East Meets West — Maumere → Bali · 11 days
Maumere → Bali · 11 days
This route became a classic because generations of divers sailed it, came home changed, and told everybody. You fly out to the far end of the archipelago, join WAOW 2 in Flores, and spend eleven days sailing home. In between is a border that appears on no political map and still separates more deeply than most: you leave the Indonesia almost nobody has seen, and arrive in the one everybody thinks they know.
East Meets West
11 days
Maumere → Bali
When
End of May · one departure a year
The route
North Flores · Komodo · Sangeang Api · Saleh Bay · Lombok Strait · Bali
The diving
Deep walls · Mantas · Sharks · Whale sharks · Volcanic macro · Night diving
North Flores
The quiet days
The first days are the quiet ones, along the north coast of Flores.
A long, mountainous, volcanic coastline with almost no boats on it, and deep reef underneath.
Walls drop straight into blue water. Big gorgonians. Hard coral that has seen very little disturbance.
These are sites we have dived for years and know how to take on the right tide, at the right hour.
Komodo
Where two waters meet
Then comes Komodo National Park.
Cold water pushes up from the Indian Ocean and collides with warm water from the Flores Sea.
The whole park runs on that collision.
Mantas queue at the cleaning stations of Karang Makassar and stack up in the current at Manta Alley. Crystal Rock and Castle Rock hold trevally and sharks in the tide. Batu Bolong is a single pinnacle wearing just about every reef fish in the province.
Whether we push south is decided once we are out there.
We read the water, not the brochure.
Ashore, the dragons are exactly as prehistoric as advertised, and rather less sleepy.
Sangeang Api
& Sumbawa
From macro to whale sharks
West of the park, the diving changes character again.
At Sangeang Api, black volcanic sand bubbles beneath the surface, home to frogfish and a whole strange cast of animals that live on ash rather than coral.
Further west, Saleh Bay cuts deep into northern Sumbawa.
Here, whale sharks come to the bagans — fishing platforms that draw anchovies with lights through the night.
At first light, the sharks are there, hanging vertically just below the surface and feeding.
Close enough that the only problem is fitting one into the frame.
No two days ask the
same thing of you
Big animal diving and macro diving are usually two different holidays.
Here, they are a single cruise.
The night diving deserves its own mention. So does the range of levels: Komodo has sites that will test a diver with a thousand logged dives, and sheltered bays half an hour away where somebody fresh out of their course can have the best dive of their life.
We split the groups accordingly and say plainly what to expect on each dive.
And photographers get to plan properly for once:
Wide angle before lunch. Macro after.
The line between two worlds
On the last night, somewhere in the deep water of the Lombok Strait, WAOW 2 sails back into Asia.
Alfred Russel Wallace spotted that line in the 1850s by paying attention to birds. It carries his name, and it still holds.
Bali belongs to Asia, with its monkeys and woodpeckers.
Cockatoos and marsupials begin on the other side.
Everything you have dived for ten days lies in Wallacea — the transition zone between two continents that were never joined.
The animals there belong fully to neither. And more and more, they exist nowhere else on Earth.
The crossing takes a night.
What it crosses took forty million years to form.
