Volcanoes & Villages — Maumere → Maumere · 10 or 11 days
Maumere → Maumere · 10 or 11 days
Most boats treat this archipelago as a stop on the way somewhere, dive four or five sites and carry on. This trip never leaves it.
Out of Maumere and back, ten or eleven days entirely inside Alor and Solor, long enough to really appreciate the place instead of sampling it.
Volcanoes & Villages
10 or 11 days
Maumere → Maumere
When
May 2029
The route
Maumere · Adonara · Solor · Lembata · Pantar · Pura · Alor · Maumere
The diving
Hard coral gardens · Soft coral walls · Pinnacles & drop-offs · Volcanic sand · Macro · Pelagics · Night diving
Maumere → Alor
Adonara · Solor · Lembata · Pantar · Pura · Alor
The islands run east from Flores in a line: Adonara, Solor, Lembata, Pantar, Pura, Alor. Between them, straits the ocean has to force its way through. That is the engine of the whole region. Cold water loaded with nutrients rises out of the deep and funnels through the gaps, and everything growing on these reefs lives off it. We go in May, and that is no accident. The upwelling has slackened, the sea has warmed, the visibility has opened right up.
Adonara & Solor
Into the straits
There is also the business of getting through those straits, which is worth being on deck for. The gaps between these islands are narrow, deep and fast. Whirlpools, standing waves, glassy patches of water moving at walking pace in the wrong direction. On a map it is a passage between two islands. From the rail it is a river running through the sea, with volcanoes on either side, close enough to pick out the goats.
Lembata
Volcanoes above water
Above water it is volcanoes. Cones standing straight out of the sea, ridges with smoke coming off them, black beaches under steep green slopes. The islands are culturally dense in a way that catches people out. Each one has its own language and its own weaving, the ikat. It is worked here as a living craft rather than a souvenir, and you only have to walk into a village to see it happening. Traditional dances are still part of everyday life, not a performance invented for visiting boats.
Pantar & Pura
North · South · and everything between
North coasts, south coasts and the channels in between are nothing like each other, and all three are in the same trip. Shallow hard coral gardens in a state that stops people mid-sentence at the surface. Soft coral walls where the tide runs. Pinnacles and drop-offs, schooling jacks and barracuda, tuna passing through. On the exposed sites, a genuine chance of something larger: thresher sharks on the deeper corners, hammerheads along the outer walls, marlin out in the blue, and occasionally a mola turning up months outside its season. None of that is promised. All of it happens here.
Alor
Look closer
Then there is the sand. Black at one island, grey at the next, pale at another, and all of it clean and alive, a long way from the rubbish tips that the word muck usually drags behind it. This is where the guides earn their keep: rhinopias, frogfish, ghost pipefish, nudibranchs nobody can name without a book, and animals that have barely been photographed anywhere else.
The Villages
Life across the archipelago
It is also a quiet rebuttal to a lot of what people assume about Indonesia from a distance. A village with a church, the next one with a mosque, side by side, and nobody here gives it a second thought.
Fishermen still work these reefs with traps and hand spears on a single breath, and meeting one at fifteen meters halfway through his working day is usually the story that comes out at dinner.
The kids paddle out to the boat in dugouts and stay as long as anyone will keep playing with them.
