Raja Ampat is some 1,500 limestone islands off the western tip of New Guinea, in eastern Indonesia, and the diving is done holding still. The good sites are current sites: you drop in on a moving tide, hook onto bare rock and stay put while the fish pour past in walls, reef sharks below you in the blue. Mantas ride the same flow into the Dampier Strait cleaning stations, thickest from December to March. This is the richest sea anyone has measured: three-quarters of all known coral species live on these reefs, and the record for fish counted on one dive was set at Cape Kri. The current can push down as well as along, so dives are planned around slack tide, not the clock. In the shallows lives a shark that walks. The epaulette pushes across the shallows on stubby paddle-like fins into tide pools nothing else can hunt in, slowing its heart to last hours in water with almost no oxygen.
The scramble up bare limestone above Wayag, hands on rock at the end, gives you the view these islands are known for: green-crowned islets in a lagoon shaped like a star, most on a narrow stem. They began as reefs on the seabed, lifted clear by moving plates, then dissolved from above by rain and eaten at the waterline until only the stems held. South around Misool the stone breaks into flooded mazes only a small boat enters, engine off, walls closing in above you as you drift. Some of those walls carry hand stencils in red ochre, low enough for a boat to reach. Before sunrise on Waigeo or Gam, a red bird-of-paradise spreads its plumes and dances on a branch the guides know by heart. None of it is run from a distance. The Papuan villages on posts above the shallows decide which stretch of their sea is shut to fishing, and open it again with a ceremony when it recovers. The custom is called sasi, and Indonesia's marine parks were drawn around it, not over it.