Exploring Alor’s Archipelago

Exploring Pulau Alor

Recently we had the chance to have a little getaway from Bali. Yes, even though we live on a paradise island, we like to escape once in a while to explore other islands of the archipelago. This time we have set foot on Pulau Alor which is one of the most eastern island of Indonesia, right above Timor Leste.

In the past we had quickly sailed along Alor and did 3 dives in the area on board a liveaboard, so we knew there was a great potential to the place. This time, we went for a longer period as we stayed at one of the only 4 dive resorts of the area. This area is full of life; unspoiled islands and reefs.

Here’s what our little getaway looked like :

Before we headed to Alor we fell in love with an Instagram account of Kevin Richter, a great german photographe who has given us a lot of inspiration and contributed to our excitement to head to Alor.

Let’s go for an early morning breakfast before heading down the jetty where all our equipment was awaiting for us. (We are use to be working with guests, but this day, we were the guests, which was a strange feeling … we loved it! :)). On the way to Pura Island, a pod of dolphins were playing in front of our boat. Yes, even at 30 years old we were like kids mesmerized by those great mammals.

Our first dive site was at Red Sand Bay on the North of Pura island, where a giant volcano emerge from the water. Under water we could see some bubbles escaping the red sand and in between some areas of the reef. These are due to a few fissure at the surface to let geothermally heated water to escape. What stunned us at first was actually how great the visibility was.

During our little escape we had done quite a few different dives sites which showed us : paddle flap rhinopias, weedy rhinopias, painted frogfish, thousands of anthias, multiple different type of nudibranchs, leaf scorpion fishes, stone fish, mandarin fish, different types of pipefish and seahorses … How spoiled and lucky can we be? Well, apparently, this is just a normal day of diving in this area of the archipelago. 🙂

The day before departing, we organised a tour to visit the village of an Abui Tribe, which was situated on the North-East coast of Alor Kecil. The architecture and the organisation (layout) was completely different from other villages visited in Indonesia. As we were the only tourist in the area, we had the chance to chat a little bit with the chief of the village and even have him roll us a complete “organic” cigarette (not that we are smokers but it was an interesting experience to have him work a form of leaf to smoothen it to become the rolling paper and take the tobacco that he had just finished drying from his plants that was right next to us).

Looking forward for our next visit in August 2018, but this time we would like to bring you with us 🙂

Check out all the details on our next trip to Alor and the different dates we have available for 2019 (May and August),