’t even need to leave your room to see the fish: my bungalow had a resident blacktip living in the lagoon below the gapped floorboards. Another bungalow had a resident barracuda. A third had a resident epaulette shark and a blue spotted stingray. Kri island itself is forested and filled with wild parrots and other birds with no qualms about waking you at sunrise in time for breakfast. The food was quite good (including fresh baked bread, and a number of traditional Papuan dishes), the dive and land teams friendly and helpful, and the sunsets from the jetty phenomenal. The dive deck was reasonably well organized, but spare equipment was not available, or needed to be borrowed from fellow divers. Process wise, the team was insistent on each diver inspecting his own tank each time and recording in a master log (which is the right protocol), but I was a bit surprised at the short fills and mislabeled mixes this occasionally turned up.

The guides’ styles were also different. DMs are local Papuans mostly trained by Max and his team, plus a few foreign instructors who double as resort GM types but spend most of their time in the water. Everyone was very safety and “reef” conscious: running essentially a full day of “check dives” for new guests to assess comfort levels, before moving to higher-current sites; providing thorough (2-D) briefings on dive sites, currents, and critical recommendations on the right and wrong way to dive the site (given strong and shifting currents, it is easy to be separated from the group and blown off a dive site, or worse off the reef altogether); and remaining vigilant and protective of the reefs against the unwanted intimacy of over-eager photographers. That said, they were a bit hands-off in terms of naturalist guiding.

Kri is also pretty remote. Two hours from Sorong by speedboat, if anything serious happens here you might as well be on a liveaboard. There is basic medical care available in a small village of maybe 50-100 families on a neighboring island. Feeling the onset of an ear infection, I was taken to see the local doctor. The doctor led me in to a small dark examination room, sat me in a chair, lit a candle, and with a concerned look in his face leaned toward my ear with the candle in his hand – then used the flickering light to illuminate the dispensary cabinet behind me as he searched for a suitable antibiotic. Anything beyond that, you may be on your own.

Diving at Kri
For me, the best diving at Kri was 3-5 minutes east of the resort by boat, where the waters from the 200 m deep Dampier Straight split off on either side of Mansour. Here, at sites like Cape Kri, Mike’s Point, Sleeping Barracuda, and Sardines, we saw a profusion of great barracuda, trevally, rainbow runners, fusiliers, snapper, sweetlips, batfish, and bumphead parrotfish in large schools; hawksbill and green turtles; napoleon wrasse; a variety of puffers; and the occasional eagle ray and blue spotted stingray. Perhaps due to effective fishing restrictions, we also saw a number of adult blacktip, whitetip, and grey reef sharks, with two or three seen on every dive; wobbegong sharks lying atop or under nearly every spreading acropora coral; and of course the endemic Raja epaulette shark.

The epitome of this diving was the Sardines dive site: a point with offsetting currents depending on the tide. If you manage to stay in the V-shaped sweet spot, the currents cancel each other out and you can hover effortlessly amidst massive swirling schools. Move or get pushed just a bit off center, and you will be blown away from the dive site or right of the reef. We did multiple dives at this site; the fish density was so high, and movement so explosively dynamic that I had to put my camera away, as there was no way for a mechanical lens, rather than a spiritual mind, to capture the intensity of life and of the experience.

Do note that not just Sardines but many other dive sites here have strong and shifting currents. In one case, three of us with a DM dropped just a few yards too far off the reef and ended up finning futilely into ripping current on the bottom at 30+ m before agreeing to call it a day. The DMs were good at grouping divers by ability level and selecting sites that were appropriate for each group; however, I might not recommend this area for novice divers.

When currents were too wild, or as dusk approached, fifteen minutes ride in the other direction took us to sites like Friwenbonda, a protected cove with neat overhangs and great coral and macro. Here, we found black commensal shrimp on red sea cushions and yellow crinoids; tiny crabs; peacock shrimp on anemone; gobi on large sea fans; giant clams, hermit crabs, eels of all description; the ubiquitous wobbegong shark; and nudibranchs of course.

And when we’d had enough macro, we visited a manta cleaning station where four manta (two black, two white) were being cleaned in a current so strong it was all we could do to take a hold on the sandy bottom, and squint to see the mantas a few meters away amidst the ricocheting sand in the water. How strong was the current? As I reluctantly released from behind a small coral outcropping to end the dive, one of the white mantas was blown sideways from left to right an arm’s length above me – and then, as I finned to keep abreast with the manta now on my right through the current into the blue, a half dozen juvenile golden trevally still with black stripes appeared beside it, leading it along. We, the manta and I, hung like this for about three minutes, until low on air, tired from finning, and giddy with excitement I moved to begin my safety stop.

We ended our trip with a dive at The Passage, a narrow, shallow, long channel separating the islands of Waigeo and Gam. Above water, the karst formations are reminiscent of the Rock Islands in Palau, with overhanging mangroves in eddies and cul-de-sacs; under water, there are numerous branching passages, caverns, caves, and hollow islands, and long walls covered with tunicates. Some folks really enjoyed this dive; I found it somewhat claustrophobic and anticlimactic.

On our last day, we took a pre-dawn hike into the forest on Gam to see the Red Bird of Paradise. The forest filled with birdsong was interesting and the old growth hardwoods soaring to the sky were impressive; however, squinting at four small birds in the canopy maybe 100 meters above my head, I felt grateful that diving allows a more up close and personal interaction with the animal world.

The local Papuan community
Between chats with the Papuan staff at Kri and the folks in villages we visited on Mansour and Gam, I felt I gained a bit of exposure to the living conditions and concerns of the local Papuans and tensions between local and national development interests. While many were supportive of Jakarta investment in schools and clinics, there was concern about weakening of traditional culture; the domination of commerce by non-locals (from the Sulawesi shopkeeper in the village, to military trading interests across the region, to the foreign mine operator on Wageo); and the extraction of the region’s mineral wealth by Javan and foreign interests at permanent cost to the local fishing and natural environment. However, as this is ScubaBoard and not MiningBoard or Political-economyBoard I will leave you the reader to consider this topic as it applies to the minority group/region/country of your choice separately.

Parting Thoughts
On many levels, this was a rewarding holiday, meeting nice people, visiting great dive sites, seeing cool stuff. At root though, the trip was a chance to experience Nature before it is gone.

Raja Ampat supporters talk up the success of government and NGOs in establishing a protected environment around the reefs: the fish life is abundant, the corals are in excellent condition, and the abundance of sharks in the area (adults in the north, juveniles in the more recently protected south) is evidence of the ability of species to rejuvenate given appropriate conservation efforts. There is also ongoing scientific research in Raja Ampat, which Papua Divers supports, suggesting resilience of local corals to wide temperature variation, which may prove helpful in light of global rising sea temperatures.

That said, one would need to be willfully naive to ignore the medium and long term threats to the Raja Ampat underwater environment. The legacy of man’s impact on the natural environment is not pretty, whether we consider as examples four centuries of Western settlement and resource extraction in North America; more recent deforestation and destructive mining in Sumatra and Kalimantan; or the impact of global overfishing directly on fish stocks, and warming seas and acidification on the base level of the ocean ecosystem.

I happened to bring on this trip some of John Muir’s writings on the high Sierras, which helped catalyze the American environmental movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Muir saw his precious Sierras as a natural temple to a true religion, under threat from destruction by mining, husbandry, and tourism such that “only the sky will be left safe, though hid from view by dust and smoke, incense of a bad sacrifice.” He thus spent many years travelling alone through the mountains, that the memories might “lighten and brighten my afterlife in the gloom and hunger of civilization’s defrauding duties.”

A long sojourn in Wilderness is not feasible for most of us, facing competing demands of work and family. Yet even short trips to Nature can awaken in us a love for the natural world, sensitize us to the beauty around us each day, and frame immortal memories to inspire us in darker times to come. For Muir’s reflection on Yosemite in full spring flood is perhaps equally applicable to us awed amidst the explosion of life at Sardines, German Channel, and Tubbataha: “visions like these do not remain with us as mere maps and pictures – flat shadows cast upon our minds…[but] saturate every fibre of the body and soul, dwelling in us and with us, like holy spirits, through all of our after-deaths and after-lives.”

So please, get out of your cubicle from time to time, travel to Nature, and visit to Raja Ampat if you possibly can.


PS – Please PM me if you’d like a link to a slideshow.

Great trip report! Only been to Sorido-Papua area(5 times) but not to the other areas you have discussed really want to go to Misool....I'll save your report....Thanks!

Way cool report, but WHERE ARE THE PICTURES???

Wow! Quite a trip, wonderful dives and all. Thanks for the write up. I'm sure it will be helpful to many for a long time.

Fantastic report!!!!!!!! Thank you!

Wow, great and very detail report - love your writting style.
will read again tonight ..
Thank you

Fantastic report!! I knew I should have stayed on board after doing the Alor > Ambon crossing. I thought of hiding in the compressor room but Vincent was on the same flight I was supposed to be on and he would have noticed.

SH Diver:

So please, get out of your cubicle from time to time, travel to Nature, and visit to Raja Ampat if you possibly can.

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SH Diver, wonderful review and perspective! Thanks for sharing.