Manta Rays

One of the creatures I always dreamed of seeing while diving is the manta ray.  I often thought about traveling to Yap where the island is “well known” for manta encounters.  I was therefore, very pleased when one of the dives during our trip to Komodo was at a site known as “Manta Point” or “Torolengkoy”   While our dive guide would not guarantee manta sightings, he was pretty confident that we would get to see some of these majestic animals.  These dives would make up for the very sparse Komodo Dragon encounters that we had on the island of Komodo…

Here are some of my manta photographs

Truly looks like stuff out of star trek

The Komodo Diving Honeymoon.

We had a rather incredible honeymoon, spent in large part, under the waters in and around Komodo.  This is by no means a full trip report, but for anybody interested, we stayed aboard the Archipelago’s Adventurer II, which had spacious cabins, incredibly friendly helpful crew, and delicious meals.  If you are a diver, and are looking for a luxury liveaboard, I highly recommend this operation.

This was my first time in the waters of Indonesia, and it was really great. While I personally cannot say that the diving was so great that I’ll never dive the Caribbean again, I am thankful for this perspective, as Indonesia is a very long way from home!

There is a lot of life in the Indonesian waters.  In fact, in the following picture, the black and green nudibranch (Nembrotha Cristata) was not even seen by me when I was taking the picture!  That says something about the abundance of life in the waters, my abilities to spot critters and my abilities as a photographer (i.e., there is a lot of luck involved in getting a nice picture).

Nembrotha Cristata (originally oriented 90 degrees to the right)