If you are passionate about diving, you have surely heard of Raja Ampat, the Indonesian destination that has been elbowing its way among the meccas of diving, striving to become the ultimate mecca of them all. If the idea of spending some time among lush corals and primordial explosions of underwater life has already piqued your interest, you have probably done some online research. And amid an endless sea of websites, all copying from one another and repeating the same information, you have likely come across one recurring word: biodiversity.
In Raja Ampat, everything is about biodiversity—so much so that there is even a resort that, in a fit of creativity, decided to call itself Biodiversity. According to the wealth of online information, renowned for its depth of analysis and obsessive attention to quality, it all seems to trace back to a day when a marine biology professor allegedly identified no fewer than 258 different species during a single dive.
Now, I’m not exactly sure how many species an average marine biology professor typically identifies during a dive, nor do I know how a single human being can catalog 258 species in one go. (Does he tally them on a slate? Memorize them all? How many deco minutes are required to count 258 species? Could it be that the same tendency fishermen have to exaggerate the size of their catches also affects marine biology professors when quantifying the species they identify in a single dive?)
As often happens on the Internet, the story got out of hand, and now every website covering Raja Ampat can’t resist mentioning this delightful anecdote. Meanwhile, the stereotypical commercial messaging, which tries to sell Raja Ampat as the place you must visit if you’re truly cool and want to set yourself apart from the herd of tourists flocking to the Maldives, leans heavily on the biodiversity of its biodiversity as the ultimate selling point.
In stereotypical travel marketing, any mention of Raja Ampat’s biodiversity is invariably followed by the naming of its two emblematic endemic species: the wobbegong shark and the pygmy seahorse. The first is a small evolutionary marvel that looks like a blender experiment combining a shark, a carpet, a leopard, and some lichen encrustations. The second is a white-crimson bundle of cuteness packed into a few square millimeters—so tiny that you’ll likely miss it entirely if you’re farsighted and don’t typically dive with your reading glasses.
And that’s it. The shallow marketing narrative fails to acknowledge the glaring discrepancy between the jaw-dropping number flaunted with fireworks (258 species! In a single dive!) and the rather underwhelming number 2.
I can almost picture the scene in a tourism marketing office:“I need to impress my readers with a place that has two endemic species.”“Add a 48. 248 sounds way cooler than 2.”“Hold my beer!”
But you, too, are an average biodiverse consumer. You enjoy suspending disbelief in order to cultivate a new dream.
And so, here you are, boarding a biodiverse plane for an endless journey to one of the most remote places on Earth, hauling your bulky and ridiculously heavy duffel bag stuffed with wetsuits and regulators. It’ll be 48 fucking hours of travel in pursuit of a fucking tiny, flamboyant seahorse, with layovers in Doha, Jakarta, Makassar, and Sorong—so much time that you’ll have aged and grown wiser by the end of it. To the point where the local airlines, which will have you board a plane, disembark, exit the airport, re-enter, and go through security all over again, will seem like nothing more than a biodiverse and utterly hilarious prank.
When you finally arrive in Sorong and board a so-called ferry—a claustrophobic, overcrowded vessel—you’ll begin to appreciate the biodiversity of this borderland through the ethnic variety of the local population, where Asian and Aboriginal lineages intermingle with the same creative flair that went into the evolution of the wobbegong.
And as you gaze out of the porthole at the landscape of stilt houses, slender, pointed hulls, and pagodas, you won’t be able to help but realize that, after all the struggles, you’ve finally made it to Southeast Asia.
Mother Nature, far from exhausted after crafting such an overload of biodiversity, stuns you once again with a palette of colors and landscapes that would make James Cameron want to produce seven more Avatar sequels. Jagged limestone pinnacles, sculpted by the tides and teeming with hundreds of wildly biodiverse plant species. An explosion of green in every imaginable shade—chroma-diverse greens—alongside an infinite spectrum of blues, azure, cyan, indigo, cobalt, more shades than in all of Picasso’s periods combined.
And yet, unfortunately, here and there, you’ll also find neglect, carelessness, and plastic waste—diversely polluting both land and water. But even that fails to dull the sheer wonder of nature. The yin and yang of the sublime and the grotesque.
But after an endless journey, you’re finally at the last stretch before reaching a paradise named Agusta Eco Resort—a place untouched by the art of exaggeration and marketing manipulation. The owner is an Italian doctor, someone who, evidently, has dedicated his life more to substance than to hype. Instead of pushing some bombastic marketing narrative, he focused on creating a small, genuine hospitality gem… all while making every effort to keep the world from finding out about it.
Initially chosen with some hesitation, after watching a few subpar YouTube videos and being lured by an attractive price, the place turns out to be an absolute steal. The island itself is a true paradise of fine, white limestone sand, so rich in biodiversity that you can spend hours sitting among thousands of crabs and hermit crabs, busy with their frantic daily tasks.
Or, you can gaze at the local hawk, diving dramatically into the water to hunt. Or, if you take a few more steps, you can dive into the crystal-clear sea and enjoy some spectacular drift snorkeling, gliding among squids, shimmering schools of fish, and blacktip reef sharks—sharks that, by the end of your vacation, you’ll be on first-name terms with. (Efisio, Tore, Gavino, and Franco.)
The local restaurant offers an exciting mix of high-quality Italian and Indonesian cuisine, and at the end of dinner, it’s blissful to fall asleep in the simple yet charming bungalows, lulled by the gentle sound of the ocean.
Let’s be clear—this is not one of those artificial Maldivian resorts that cost €5,000 a night, where everything is Instagram-perfect to the point of feeling unnatural. Agusta Eco Resort is a budget-conscious project, free of excessive luxury. But what it lacks in opulence, it more than makes up for in authenticity.
And after the exhausting 48-hour journey, as you walk along the powdery beach, admiring the breathtaking colors of nature, or sit dangling your feet off the pier, watching life teem just inches below the water’s surface, you’ll feel like you’ve arrived at nothing less than paradise.
And although the journey to reach this most remote corner of the planet is truly exhausting, not to mention biodiverse, you won’t be able to resist when, at dusk, you hear that a boat is about to leave for a night dive.
And so, instead of slipping into your pajamas, you find yourself struggling into your wetsuit, wondering if this isn’t all insanity, if perhaps your first dive couldn’t wait for a restorative night’s sleep.
3, 2, 1. The impact with the water. A brief moment of disorientation. A quick check of your buoyancy and weighting. And then—the miracle begins.
Because despite all the ironic jabs at the clichés of social media and the biodiverse world of the Internet, what unfolds before your eyes is nothing short of a natural marvel—one that, for once, outshines and transcends the glossy, overhyped marketing you’ve been fed by countless influencers in the months leading up to your trip.
For once, in the banal battle between Instagram and Reality, it’s the latter that wins. No—it doesn’t just win, it triumphs.
The Papuan Sea, in all its biodiverse glory, bursts into an unapologetically flamboyant spectacle, spewing forth—at every biodiverse moment—every conceivable and inconceivable combination of colors, corals, sponges, vertebrates, invertebrates, elasmobranchs, gnathostomes, carangids, serranids, wrasses, barracudas, gobies, scorpionfish, pipefish, dartfish, angelfish, gorgonians—and the list must stop just to catch a breath, so overwhelming is the urge to shout it all out in one go.
It’s a full-blown fucking encyclopedia of ichthyology and invertebrate zoology, unfolding right before your eyes.
The funny thing is that by the end of the trip, after fewer than 30 dives, this first dive will seem almost… ordinary. Because, in the days to come, Raja Ampat will keep raising the bar—with every single dive, it will throw at you an endless variety of colors, dive conditions, underwater landscapes, and, of course, biodiversity, so much so that the fact you spotted everything in a single dive—from a frogfish to a crocodile fish, from the infamous blue-ringed octopus to the fire urchin—will seem almost predictable.
What truly leaves you stunned, in fact, is not just the biodiversity (heaven forbid we stop talking about biodiversity for a second…), but also the sheer diversity of underwater landscapes. Here, you’ll find sheer vertical walls of rock, endless gardens of soft corals, expanses of sand populated by seagrass meadows, gently sloping reefs exploding with frantic marine life in just a few meters of water, mangrove forests, abandoned piers turned into predator hunting grounds, caves, and swim-through tunnels.
If I had to name the most recurring sensation, both above and below the water, experienced during a week in Raja Ampat, it would be a biodiverse and constant sense of awe—one that grabs you right in the pit of your stomach, keeping you in a perpetual state of wonder, always on the verge of tears.
This happens as early as the second dive, the first daytime dive, when you don’t even have time to reach the seabed before coming face-to-face with the first of many magnificent wobbegong sharks—one of so many you’ll see in a week that you’ll start taking them for granted, only to long for them for years to come.
Or when, at Manta Sandy, after many minutes spent on the seabed, gripping onto a rock to avoid being swept away by the strong current, just as boredom begins to creep in and you start wondering if this will be the first dive where you see nothing, your buddy suddenly yanks your arm—you turn left, and there they are: two gigantic, magnificent, breathtaking manta rays, floating and dancing above you, utterly unbothered by the push of the entire ocean.
Or when, at Rufas Island, you stand dumbfounded, watching tens of thousands of juvenile fish move in perfect unison, their swirling mass pierced by lightning-fast carangids, hunting in a synchronized ballet of life and death.
Or when, during a boat transfer, the calm surface of the sea suddenly erupts, disrupted by dozens of dolphins, hunting a massive school of fish that desperately try to escape, breaking the boundary between water and air by the hundreds.
Or when, at Cape Kri, struggling to fin against the current, you suddenly turn to your right and find yourself side by side with a small school of sleek, elegant barracudas—completely unfazed by your presence, as if mocking your laughable lack of hydrodynamics.
Or when, at Melissa’s Garden, gazing at an endless field of soft corals and colors, you freeze in disbelief, wondering if what you’re seeing is truly Earth or some alien planet, so unfamiliar and surreal is the variety of forms and colors overwhelming your senses.
Or when, at Sauwandarek, you skeptically watch your dive guide motioning for you to jump in, right in front of what appears to be a nondescript village, in just a few meters of water. You hesitate, wondering if they’re wasting one of your precious dives by bringing you here out of laziness, simply because it’s easily accessible—only to resurface 50 minutes later, on the verge of tears, having just experienced one of the most incredible dives of your life. Minute after minute, you watched sharks, schools of mobulas, enormous turtles, colossal swarms of trevallies, sweetlips, and corals, corals, corals.
Or when, during boat transfers, you lose yourself in the scenery—soaring limestone cliffs, drenched in vegetation so lush and intense that it almost hurts your eyes, a constant variation of the exotic landscapes that have found their most famous expression in the iconic image of Piaynemo—which, with biodiverse inevitability, is plastered across every single webpage that dares to talk about Raja Ampat.
A journey to Raja Ampat is an unparalleled experience, a continuous surge of emotion, whose intensity is matched only by the heartbreak that will grip you when, at the end of your trip, you cast your final glances at these magnificent places, desperately trying to absorb every last detail into your memory.
And as you step onto the boat back to Sorong, you can’t help but feel a barely concealed envy for those who, just like you a week earlier, are arriving to take your place—their eyes already wide with awe, catching their very first glimpse of this Indonesian paradise.
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