Over the period of 11 days, I dove anywhere from 2-4 dives a day. Before the trip, I had been to many places to dive and had honestly been getting a little bit tired of diving, thinking I had seen everything I wanted to see underwater. I was really only in search of diving with the "big" things like sharks (which we did in Fiji), mantas, whale sharks, etc. After reading about the biodiversity that existed in Raja Ampat, I wanted to check it out for myself. The statistics stated that over 1,400 fish species live in the region and more than 500 species of coral. I think it's typical for a one week dive trip, that you would see maybe a handful of really cool things. Well, after the first day of diving in Raja Ampat I had already seen some of the coolest things I'd ever seen and a lot of it had to do with just the immense amount of biodiversity.
Honestly, great photos with the GoPro were hard to come by, but there are some below. Instead, I opted for video to try to capture what I saw underwater. I saw the most "cool" things I've ever seen underwater all on this trip and most of them multiple times on different dives. There was one dive where we were surrounded by a massive school of small fish and watching them move around and between us was absolutely insane. The video just does not do it justice. When I came up from the dive, the first words out of my mouth were, "That was the coolest thing I've ever seen on a dive."
Let's just say...I will be back. And not only that! But Allie decided to try diving and ended up doing not just one, but FOUR dives over the course of the trip. Anyways, here's a video I put together to try to summarize some of the "cool" things I got to see and then some photos below. Enjoy!
