Looking for info on caves in Indonesia

[Lenika]

Hi there!

I recently got cave certified in Spain and really enjoyed it. I would love to continue with cave diving to get more experience and so I don't forget all the techniques. However, work will have me move to Indonesia next year and right now I workm in the Maldives. Both places are pretty far from the typical cave destinations.

So I'm wondering if anyone here has info or contacts that could help me find suitable caves in or around Indonesia. There must be caves there, but I can find next to nothing on the internet about them.

Any info, anything would help. Thanks a lot for reading!

Lenika

 

[Aquavelvet]

Don't know about Indonesia, but Thailand has some pretty serious cave systems around the Krabi province, a relatively short hop away from where you'll be. I got full cave certified there last March with Blue Label Diving.


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[Makhno]

I've heard there are some diveable caves on the island of Timor, but don't really know anything about them. That part of Indonesia doesn't have a lot of tourist infrastructure, much less cave diving infrastructure. I vaguely recall reading about an Australian with a dive center that's focused on ocean diving, but can provide support to cave divers. If you find out more about the situation there, please PM me with info.

Aquavelvet is correct that there are diveable caves in Thailand, although based on my limited experience of diving 6 different caves over 4 days, I would say they are "serious caves" rather than "serious cave systems" because they were nothing like the maze of interconnected tunnels where I was trained in Florida.

There are also some caves being explored in Samar, the Phillipines, but those are rare and costly expeditions into the jungle rather than caves which conveniently available for diving. I think there are a couple of caves which are easier to access on the island of Cebu. There are presumably lots of diveable caves on the island of Mindanao, including some in the safer parts of the island where there's no armed insurgency or jihadi kidnappers. From what little I've heard, very few people other than a handful of Filipino cave divers have done any exploration of those Mindanao caves.

Not quite so close is China, where there are some caves being dived at Du An in Guangxi province. Other than a couple of articles in the diving press, I haven't been able to get much info about that situation.

I'm in Asia and started cave diving this year. I would love to do more cave diving in this hemisphere, so please PM me with whatever info you learn.

By the way, where in Spain is there cave diving? I was on the island of Mallorca a couple years ago and was told that those caves are off-limits to all but a very few cave divers. Are they more open now?

 

[Lenika]

Thanks for the info so far, this is just the kind of stuff I need. I read about Timor, but the dive center there has yet to respond.Mallorca is complicated and diving the caves is sort of illegal but not impossible. On the mainland there are several legal caves, one of which is warm water all year round (la cueva del agua in Murcia)! if you want more info I can recommend a divecenter for you.

 

[red_barbarian]

try Blue label diving for info on caves in the Maldives, they know of some. Might save on travel time and expense. Heard they were pretty deep down though.

 

[Makhno]

Forgot to mention that in the Philippines, there are a few ocean caves which you can access from the liveaboard Rags 2. I haven't been in any of those caves yet, but I can heartily recommend Rags Two as a great liveaboard. It is small, with room for 8 divers (or 9 or 10, if willing to sleep in the saloon), but is comfortable for a group that size, and is designed for technical diving. The boat and its crew and management are all excellent. At most destinations like the Coron wrecks, Rags II can accommodate both technical and recreational sport divers simultaneously. That's what my friends and I did when we chartered the boat for Apo Reef and Coron a few years ago. (Combining technical with recreational divers is not really feasible for a cave diving charter, though).

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUDzFbr-gs

Want to try to put together a wrecks-and-caves technical charter for mid-January?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5PE3mfTCb8