Month: December 2019

The Coral Triangle is a rough triangular area that starts with the Philippines in the north and runs southwest along the east coast of Borneo where it then follows the the southern chain of islands in Indonesia to the Solomon islands where it then heads north west up the coast of Papua New Guinea back to the Philippines. What's the significance of this obscure triangular shape that is really more blob than triangle? Within this imaginary boundary lies what marine biologists refer to as the global epicenter of marine biodiversity. This area only occupies 1.6% of the world's oceans but it holds 76% of all known coral species. Basically what this translates to is hyper-dense and diverse reefs which is home to thousands of different marine creatures that range from tiny nudibranchs, six of the seven species of sea turtle, both species of manta ray, lakes full of stingless jellyfish, shoals of fish, and everyones bucket list animal—the whale shark. What does all of this translate to? A seemingly endless supply of predictably epic snorkeling! Even though the Coral Triangle area occupies less than two percent of the worlds oceans, it is still a massive area and literally full of islands. Indonesia alone has over seventeen thousand and the Philippines has nearly eight thousand. I suppose technically you just just pick a point at random within this magical blobby triangle in the tropics and have a pretty good chance of the snorkeling being awesome, but we wouldn't recommend that. There are some destinations which may be better for divers as the reef and marine life start a bit deeper, while there are others areas which are really more suitable for snorkeling because the reefs and marine are quite literally at the surface. Here's a quick break down of areas we