Raja Ampat Beach
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The territory within the islands of the Four Kings is enormous, covering 9.8 million acres of land and sea, home to 540 types of corals, more than 1,000 types of coral fish and 700 types of mollusks. This makes it the most diverse living library for world's coral reef and underwater biota. According to a report developed by The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, around 75 percent of the world's species live here. When divers first arrive here their excitement is palpable. It's common to hear people praise God as they take in the remarkable scenery. Others prefer to remain in silence taking in the overwhelming sight of so many islands with crystal clear water that softly brushes over the white sandy beaches.
Get Around
Commonly, divers will join a tour and live in a diving resort during their stay in the Raja Ampat Islands. To access diving spots, please contact and use the professional diving organizers, who can be conveniently found in Sorong. You may rent a small boat if you wish to stop and make personal discoveries along the line of the beaches. You can also trek around the islands to find hidden beauties, like waterfalls and ancient caves.
Get There
If you are flying from Jakarta, you can take a six hour flight to Sorong with a stopover in Manado. Alternatively, you can join a diving tour in Bali and fly from there. Flying from Jakarta/Bali to Sorong, with connecting flights in Makassar or Manado are offered by various airlines.
There are also daily ferries available between Sorong and Waisai, capital of the Raja Ampat district on the island of Waigeo. The journey takes between 1.5-2 hours. There are also speedboats for rent at Sorong.
The sparsely populated Raja Ampat Islands comprise around 1000 islands just off Sorong. With their sublime scenery of steep, jungle-covered islands, scorching white-sand beaches, hidden lagoons, spooky caves, weird mushroom-shaped islets and pellucid luminous turquoise waters, Raja Ampat has to be one of the most beautiful island chains in Southeast Asia.
Pure, unadulterated beauty isn’t just what draws people here, though. Raja Ampat has good birdwatching, with a couple of species of birds of paradise present, and what many call the best diving in the world. Little known until the last few years, Raja Ampat’s diversity of marine life and its huge, largely pristine coral reef systems are a diver’s dream come true – and fantastic for snorkellers too. It’s like swimming in a tropical aquarium. In fact, the waters are so clear and fish so numerous that you hardly even need don a mask. We saw six sharks swimming around below us merely by peering out the window of an overwater hut! So great is the quantity and variety of marine life here that scientists have described Raja Ampat as a biological hotspot and believe that the reef systems here act to restock reefs throughout the South Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The four biggest islands are Waigeo (with the small but fast-growing regional capital, Waisai), Batanta, Salawati and Misool. The Dampier Strait between Waigeo and Batanta has many outstanding dive sites, so most accommodation options are on Waigeo, Batanta or three smaller islands between them: Kri, Gam and Mansuar.
Home for the next ten days is a luxury liveaboard confidently named the WAOW, an acronym for “Water Adventure Ocean Wide” – though they should have just gone for “OMG!”. Anchored off Sorong, she resembles the love child of the Black Pearl and an oligarch’s mega-yacht: 190ft of stunning Borneo ironwood and canvas sails pimped up with five-star comfort and state of the art scuba kit. Mooring alongside I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling.
A nut-brown, tattooed figure grabs me by the elbow and pulls me on deck. “Bienvenue!” he says, welcoming the other guests, all of whom happen to be Swiss or French. I start to worry my schoolboy Francais won’t survive the trip but fortunately Jay and wife Kay, our cruise directors, are fluent in seven languages from English to Thai. We meet the crew and our dive guide, Hawe – 5ft nothing of bouffant hair and giggling enthusiasm – and have the three essentials pointed out: there’ll be 3-4 dives per day, free wine with dinner and “please don’t fall overboard”.
After a morning watching dolphins dancing in our wake we reach Blue Magic, our first dive site. Splashing in off the side I’m reminded of why I learnt to dive in the first place. The reefs here simply look like reefs should look – pulsing with fish and irridescent with colour. Having blown gigabytes of camera memory within a couple of days, I’m soon searching for a Safari style “Big Five”: giant mantas, grey reef sharks, the not-so-big pygmy seahorses, schools of barracuda and the “walking” epaulette shark which drags itself across the ocean floor on its fins. Amazingly, these are ticked off by day five, a testament to Hawe’s eagle eyes and Raja’s sheer vitality.
Back on board, time passes in a lazy sequence of mealtime bells, dive briefings and hammock snoozing. Exploring the ship’s library I find Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago which
As soon as we hopped off the boat and onto the jetty at Pulau Arborek we were greeted by a group of local kids dressed in traditional attire. They performed a song and dance and then we walked into the village with the rest of the locals. I’m not usually a big “village tourism” kind of guy but it all felt pretty genuine. We ate lunch on the beach and had some free time to explore the island. The village is extremely tidy and the island is surrounded by some stunning water (the snorkeling just off the beach is recommended).
Raja Ampat, is a regency and groups of islands that located in the tip of Bird's Head Peninsula on the island of New Guinea, precisely in West Papua province. Raja Ampat has 610 islands, which is only 35 islands that have been inhabited, the rest areun inhabited and even nameless. The famous islands in Raja Ampat are Misool island, Salawati, Batanta, and Waigeo island.
The area of Raja Ampat is often touted as the best reef areas in the world. The marine biota has beauty that can easily captivated by the tourists.
The origin name of Raja Ampat,according to local myth, is coming from a woman who found seven eggs. Four grains of which hatch into four princes who separated and each became the king who ruled in Waigeo, Salawati, East Misool and West Misool. Meanwhile, three other eggs became a ghost, a woman, and a stone. The names of the kings are:
- War became king in Waigeo
- Bethany became king in Salawati
- Dohar became king in Lilinta
- Mohamad became king in Waigama
Raja Ampat islands are the potential place to be the greatest tourism object relating their marine spots. Raja Ampat Islands, according to various sources, is one of the 10 best waters for diving sites around the world. In fact, it may also be recognized as number one for the completeness of underwater flora and fauna at this time. According to Conservation International, marine surveys suggest that the marine life diversity in the Raja Ampat area is the highest recorded on Earth. The diversity is considerably greater than any other area sampled in the Coral Triangle composed of Indonesia, Philippines and Papua New Guinea. The Coral Triangle is the heart of the world's coral reef biodiversity, making Raja Ampat quite possibly to be the richest coral reef ecosystems in the world.
The area's massive coral colonies along with relatively high sea surface temperatures, also suggest that its reefs may be relatively resistant to threats like coral bleaching and coral disease, which now jeopardize the survival of other coral ecosystems around the world. The Raja Ampat islands are remote and relatively undisturbed by humans.
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