Anda — Bohol

Diving here is mostly walk-in. Resorts sit above the drop-off, so a dive starts from the beach, crosses a short sand shelf and finishes along the wall without a boat involved at all, and house-reef diving is generally part of the package rather than charged by the tank. Outrigger bangkas run the sites further along the coast and out to the islets, usually as a two-tank morning, and because the coastline is one continuous feature nothing turns into a long ride.

The wall is the organising feature, and it is undercut and fissured rather than sheer, with ledges and overhangs to work along and enough shallow reef on top to spend a long safety stop over coral. Sites are told apart mainly by what lies between the wall and the shore. Some have a clean coral shelf; others a broad grey sand slope carrying the critter life, so one dive can move from wide-angle on the wall to hunting the sand on the way back in. Divers working the same stretch morning and evening rarely find the same cast twice.

What people come for is small and slow: mandarinfish emerging over rubble at dusk, night dives on the sand, an hour spent on a few metres of wall. The trade-off is that there are no schooling pelagics to fall back on and little going on after dark, since the resorts are small and the evenings are quiet. It works for divers who would rather look than cover ground, and it pairs naturally with a few days on Panglao, or a boat out to Balicasag, for the opposite kind of dive.