Our West Komodo & Alor Snorkel Safari, with Kalimaya and Alami, is one of our newer resort-based snorkel safaris, and we just wrapped our first few tours through these incredible and remote locations. Here’s a little look at how they went. More specifically, here’s how the West Komodo/Kalimaya portion of the trip went!
Kalimaya
Kalimaya is a hidden gem, tucked away in a small bay in eastern Sumbawa. We were lucky in that our group had the whole resort to themselves. Not that additional guests would have been an inconvenience at all, as the resort takes a maximum of twenty guests, and our group was fifteen.
Arrival Day
Upon arrival at the resort around 2 pm, we were treated to a delicious butterfly pea flower tea as our welcome drink, which was a welcome refreshment after our two-hour car ride from the Bima Airport. We were then served a delicious chef-prepared lunch, before which, the chef comes to the table and introduced each dish about to be served. Post lunch, we settled into our beachfront bungalows, got a tour of the lush grounds, and then settled into the comfortable loungers set around the beachside pool. We had intended to jump in on the house reef, but the winds at the time were quite high and the waves stirred up the sand, making a house reef snorkel session quite a bumpy one, not to mention a very murky one. We weren’t bothered, though, we had cold drinks and an incredible view of the ocean.
Day to Day
Each day started with a breakfast served at 7 am, followed by our boat ride to the different snorkeling sites departing at 8 am. The travel time to the different islands ranged from forty minutes to one hour. We had two dedicated speedboats for our group, both of which had a dry interior with a small marine toilet and were equipped with plenty of drinking water, soft drinks, and snacks! Even though we had unusually strong winds and large waves for all but one of the days on the water, the boats were more than comfortable and capable of safely shuttling us from place to place.
Now, having seen the wind forecast in the days leading up to the tour, I was anxious to see if the snorkeling sites would be accessible to us, but was soon comforted by the fact that the winds in this area tend to come from the south-south east direction and many of the best snorkeling sites are on the north or north west of the islands, not to mention in protected bays. After our bumpy journey to the snorkeling sites, the group was gifted flat, calm waters to snorkel in for as long as we liked! I would also like to quickly add that the winds we experienced were very out of character for the time of year that we were there. This year, wherever we’ve been on tour, has been quite unusual with weather. Nature, am I right!?
Given the longer travel times to the snorkeling sites, we decided to do two nice long snorkeling sessions each morning. With the reefs as vast as they are in the West Komodo area, we were easily able to do two ninety-minute-plus snorkels, punctuated by a little time in between to grab a snack or drink in order to fuel up for the next mighty snorkel session. We would then return to the resort for around 1:30 or 2 pm, enjoy a leisurely lunch, followed by siestas and poolside banter. The house reef is always available; however, given the windy conditions, we chose to enjoy the pool and relax after many hours of morning snorkeling.
The Reefs
I was thrilled to see how vast and dense the reefs are in this part of Komodo. While the east of Komodo, the more widely explored area, has some seriously pretty reefs, the reefs here in West Komodo were even more impressive. It seems like everywhere we went, we would jump in to find stunning hard coral reefs teeming with life, and then find that this continues for the entire coastline. In a lot of places around the world, when you swim up towards the beach or the waterline, the health of the corals starts to visibly deteriorate as a result of low tide lines and the wave action, but not here. All the places we visited had reefs that were just as robust and beautiful right up to the waterline!
Marine Life
The marine life was just as much of a surprise as the reefs were. We had all the usual suspects that you’d expect to find in Komodo, from large crocodile fish, scorpionfish, many nudibranchs, a lot of the beautiful juvenile fish species like sweetlips and angelfish. We also had several mantas passing through one of the shallow cleaning stations, as well as several turtle encounters, and quite a few sea snakes! The biggest surprise, though, was the amount and density of some of the colonies–more like mountains–of anemones. They were huge, and in just about every reef we found one of these unusually large collections of anemones and their respective fishy inhabitants. Another fantastic surprise was all the blacktip reef sharks we encountered in several of the bays. In less than three feet of water, we were finding groups of sharks that numbered twenty-plus!
The House Reef
We finally got a break in the wind towards the end of our time at Kalimaya, where we were able to jump in on the house reef. While the visibility wasn’t amazing, the experience was very much so! The reef is a mixture or hard corals and sponges mixed with volcanic sand in between. This creates the perfect habitat for juvenile fish and creatures such as scorpionfish, lionfish, nudibranchs, moray eels, octopus, and peacock mantis shrimp…all of which we were able to find in the two hours we spent snorkeling it! There’s also a resident school of batfish, with the juveniles hovering right next to the jetties pilings and the adults a bit further away on the reef.
Alami Alor
While we were all sad to part ways with Kalimaya after the amazing time we all had there, it was short-lived as we were soon sitting comfortably in Alor at Alami, excited to jump in on the next leg of our snorkeling adventure. Now, I’m not going to spend too much time writing about Alami or Alor as we’ve spent the past five years running tours to this outstanding resort, and its reputation is well established in the snorkeling community by now. I will just say that our time in Alor was pretty mind-boggling as our first day on the water gave us a pod a melon-headed whales just off the bow of the boats, followed by a pair of blue whales a couple of hundred meters from the resort’s jetty! In water experiences included the mysterious mola mola, another large school of blacktip reef sharks, followed shortly by a feeding eagle ray in the shallows, multiple frogfish, a pair or robust ghost pipefish, seven different seahorses, Mandarinfish, Spanish dancers, moray eels, and so much more!
