Raja Ampat Islands - West Papua

The Raja Ampat island group spreads out over a huge area and consists of over 610 islands. The four largest islands are Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool and are located at the Westside of the “Bird head peninsula” in New Guinea. The Indonesian province Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, while Papua New Guinea is the eastern half.

Raja Ampat is frontier diving. One of the last truly wild places on earth, it has yet to succumb to the pressures of over fishing, coral bleaching, exploding tourism and overpopulation. The diving reflects this. Topside there are few roads, even few boats ply the water in the Raja Ampat islands on the "bird's head", the far northwestern end of Papua where Papua Diving is located. Underwater, the life is wild, extraordinarily plentiful and for the most part, unexplored.

Straddling either side of the equator, Indonesia sprawls in a broad 5,000 km arc from west of Singapore to Papua New Guinea in the east. The world's largest archipelagic nation, Indonesia boasts 17,000 islands, 80,000 km of coastline, 50,000 sq km of coral reefs, and 3.1 million sq km of tropical seas.

Indonesia’s easternmost province is West Papua (formerly known as Irian Jaya), which shares an enormous island with Papua New Guinea (PNG). Just off West Papua’s northwestern tip is a series of islands known as Raja Ampat, or 'The Four Kings’ in Indonesian.

Located within the famed Coral Triangle, this area is comprised of four large forested islands, innumerable smaller islands and rocky outcroppings, all surrounded by a seemingly endless expanse of azure sea.

Raja Ampat's diverse terrestrial and underwater topography is simply breathtaking. Massive tracts of primeval jungles blanket the islands, sheltering orchids, marsupials, birds of paradise, hornbills, and cockatoos.

Sheer, craggy cliffs drop from high peaks to the water, and then continue on all the way down to the bottom of the sea. These underwater walls are current-raked gardens festooned with all manner of soft coral and gorgonian fans.

Raja Ampat abounds in diverse reef systems, the majority of which have yet to be explored. There is a seemingly inexhaustible selection of unmapped walls, reef flats, caves and swim throughs, gentle sea mounds, mucky mangroves, placid lagoons, pinnacles, and WWII wrecks.

The clear waters are teeming with big pelagics, massive schools of hunting fish, whale sharks, manta rays, mobula rays, dolphins, whales, turtles, tawny sharks, and wobbegong sharks.

Macro delights include a bewildering assortment of garish nudibranchs, blue ringed octopus, Mandarin fish, harlequin shrimps, flame file shells, ghost pipefish, frog fish, and a range of elusive pygmy seahorses.

This area’s staggering abundance of marine life is due in part to its remarkably low human population density. Beneath the verdant canopy, the islands are primarily karst limestone, which are dry, inhospitable, and overwhelmingly vertical.

The few resident Papuans are mainly a subsistence society, exploiting a variety of resources to meet their basic needs. Fishing is only one of these resources, and they continue to employ traditional, low-impact fishing techniques, using a hook and line from dug-out canoes.

Biodiversity

In 2002, Conservation International conducted a Rapid Assessment Project (RAP) in Raja Ampat. The researchers concluded that "due to its location near the heart of the coral triangle coupled with an amazing diversity of marine habitats, the area is potentially the world’s richest in terms of marine biodiversity." A similar survey by The Nature Conservancy confirmed this conclusion.

World-renowned ichthyologist and author of several fish identification books Dr. Gerald Allen was part of the Conservation International study. He broke his personal record on a single dive by identifying 284 different species of fish. The research team recorded 828 species of reef fishes in the assessment, raising the known total in that region to 970. In addition, 456 species of hard corals were recorded, which is more than half the world’s total. Including previous studies, this brings the total number of hard coral species in Raja Ampat to 565, and no other area of comparable size has this many species.

This survey also found that the diversity of mollusks was incredibly high, finding 699 species, which surpasses earlier records in PNG and the Philippines. Following a recommendation by Dr. Allen and Dr. Mark Erdmann, Raja Ampat was nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Status. The result is still pending.

Raja Ampat’s pristine beauty, both above the water and below the water, is truly unrivalled. Its remote location and lack of infrastructure have inhibited the growth of tourism. Apart from MER, there is only one landbased resort in Raja Ampat, and two permanently based liveaboards operating from Sorong. In the past year, however, this undiscovered area has received a flurry of exuberant press.

The November/December 2005 issue of Asian Diver magazine named Raja Ampat as its Destination of the Season, in a cover article titled “Kings of Kings.” Author David Espinosa, who is also the editor the magazine, dubs Raja Ampat the Shangri-la of diving, raving that ‘each dive is a guaranteed seat-of-your-pants adventure.’ In July of 2005, Action Asia magazine published ‘Raja Ampat Story’ in which author Pierre Constant calls the area a ‘hidden garden of Eden.’

As word of Raja Ampat’s natural splendours spreads, increased traffic to the area is inevitable. However, tourism and conservation need not be contradictory objectives.

If  Raja Ampat is to maintain its pristine beauty, it is imperative that we are proactive in the development of the tourism industry. The Departmen Parawisata, or the local Department of Tourism, has been very receptive to suggestions as to how the industry can be developed responsibly. Along with the local government, they have been eager to develop low impact tourism and understand that the conservation of their environment is essential to the longevity of both the tourism industry and their local communities. Misool Eco Resort has had their full cooperation in securing contracts for the land.

Misool is a region with thousands of isle, which have been pushed up throughout the thousands of years and build a wonderful scene. You come across caves, or caverns everywhere. You´ll find rocks as big as cathedrals, over hangs that improve the dramatic sight of this breathtaking region. Of course these sights will continue in no less impressing views under water. Misool is one of the places on earth where you´ll find the most various species of fish, hard and soft corals, sponges, worms, nudebranches, shrimps, crabs and all kind of non-vertebrates, like cuttle fish and octopus. You will as well come across Wobbegong and Epaulet sharks, which you will only find in the region of „Raja Empat“. Giant clams as well as fantastic tiny shells. Photographers as well as Videographers will have the dives of their lifetime for shoot macro all over.

Misool is one of the places with most wonderful and colourful and above all still intact reefs. All kinds of different corals set up the background scenery of the underwater world.

The Raja Ampat area of Northwest Irian Jaya is filled with islands, surrounded by reefs and inundated with fish! After 9 years in the area we have only begun to discover the natural treasures awaiting us on each dive.

The area's reefs are covered in a diverse selection of both hard and soft corals. Most of the areas reefs are pristine, with mile after mile of perfect hard corals, drift after drift of Dendronephya (soft) corals of many species and colors ranging from brilliant red, to shocking yellow pretty pink and exotic purple. Most reef dives are very colorful. Among, above, and on top of the corals are fish. Schooling fish, solitary fish, beautiful fish, ugly fish, large fish, small fish! Some fish that are considered to be rare in many parts of the world are abundant in the Raja Ampat area. For example, many Sargassum Frogfish are found in the floating weed in front of the dive resort.

Wobbegong Sharks are found on many dives, often lying atop perfect table corals like a fish carefully arranged by a chef on a dinner plate. The Epaulette Shark, a small shark only a foot long, is numerous and found very often on night dives in the seagrass or even on the shelf of a wall dive.

Wobbegong Sharks

Raja Ampat Island is the most western district of the Indonesian province of Papua. Raja Ampat consists of an area surrounding four major island off the western coast of Birds Head Panisula of New Guinea Island. The western half of which is Indonesia and the eastern half, Papua New Guinea. The province was called Irian Jaya, and its a cluster of over 1500 small Islands.

Raja Ampat is the most bio-diverse location in the world more than 3000 species of fishes and over 300 species of corals have been identified here, in a single one and half hour dive you can identified more than 282 fish species and more than 400 species. Till this very day the area is virtually unexplored and unknown due to its size. This area as there are still many remnants of WW II.