Wajag Island, Raja Ampat Regency of West Papua, Day 10

Tags

Indonesia, photography, Raja Ampat, southeast asia, travel, travelogue, underwater, underwater camera, wajag island

Somewhere between Buru Island and Wajag (and I don’t know whether it’s spelled Wajag or Wayag), we crossed the equator which I had never done by boat before. And there’s usually a big ceremony with King Neptune where all the virgins (aka people that have never crossed the equator by boat) are trotted out to do embarrassing things and drink some rum. They had such a ceremony here with a staff member dressed in fishing nets with a cardboard trident and people pushed in the small pool on the upper deck of the ship and we were given a combination of Tabasco and lemon juice to drink. Which may have been more historically accurate because of the dangers of scurvy and all, but was completely vile and left me asking, where’s the rum?

There is little information about Wajag Island on the internet, but what information you can find about it, gushes about its beauty and biodiversity. Diver, surfer, birder paradise. It’s a popular spot (as you can imagine) with drone photographers. It’s a dot on the global maps, so let’s look at a more detailed view…

The only way to get to this part of the world is by ship. If you can get to West Papua, there are live-aboard boats that run trips out to this area. At least, there used to be, what with the pandemic and all, I honestly don’t know what businesses have survived.

It’s a tangled maze of coral islands and pristine beaches with the heads of hawk billed turtles popping up to eyeball us. I think they’d hoped to find manta rays for us to swim with here, but didn’t find any. But that’s a very small note on the chance to visit such a remote, untouched place. We went in by zodiac.

This is a panorama of 4 shots and I’m pleased with it mostly because it’s hard to get things to line up in a bouncy moving boat. Though I have to admit that I’m old enough that I used to sit and do panorama stitching by hand, hours, like knitting. And now you just push a button and come back in a 5-10 minutes.

We then landed on a beach and most of the places we snorkeled, you swam out a small distance to a drop off and there was lots of room to maneuver. This was a shallow white sand cove with an abundance of stagshorn coral just beneath the surface, so you swam with a great deal of caution. I did not scrape myself, but coral cuts (because of the stinging elements of coral and all the little organisms) are more difficult to heal.