Indonesia

Coral reefs are places of immense natural diversity. They accommodate some of the highest densities of animals on earth and have more species than any other marine habitat. However, the species inhabiting coral reefs are not distributed evenly through the oceans.

Standing on the beach staring out at the deep blue water, it’s hard to imagine a world so vibrant and full of life lying just a few meters away from our feet. My dive group and I shuffle slowly into the water, careful not to slip on the smooth black stones beneath our boots. With all our gear in place and a quick press of our deflators, we descend down into this beautiful wonderland hidden just below the surface.

Barely beaten tracks are an increasingly rare find for travellers in this ever more accessible world. Yet on the shores of Tomini Bay on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi, one such place still exists.

We’re swimming fast. Too fast for my liking. I’m taking heaving gulps, and I know my tank won’t last very long if we don’t slow down soon. Just as I’m about to stop and risk losing my group, we hear a rapid series of bangs coming from our dive boat in the distance. Our guide, a lithe Indonesian with pistons for legs and bottomless iron lungs, points into the blue and somehow quickens his pace.

The apparently contradictory choice of adding teleconverters to fish-eye lenses to obtain arresting “wide-macro” images has long been adopted by many rainforest and insect specialists—notably Frans Lanting, the grand master of them all—while several Japanese authors have pioneered its use in underwater photography since the last decade.

There are very few places in the world that remain unknown to the dive community. Let’s face it, scuba enthusiasts are nothing if not resourceful when it comes to finding new and uncharted waters to dive in. But chances are excellent that when you read the title of this article you asked yourself, “Buyat Bay? Where the heck is that?”

The world’s full of triangles. There’s the Love Triangle, the Golden Triangle, the Bermuda Triangle… and then of course, most relevant of all to us divers, there’s the Macrolife Triangle, that blissful figure made up by the Malaysian islands of Lankayan and Kapalai and—at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi—the Strait of Lembeh.