It’s better and wetter down here.
Cheapflights’ travel experts have chosen their favourite dive sites around the world – starting with a couple of home-grown favourites:
The Great Barrier Reef
We’re on home surf. The Reef is a mesmerising mosaic of colourful coral and sea life that stretches for more than 3,000km from Bundaberg to Cape York. Psychedelic, neon-coloured fish, manta rays, turtles, whales and dolphins are to be spotted here. Best time to go? Take your pick. Visibility in the winter months can be superb, but the waters will be warmer between September and December. Following the breeding season, sea life is more abundant – and hungrier – between January and April.
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Ningaloo Reef
The marine park runs for 260km from Bundegi Reef, close to Exmouth, to Amherst Point, near Coral Bay. It’s a massive space – 5,000 sq km housing, if that’s the right word, more than 200 species of coral and 500 species of tropical fish. Best time to go? If you want to swim with a whale shark, visit between April and June. If you want to experience turtle hatching season, pencil in a trip for late January/February.
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New Zealand
When legendary explorer Jacques Cousteau compiled his top diving locations around the world he included the Poor Knights Islands Marine Reserve. The Poor Knights lie off the coast of the North Island and its tunnels and caves, arches and cliffs offer a stunning variety of marine life. The sponge gardens give way to deeper waters where black coral lives and the cliffs plummet to 100 m below sea level. Several of the subtropical fishes you’ll spy can be found nowhere else in New Zealand’s waters. Best time to go? The Poor Knights are a year-round dive site but the best visibility is generally during the winter months (May to September).
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Saudi Arabia
This might be the most surprising entry, but Saudi Arabia has become more welcoming in recent years and if you do the research and get the visa there’s more than 1,600km of the Red Sea coast and 800km of the Persian Gulf to explore. The Farasan archipelago is the Red Sea’s biggest group of islands. It’s just 40km off the coast of Saudi Arabia, across from Jizan. The diving here is choice with soft, colourful corals, and several species of fish such as angelfish, bannerfish, parrotfish and pufferfish while manta rays, eagle rays and moray eels may be seen too. Best time to go? The diving here is good year-round but go early in the morning to avoid the hot summer temperatures.
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Maui, Hawaii
One of North America’s best dive spots. Molokini Crater, the marine-life park, is the island’s most popular dive site. Lying just 5km off the southwestern coast of Maui, this crescent-shaped natural wonder covers more than 7 hectares and soars 50 metres above the blue waters. It’s home to more than 250 species of fish including reef sharks, spinner dolphins and manta rays. Best time to go? The summer months, as early in the day as you can. Visibility is generally better earlier in the day and winds can pick up in the afternoon. Whale-watching is an added bonus during the winter months (December to May).
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Belize
Boasting the second-longest barrier reef in the world (after the Great Barrier Reef) and three open-ocean coral atolls off its coast, Belize is a diver’s paradise. And the Great Blue Hole is a definite on the things-to-do-before-you-die lists. If you are lucky enough to see it from above, the Unesco World Heritage–listed ocean sinkhole will put you in mind of the pupil of an eye. If you’re even luckier and are in the waters the Great Blue Hole is about 400m in diameter and drops away dramatically to approximately 145 metres. Forty metres down are the stalactites formed thousands and thousands of years ago between which several types of fish such as giant groupers, nurse sharks and reef sharks swim.
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Featured image by Ilse Reijs and Jan-Noud Hutten
