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Book: The 50 Best Dives in Indonesia

Indonesia dive guide on Wetpixel

Authors Tim Rock and Simon Pridmore have announced that their guidebook to Indonesia diving is now available. “The 50 Best Dives in Indonesia” has full color throughout with 220 pages, maps and over 270 images. If your favorite dive site has not been included, the authors suggest that it was number 51…..

Press release

A new guide to the best scuba diving in Indonesia

The 50 Best Dives in Indonesia - the Ultimate Guide to the Essential Sites

By Tim Rock and Simon Pridmore

Indonesia is a huge country that most divers agree offers the best scuba diving in the world. Its vast archipelago of thousands of islands extends over 2 million square km of sea and acts as a porous barrier between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Indonesia connects Asia with Australasia and encompasses a vast part of the rich reef system known as the Coral Triangle.

This is scuba nirvana: home to the greatest diversity of life forms on the planet and there are countless great scuba diving sites. So many that it can be hard to choose where to start or, after you have started, where to go next. The seemingly impossible mission that Tim Rock and Simon Pridmore chose to give themselves in this essential guide was to pick the top fifty sites: the best of the best. To make the task a little easier, however, they adopted a couple of strategies.

First, they decided not to rank them in order. Which makes sense. After all, how can you assess whether a dive in the blue with half a dozen whale sharks is better or worse than a drift across a fantasyland reef-scape inhabited by millions upon millions of fish resplendent in all the colors of the universe? Second, they vowed not to be swayed by personal preference for certain types of site but to list as wide a variety as possible. And third, they wanted to make sure that all the key Indonesian scuba diving areas, from Aceh in the west to Biak in the east, are represented.

Whether you are an experienced veteran of Indonesian diving or a novice planning to visit the region for the first time, this book is for you. If you are new to Indonesia, you will find half a lifetime of sites to choose from. And, even if you know Indonesian waters well, there will still be at least a few dives in these pages that you have not yet logged, maybe never even heard of!

Not only does this book help you pick out the key hotspots in relatively well-known places like Bali, Komodo and Raja Ampat, it also introduces you to the top sites in more remote, much less visited parts of the country, such as Mapia, Maputi and Manuk. There are shipwrecks, deep walls, enormous fish aggregations, weird creatures, wild rides, ancient reefs, kaleidoscopic seascapes and even an undersea volcano.

And, as Tim and Simon say, if you don’t see one of your own favorite Indonesian dive sites listed, don’t be too disappointed: it was probably number 51!

Full color throughout with 220 pages, maps and over 270 images, this is the third volume in a series that also includes the 50 Best Dives in Micronesia and the 50 Best Dives in the Philippines.

Paperback 221 pages
eBook File Size: 129128 KB
Published by Createspace & Mantaray Publishing
Available from:

Tim Rock and Simon Pridmore are internationally published authors with decades of Indonesian dive experience and have previously worked together on the Diving and Snorkeling Guides to Bali and the Diving & Snorkeling Guide to Raja Ampat and Northeast Indonesia.

Find out more at Tim Rock and Simon Pridmore.