Togian Islands

Nothing about diving here moves fast. The dive bases are small operations attached to bungalow resorts on Kadidiri and neighbouring islands, and the boats are wooden and unhurried. A typical day is two dives with a long crossing built into at least one of them, plus a house reef you can walk into whenever you like. Power often runs on a generator for part of the day, rental kit can be thin enough that bringing your own regulator and computer is the safer plan, and schedules shift with weather and boat availability.

The three reef types are not a technicality; they produce genuinely different dives. Fringing reef off the bungalows gives easy shallow coral and most of the macro. The barrier and atoll reefs further out are long, gentle swims in shallow water, with the fish rather than the terrain doing the work. The walls, Una Una's above all, are the only dives with real depth under them, falling into clear water with schooling fish holding on the corners — and reaching them is a crossing measured in hours, not a hop.

The two things people travel here for sit at opposite ends of the effort scale. The bomber is an undemanding dive in itself: open sand, no overhead, and enough of the airframe holding its shape to swim the length of it and read an aircraft rather than debris. Identification of individual wartime losses in this part of Sulawesi is not settled, though, so the history attached to it is worth holding loosely. The marine lake is not a dive at all — a boat, a short walk through forest, then a snorkel — and it fills a morning rather than a tank.

This suits divers who are travelling anyway and want the islands as much as the diving: people crossing Sulawesi overland, or anyone content to spend days getting somewhere. It does not suit a short holiday, because the journey eats time at both ends and most visitors find a week on the islands is about the least that makes sense. Carry enough cash for the whole stay, as banking is scarce and unreliable once you leave the mainland, and expect phone signal to come and go by island.