No, it is not just a way to say “A very long beach”, it is actually a stunningly beautiful five mile long beach covered with white sand. The sands texture is not like powder but closer to unrefined sugar, but definitely pristine. With each step along this stretching beach, you can hear the sand squeak beneath your feet. And you can walk for hours.
At one end of this beach, stands a small fishing village. Five miles later is a small guest house. In between these two manmade settlements, is Mother Nature`s sugar coating, sand! It would be a long walk back from the guest house if you realized you had forgotten to buy sugar from the village!
Not far off the very middle of this five miles of sand, just below the surface is a collection of coral bommies, each coral formation is like a piece of bread crumbs leading you to the main reef. I would not claim that this reef structure is five miles long, but it`s pretty long. Every dive that I`ve made there so far has been drift dives only in one direction, for no less than an hour.
I am yet to find the end of the coral garden. The reef runs parallel along the beach and reaches up towards the surface water, lapping 10 meters above. Scattered around the low covered coral formations, you will suddenly find large boulders erupting with brain coral.
This reef is blessed with a lot of puffer fish and blue spotted rays gliding just above the sand looking for a safe place to tuck in and hide. Another creature, a little bit more difficult to spot, but even more beautiful is the Jan`s cleaning pipefish, half blue and half red. They hide under corals and wait for a fish to enter in their cleaning parlor. Sometimes they don`t even mind cleaning a diver`s hands.
There is one specific place in this coral garden which I love most. It`s an area flooded with small yellow snappers. Somewhere in the middle of the cluster of fish are Diamond fish hiding and a big school of Batfish. I love taking divers there and seeing their amazement by this amount of fish surrounding them. Every time I am there I find myself being amazed over and over again.
At some points, diving there is like tracking through a rainforest, blowing bubbles in between forests of whip corals sticking out from the bottom. Some of them are quite long and twirled in beautiful spirals.
One of my favorite underwater creatures has also created a home there – the cuttlefish. They are amazing creatures which have been the inspiration for designs like submarines and jet skies.
Not so easy to spot, since they are able to blend in quite well with their surroundings. Same goes for the scorpion fish, this lazy fish just lies on top of corals waiting to strike a passing fish. You can pass right next to a scorpion fish without even noticing it was there.
If I continue naming all the fish and corals that one can see there, the list would become seriously long. One suggestion, come and see it yourself!
