Diving in Papua New Guinea

Kimbe Bay. For fanatical divers like me who devour books, magazines and television programmes about our sport, those words have an almost mythical resonance. Like Raja Ampat, a famed archipelago 1,400 miles to the west, off West Papua in Indonesia, those percussive syllables set the heart racing.

They signify a subaquatic Shangri-La, an enchanted place with neither tides nor currents where sharks, barracuda and even killer whales swirl around coral “bommies” (isolated outcrops) and sea mounts rising through gin-clear water, where the reefs are pristine, the ecosystem undamaged and the white sand bottom is occasionally interrupted by the hulk of a Second World War Zero fighter.

Look on the map and Kimbe Bay truly exists – sheltered in the crook of the Willaumez Peninsula on New Britain island, north of Papua New Guinea, seemingly a stone’s throw from Queensland, Australia. At its eastern extreme is Mount Ulawun, an active volcano and the highest mountain in the Bismarck Archipelago; to the west is cradling Cape Hollman with its flooded crater, Lake Dakataua. There could not be a more epic backdrop for a scuba-diving Shangri-La.

The problem, of course, is that you have to get there. It is 13 hours’ flying time from London to Singapore, followed by a six-hour flight to Port Moresby, the turbulent capital of Papua New Guinea – and the journey still isn’t over. “Smoking and the chewing of betel nut is prohibited on all Air Niugini flights,” warned the cabin announcement on the remaining 90-minute hop by propeller plane to Hoskins, and the near-mythical world of my imagination finally seemed real.

From the shack of an airport at Hoskins, it was a further hour by road to Walindi Plantation Resort. Not surprisingly, given the distance and expense of getting there, this collection of bungalows scattered through Edenic gardens attracts only the most hardcore British travellers. It is a haven for scuba geeks, from the communal evening meals where discussing the day’s diving is mandatory to the breakfast room with its library of scuba magazines and books, where the walls are covered in photographs of marine flora and fauna.

Over dinner, Gary Kulisek, the flamboyant dive operations manager, checked my diving credentials and promised me the experience of a lifetime. It would be a three-tank dive, he said, explaining that we would dive the Bradford Shoals, North Emma Reef and the Japanese Zero plane wreck in a day, with intervals on the boat in between. My diving partners would be Bill Johnston, a 71-year-old American, and Martin, one of the local divemasters. At the Bradfords, a pair of volcanic sea mounts way out in the bay, there was a shock – a current. On a lollopy sea, with our small launch drifting next to MV FeBrina, Walindi’s liveaboard boat, we waited for the tide to turn. By the time we were in the water, the current was minimal and we dropped down the anchor line into a miasma of plankton – jelly-like strands that drifted by, a tantalising snack for deepwater predators – to alight on a coral pinnacle covered in green corallimorphs, anemone-like creatures with a potent sting.

It was an inauspicious start, but as we skirted the first sea mount, its sides dropping vertically to the sea floor hundreds of feet below, the topography was spectacular and the sealife vibrant. There were clouds of damselfish, fairy basslets, butterfly fish and pink anemone fish, while in from the indigo haze came predators: big-eye trevally, snapper and tuna, but alas no sharks.

Ascending from 100ft or so, a safety stop was necessary to allow absorbed nitrogen to leave our bloodstreams. As we hung on the shotline in royal-blue water, the grand finale unfolded. Suddenly we were surrounded by batfish, striped exotics the size of bicycle wheels, swirling around us in formation. Then Martin pointed to my right. A school of barracuda had joined the maelstrom, circling us like a flight of silver arrows.

Back on board, we swapped our empty air tanks for full ones and set off for North Emma Reef. At first I thought the ochre mat on the water’s surface was floating weed, but it was the exposed top of the reef which plunges away on all sides into the inky blue. The flat reef is joined to a “bommie”, or pinnacle, by a “saddle” of coral 130ft down. Swimming the length of the main reef wall, clinging to the precipice like wingsuit flyers soaring along a cliff, we headed for that saddle. The water was the clearest I have seen, the visibility exceeding 120ft, inducing vertigo. On the deep saddle was a forest of gorgonian sea fans, like giant golden ferns, next to a colony of feathery crinoids, or sea lilies.

As we neared the bommie, with its thickets of staghorn coral, it resembled a hillside covered in thistles and bracken, framed by indigo water. Hiding in the roots were tiny clown anemone fish (think Nemo), including the rare skunk, white bonnet and tomato varieties, the last a shade of deep orange. We swam through swarms of miniature violet reef fish, and larger ones coloured lemon yellow, fluorescent orange and black. Mesmerised, my breathing became slower and we drifted languidly back along the bristling coral wall, tracked by beady-eyed barracuda and plate-sized trevally jack hovering out in the blue. In this tepid wild aquarium, we used up our air pottering 6ft down beneath the boat. There were no sightings of sharks or killer whales, but the experience was meditational, almost spiritual, making it my best dive ever.

The sunken Zero fighter beckoned, just 50 yards from shore, where the Japanese pilot managed a controlled landing after getting lost and running out of fuel in 1944. Though not an epic dive it is a rite of passage, something you must do at Kimbe Bay. Within a minute of entering the water, there she was, intact on the sand at a depth of 55ft. We inspected the cockpit controls and pilot’s seat, the nose cone and propeller, then the wing flaps. Hiding under the wing, was a massive lobster, antennae quivering, as if guarding this ghostly relic of the Indo-Pacific theatre of war.

Back on dry land I met Cecile Benjamin, the Australian who, with her husband Max, set up Walindi Plantation Resort 25 years ago. “It’s aesthetic diving,” she said, after hearing about my day of Technicolor coral and knockout visibility. “That’s why 20 per cent of our clients are Japanese; they appreciate the aesthetics. Another 20 per cent come from Europe, but we’ve had fewer Americans since the downturn. Australians have filled that gap.”

On the main island of Papua New Guinea, I spent a couple of days diving at Tawali, a charming eco-dive resort on the East Cape where most of the guests were expat Australians working in Port Moresby. One was in the military, another worked for the Australian government, but everyone I dived with had one other thing in common: they were heavily into “muck diving”, an esoteric specialism that lies at the polar extreme of what Papua New Guinea has to offer.

It takes place on featureless, often muddy, seabeds, sometimes littered with human detritus such as bottles. “Macro” life, a menagerie of small animals referred to as “critters”, is drawn to the shelter provided and thrives in these nutrient-rich habitats. Creatures such as pygmy seahorses, nudibranchs (sea slugs) and the “wonderpus” (a zebra-striped octopus) are highly visible on a flat, bare seabed. The weird, wonderful and downright ugly of the animal kingdom are on display, luring aficionados.

The world’s muck-diving hot spots are the Lembeh Straits, off Sulawesi in Indonesia, and Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea. At Tawali, close to Milne Bay, I tried to get to grips with this relatively new pastime, a difficult taste to acquire for fans of aesthetic diving. From the dive boat Explorer, I dived at a site called Lawadi, accompanied by Albert, Tawali’s eagle-eyed underwater guide. On a gravel slope just off the beach, he showed me creatures virtually invisible to the untrained eye: ghost pipefish (like spiky, horizontal seahorses); cockatoo waspfish (resembling a brown leaf); tiny, snow-white porcelain crabs; leafy file fish; black-saddled toby; napoleon snake eels; silver sweetlips; spine-cheeked anemone fish; and a hermit crab hiding inside a coconut husk. In just 3ft of water, with the seabed dappled by a thermocline (the blur where warm and cooler water meet) we spotted a lone barracuda.

In a rest between dives, Albert noticed a pod of what could have been dolphins 100 yards from the boat. “Pilot whales!” someone cried, and we jumped in a fast skiff and sped out to meet them. With a mask and snorkel only, I flung myself into the water to see two cetaceans, magnified by the refraction of light through water, disappear beneath me. On an outing to identify macro sea life, we encountered these large mammals – proof that, in the surreal marine playground of Papua New Guinea, anything is possible.