Forts and Forests — Ambon → Kaimana · 12 days
Ambon → Kaimana · 12 days
There is a reason this trip runs in November. It is the short overlap when the Banda Sea is still in migration mode, with schooling hammerheads and migrating whales, while the nutrient-loaded water of Triton Bay has usually cleared enough to show what is growing below. Either half would justify a trip. Getting both in one crossing takes November.
Forts and Forests
12 days
Ambon → Kaimana
When
November 2028
The route
Ambon · Nusa Laut · Banda · Watubela · Papua · Triton Bay · Kaimana
The diving
Hammerheads · Whales · Mantas · Whale sharks · Soft coral · Walls · Night diving
Ambon & Nusa Laut
Starting strong
It starts near Ambon at Nusa Laut, one of the Lease islands and one of the healthiest reefs in this part of Indonesia, protected by the village that owns it and looking the way reefs looked before most of us started diving.
A gentle opening dive, and an unfairly good one.
Banda
Where the story is still written into
the landscape
Then Banda.
Four hundred years ago these few small islands were the only place on earth where nutmeg grew, which made them the most fought-over ground in the world and pulled every European power with a fleet into the eastern seas.
That history has not been tidied away.
Banda Neira still has its street plan, its Dutch forts and the volcano standing over the anchorage. The plantations are still worked, the drying racks are still in front of the houses, and the people here will tell you the story themselves.
Underwater, the walls fall away straight from the shoreline, the lava flow from the 1988 eruption has grown back into something remarkable, and the mandarinfish come out at dusk.
Watubela
Fed from below
Then the horizon opens.
From there we head east through the Watubela islands, scattered between the Banda and Seram Seas, where almost nobody dives and the reefs show it.
This is where the trip becomes a proper crossing. Days of open water with the boat moving and nothing on the horizon, which is when the good things tend to happen.
The Banda Sea in November is one of the better places in the world for schooling hammerheads. At this time of year, the same water is a migration corridor for whales, while sperm whales stay in these straits most of the year.
Nothing out here is promised. Everything is watched for.
Papua
From Asia to Oceania, without
leaving Indonesia
Then Papua, and the change is abrupt.
The coastline turns into jungle running straight down to the water, karst walls, hidden bays, birds calling from inside the trees.
There are cuscus in the canopy and kangaroos in these forests.
This is the west coast of New Guinea, so the sun goes down into open water with the jungle at your back, and the skies out here are enormous.
We stop at the Kitikiti waterfalls, where fresh water comes straight off the rock into the sea and you can swim under it.
Triton Bay & Aiduma
The reefs do not do subtle
Triton Bay and Aiduma are the payoff.
The reefs here are the densest and most saturated in Indonesia, orange soft coral packed so tightly the rock underneath disappears, walls of fusiliers and snapper in numbers that look edited, and the whole thing lit up in a way that makes photographers behave strangely.
Wobbegongs lie flat on the reef waiting to be noticed, walking sharks come out at night, and the plankton that makes the water rich brings in mantas and mobulas as well as Bryde’s whales, which work these bays and are seen from the boat more often than anyone expects.
Bagans
Where whale sharks come to
feed under the nets
We time this departure to the right phase of the moon, because the darker nights bring the bagans better catches and the whale sharks better reasons to stay.
Twelve days from a spice island to a rainforest coast, from one continent to another, and the two halves have almost nothing in common except the water in between.
