Thoughts from Raja Ampat

Raja Ampat was a fantastic trip in so many ways. Weather and sea conditions were perfect, even if the currents provided more rigorous an exercise than I cared for. We also got the first sighting of the great oceanic mantas this season, and the crew excitedly informed us that the show the reef mantas gave us was one of the best yet.

I remember gasping into my regulator as we descended onto a reef called Melissa's Garden. A shoal of silvery baitfish numbering in the thousands eddied around us; a stream of yellow-tail fusilier shimmied by; occasionally the two groups met and merged, then separated, a resplendent performance brought to life by the rays of sunlight that penetrated even to this depth.

Giant trevallies stalked at their boundaries, not hunting yet, but doggedly keeping their prey in sight. Above, the backlit silhouettes of a school of barracuda drifted lazily through the cloud of bubbles that burst into the day.

Suddenly - a flash of movement - the wall of fish undulated urgently as a trevally darted into it. The scene in front of us turned frenzied, and for a moment I lost sight of my companions as we were each enveloped in dizzying waves of silver.

On another dive, as I struggled against a fierce current, I turned to my left and saw a group of oriental sweetlips finning determinedly right beside me. Both they and I took cover behind an outcrop, catching a much needed break, before I reluctantly kicked into the current again.

There was something to be discovered on every dive, basically - if not the big then the small. Heaven forbid you get bored of the action around you, but if you did, all you had to do was turn your attention to the reef under you for a whole different world. From the flamboyant nudibranches to the well-camouflaged pygmy squids and seahorses, there was truly no lack of things to look at.

Some exciting moments too - a banded sea snake as thick as my arm and three times as long weaved its way down the wall and went head-on into the camera Jared was holding, as he concentrated on getting a picture of a nudi. A metre is a long distance when you are not in your element. I was just beside him, but my arm reached out for him as if in slow motion. In the next split second the snake had slithered underneath him, and with an audible crack he just managed to use the camera to push himself some ways from the wall.


On yet another dive, he set the camera down on an unsuspecting flounder, who exploded out of the seabed in a flurry of sand, scaring the three of us alike.

After every dive, we clustered on the deck to compare photos and stories, high-fiving each other in celebration of seeing something cool, or groaning in envy if the other group had seen something we missed.

It's strange, isn't it? We affix a value to the things we named and recognise. I'm admittedly guilty of that too - I came to Raja Ampat with a list of things I wanted to see. But there is so much beauty out there that gets overlooked because we don't know the name for it.

On this trip, we stepped onto dry land only once - on the day after Christmas. As part of the festive cheer we had each brought stashes of old clothes, toys, books and snacks that we wanted to pass to a village that didn't have regular access to the mainland. 

The village we chose didn't even have lights. The children stared at us with their large eyes, shying away when we approached them. "Foreigners don't come here," an elder explained. "They don't know what to make of you." 

Some well-placed bribes in the form of Christmas candy canes eventually coaxed smiles out of the children, thought it was by far the soft toys that elicited the most joy. There is much we take for granted here in Singapore; we are blessed in ways we don't even realise.

The sky was especially clear the last night we sailed through the seas of Raja Ampat; I remember that well. We were slipping between two worlds – one ruled by the constellations glimmering fiercely overhead, and a second undersea realm that buoyed us up against it. Both polar opposites, but similarly guarding secrets we can only guess at. The familiar sound of the boat engine was the only thing that kept us from drifting off into one of the two.

That night, a multitude of emotions struck me. There was contentment and appreciation, juxtaposed against sadness, fear and wistfulness. Contentment – in realising how trivial my worries are in the bigger picture; appreciation – for the beauty I was allowed to glimpse and revel in; sadness – for the indiscriminate harm our ignorance has caused the world; fear – that it is too late for us to undo the damage; and wistfulness – for the many mysteries yet undiscovered.