The snorkeling at Black Swiss is excellent. If I had to compare it with snorkeling I’ve done everywhere else in the world except Raja Ampat, well, it’d be right up there near the top. However, if I were to redo our six weeks in Raja Ampat, I’d skip Black Swiss and slot in Meos Ambower (also don’t miss (we did) snorkeling at a mangrove reef in the Pam Islands, perhaps Mangrove Reef (?)).
Looks great, doesn’t it? So what’s the complaint? Well, the only (non boat) accessible snorkeling at Black Swiss on Pulau Barie is all facing the same direction (north). We had a lot of wind from the north while we were there bringing waves and poor visibility. Everywhere else we stayed had more choice as far as exposure.
Blue-green chromis, now blue:
now green:
You can see it wasn’t always poor visibility. All those were taken straight out from the Black Swiss Homestay.
Check out this tiny lionfish, hanging out in shallow water near shore.
Yorris and his wife, Megan, run Black Swiss. They only had one functional bungalow when we were there, but they were working on getting others fixed up for the (hoped for) post covid tourism recovery.
Yorris’ combination of species knowledge and English made him probably the most informative local we snorkeled with. However, I think we only got in the water with him once. His snorkel gear was in Sorong for much of our stay.
I should add that Yorris screwed up (cancelled with no notice) two excursions that we had planned with him. Additionally there wasn’t quite enough food (and limited to rice and potatoes) for a couple days before he went to the market in Sorong. After that though we had some of our biggest and best meals in Raja Ampat.
Yorris lives in the village of Arefi, and he took us one day to snorkel the West Arefi site which ended, not surprisingly, at the west end of the village.
Nice site. We spent a few minutes walking around the village.
In the opposite direction from the homestay (to the east), passed a couple fancy “eco” resorts, Yorris took me to the fantastic snorkeling at Pulau You.
Dang, that was nice! And if that wasn’t enough, I saw the only walking shark (Raja Epaulette Shark (Hemiscyllium freycineti)) that I saw during the day in Raja Ampat (I had two better sightings at night).
You can see most of it here from the tail almost to the head which is hidden under the pinkish soft coral.
We only had good enough visibility once to head all the way over around the NW corner of Pulau Barie.
There it seemed to be one group of anemonefish after another, often in very shallow water. I did find one anemone hosting quite a few small translucent crabs (porcelain crabs?). It was a beautiful purple carpet anemone in about 8-10m of water — no photo. 🙁
For another excursion Yorris took us to the Ranger site, only about 1km east of the bungalow. Jens had told us it was the best coral he had seen in Raja Ampat. Unfortunately the sun wasn’t out, and the visibility wasn’t great when we were there. We did, however, get to hang out with three cuttlefish for about 20 minutes starting right when we got in the water.
That ended up being Ferda’s best cuttlefish sighting of the trip.
This might give a little idea of the coral,
but it seemed to be all about the anemonefish again — a number of different species!
Since we still hadn’t seen an octopus after over a month in Raja Ampat, Yorris took us on a night snorkel to Pulau You where he could almost guarantee we’d see an octopus (over 90% of the time). Ferda and I saw cuttlefish — a different species than we had seen before — almost as soon as we got in the water. We saw another epaulette shark, a large flounder, multiple crabs including an anemone hermit crab which hosts an anemone on its shell. We didn’t find an octopus, but Ferda was absolutely thrilled with the bioluminescence (“fairy dust,” she said) as she followed me around after her light died.
Also at night just near the homestay I watched spiny lobsters out walking around. That was great since during the day, this is about all you see:
On one of my last snorkeling sessions at Black Swiss I found sweepers for the only time. They were hanging out in dense groups near the reef dropoff.
We arranged for Yorris to take us from Black Swiss to Kri, our last stop in Raja Ampat. On the way he had us snorkel at Pulau Wai. The currents were too much to fully enjoy it, but, wow, there is one incredible reef after another in Raja Ampat!
Looking at these photos it’s hard to believe we were really complaining about Black Swiss, isn’t it?
Your blogs on Raja Ampat are incredibly helpful thank you. Do you mind me asking about tipping etiquette in Raja Ampat, did you tip the homestay or boat staff and if so did you do this as you went along or at the end of tje stay?
Hi Karen, there’s no culture or expectation of tipping in Raja Ampat (or in Indonesia in general based on my six months experience of traveling there). That said in Raja Ampat in two of the places where we stayed a week we gave a little extra at the end of our stay to the person who did the cooking for us.