Whether it really has world class diving, it’s subjectively up to the diver’s preference.
We have met divers who had travelled to best dive sites around the world but doesn’t care or appreciate macro stuff. When he tagged along with our boat to Lembeh, his expression was,”The fishes don’t come out.” Nothing wrong with that, he merely more impressed in seeing colorful reef and big fishes and they actually make up to very big percentage of divers. For macro lover, they can related to shallow, sandy, rocky, exciting hunt for the critters and ‘grazing’ on the sea floor.Some of the Germans described us as grazer and they were wondering why we looked down during diving while most of them busy looking at the reef or at the blue finding big fish.
For macro heaven, we found it less impressive than Lembeh and some parts of Bali (like Seraya Secret, Puri Jati on glorious past and Secret Bay). Either because the water was cooler or it’s simply not the season. During our diving period, while we could visit same destination in different time and different year, underwater life is always unpredictable. We could find plethora of ghost pipe fish in one trip to Menado, and found almost none of those in another trip. I guess Thomas put it best, the sea is not aquarium. It’s never the same. I totally agree with it.
But if I were to compare it to Derawan (also has macro reputation), Mabul (ditto, to be fair when I visited there I was not a macro freak yet), San Miguel in Philippine, Alor is better for macro. In my opinion, I still hold Alor as one of the bests in macro because I think two weeks is too short to judge, and we didn’t have macro-whisperer dive masters like we had in Bali and Menado, so we counted on ourselves to find critters. We also visit ‘non-macro site’ more, probably 60-70% percent of the dives since we had to cater to majority of divers. Those macro or even non-macro sites have a lot of potentials, looking at the terrain, water temperature, corals and critters that we did found. For near future, I would pursue my macro fix to another location or annual location (Menado and Bali) but further in the future, if I had the time and budget, I would love to come back and explore more.
For big fish or pelagic lovers, you may be better off with Sipadan, Maratua, Sangalaki or Maldives. But, there is a but, few big buts indeed. Eventhough Alor is not so impressive in term of big fish down there, at least for our two weeks testimonial, it is magnificent in term of surface encounters. If we encountered dolphin on the surface three times for our perhaps five-six time visits to Menado, we saw dolphins here almost everyday, sometimes two or three times a day. We saw blue whales, and yes, yup, yes, we saw numerous mola-mola. More on these later. Another but is that if you fancy big stuff, south of Alor is also a place to go, provided you go at the right time (check with operator), some days of the certain months affected by full moon etc, and good luck of course, you could be rewarded to dive with whales, dophins, sharks etc.
Another but, in the bay itself. Bay! bay! Not open sea. Thomas had collected pictures of whaleshark, dugong and hammerhead sharks, manta rays. These are probably some of our must-see-underwater in our lifetime, although we can cross all of them except for dugong, I will not miss another opportunity of seeing them again if I have the privileges.
For the coral reef, mark my testimonial. Alor is by far has the most magnificent, beautiful, rich, diverse and pristine coral life I had ever seen all my life, it’s still relatively untouched by human. The beauty is breathtaking, and for me, I could go hours underwater and doing nothing but just to enjoy the scenery.
It’s not possible to write about every single things, so I just include memorable things about the diving:
Forgive my chicken-claw handwriting...
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