Coral and Cloves — Sorong → Ternate · 11 days
Sorong → Ternate · 11 days
Eleven days from Raja Ampat to the volcanic islands of Ternate and Tidore, following the length of Halmahera in between. Three regions, three very different kinds of diving, and a route that crosses both the equator and one of Indonesia’s great biological boundaries.
Coral and Cloves
11 days
Sorong → Ternate
When
March 2029
The route
Sorong · Raja Ampat · Pisang Islands · Halmahera · Bacan · Guraici · Makian · Ternate
The diving
Mantas · Wobbegongs · Walking sharks · Pinnacles · Walls · Black sand · Exploratory diving
Raja Ampat
Beyond the usual route
The Raja Ampat days focus on Fam, Yanggefo, Yeben and Kofiau, away from the busier Dampier Strait.
The diving covers the full Raja repertoire: pinnacles in tidal flow with jacks and barracuda, manta cleaning stations, wobbegongs beneath table corals, shallow coral gardens and walking sharks after dark.
Across the line
From one biological
world to another
Raja Ampat lies on the Australian side of the Lydekker Line; Halmahera sits west of it in Wallacea. Somewhere during the crossing, the boat quietly leaves one biological region for another. The equator is harder to miss. We cross that too, with the traditional ceremony on board. The Pisang Islands sit along the way, remote and rarely visited before the route reaches Halmahera.
Halmahera
Where the map starts to thin out
Halmahera has long stretches of coastline that have barely been dived. The Patinti Strait funnels water and fish between Halmahera and Bacan, while Bacan, Guraici, Kusu and the islands off the southwest coast offer reefs with very little dive traffic.
Rainforest runs down to the coast, home to Wallace’s standardwing, a bird of paradise found only in this part of the Moluccas. At dawn, the males display high in the trees, trailing long white wing pennants.
Makian
Unnamed sites
Further north, Makian rises as a volcanic cone above fringing reefs, walls and dark sand slopes. At night, Halmahera’s own walking shark moves through the shallows.
There is also room here for exploration. Some stretches of coast have no established dive sites at all. When conditions allow, we put the tender in and go and look. Sometimes there is not much there. Sometimes there is.
Ternate & Tidore
The islands that changed
the price of spice
The journey ends between the volcanic cones of Ternate and Tidore, once the center of the global clove trade.
Forts, a sultan’s palace and clove trees still sit on the slopes of Ternate’s active volcano, while the spice itself is still sold in the roadside markets.
Alfred Russel Wallace was living on Ternate in 1858 when he wrote down his ideas on natural selection and sent them to Charles Darwin. After eleven days traveling through the region that carries his name, it is a fitting place to finish.
