Go Dive Club
Kampung Hijau
Hosted by Adi
The best thing here is the size of a thumb.
Two divers to one guide, ninety-minute dives, every meal and every transfer — with a man who has photographed this sand for nineteen years.
From $165 per night, per person · everything included
Ten metres down on a grey slope with nothing on it. You hang there thinking you have made a mistake, because there is genuinely nothing to look at in any direction.
Then Adi stops, folds his hands, and points at a stone. You look at the stone. It has an eye. A second later it has a mouth. Then it is a stonefish and it has been eighteen inches from your knee for a full minute.
That is the whole island. Nothing here is big and almost nothing is where you would look. By Thursday you will be the one stopping, and Adi will hang back and let you.
You do not get better at seeing by looking harder. You get better by slowing down.
But learning to see takes days and not dives, and the days here are shaped around that. Therefore this is one of them, from the slow breakfast to the fried rice on the wall at ten at night.
The good hour on the flats is ten, so breakfast is slow.
Grey slope, ten metres down, and it appears completely empty.
Six housings open, everybody arguing about strobe position.
Five dishes in the middle, everybody reaches, nobody serves.
The ugliest site on the island and the one you will book again.
Two hours, one laptop each, and a lot of deleting.
You point. She nods. It arrives. It costs almost nothing.
You get in at grey light and come up in the dark.
Eight sites, and the best one has a car tyre in it.
None of these sites will look like much from the boat. But every one of them is a place where something specific lives, and Adi knows which sponge and which side of it. Therefore what follows is a list of addresses more than a list of reefs.
A tyre, a bottle, and two frogfish who have not moved in a year
Six metres under a working jetty. The ugliest site here and the one everybody asks to dive twice.
Shore · the village steps · All levels · 3–8 m
Black sand, and everything on it is doing an impression of it
A volcanic sand slope on the north shore. It looks empty from three metres up and it is not.
Boat · 6 min · All levels · 5–24 m
Nine seahorses on a good afternoon, and none of them move
Two to six metres of seagrass on the sheltered side. Thorny seahorses, pipefish, and long safety stops that are not safety stops.
Shore · south of the village · All levels · 2–6 m
Thirty-one species on one dive is the standing record here
A short vertical face on the far side of the strait, covered in soft coral and sponge, and covered in the things that eat them.
Boat · 15 min · Open Water · 8–28 m
The one dive here where you look outward instead of down
The edge of the shelf where the strait falls away. Big schools, occasional pelagics, and a change of scale that people need by day four.
Boat · 25 min · Advanced · 12–40 m
Twenty minutes at dusk, and it is over for the day
A rubble patch that does one thing, at one time, brilliantly. Mandarinfish come up out of the coral to spawn in the last of the light.
Boat · 4 min · All levels · 4–10 m
Adi knows every one of them by shape and by sponge
A sponge-covered rubble slope where the frogfish sit. Six residents on the last count, in five colours.
Boat · 10 min · All levels · 6–16 m
A cargo boat on her side with a garden growing out of her
A wooden inter-island cargo boat that went down in 1994. Eighteen metres, on her side, and completely covered.
Boat · 12 min · Open Water · 10–18 m
Cover for every diver, and the photographs from the water — handed to you at the end, not charged, not mentioned.
If anything goes wrong, that's on us.
per night, per person · All diving · Accommodation · All meals · Airport transfers · Dive insurance · Photos & video
Plus the ride from the airport — $45 per person, charged once for the trip, not per night.
Adi grew up in this village and started photographing the strait with a borrowed film housing at twenty-two. Nineteen years later his frames are in magazines that have never sent anybody here, and he still guides four days a week because he does not trust anybody else to find the hairy frogfish. He knows the resident animals by individual, not by species.
Owner and guide
Has photographed this strait for nineteen years and knows the resident frogfish as individuals rather than as a species.
Kitchen and the night market
Adi’s sister. Cooks lunch for everybody on the floor mat and has firm and correct views about which prawn stall.
Divemaster
Found the mimic octopus at Pantai Hitam in 2019 and has kept track of it ever since.
Instructor
Teaches the buoyancy day. Has never once made anybody feel foolish about needing it.
Boat
Reads the tide for the jetty dive. If he says wait twenty minutes, everybody waits twenty minutes.
You come out with eight photographs, not four hundred →
Ten dives and five evening sessions, shooting the same handful of subjects until they are right. Housing and strobes included if you do not have them.
On black sand this is not a nicety, it is the whole dive →
Two dives on trim and control in the seagrass, then one on the black sand to prove it. The single most useful day anybody spends here.
Nineteen years of shooting this exact sand →
Three afternoons on the deck with Adi and your own photographs. Strobe position, back-button focus, and why your black is grey.
Forty stalls and one of them is the one →
Two streets, forty stalls, no English on any of them, and somebody who will order the things you would never have pointed at.
Flat water, mist off the mangroves, and the fish traps going out →
A kayak across the lagoon at half five while it is still cool, through the mangrove channels and back before breakfast.
Green lights over black water, for four miles in both directions →
Out with the fleet after dark, hand-jigging under the lamps, in among a line of boats that is visible from the top of the island.
Six hundred metres of water under you and a line to hold →
Out to deep water after dark on a lit downline. Larval fish, pelagic octopus, and animals that only come up at night.
Adi’s own frames, printed and signed at the counter →
Eight of Adi’s photographs from this strait, printed on rag paper at A5, in a paper folder. Signed at the counter while you wait.
That is everything, including the prints. But the week is longer than the dives, and here the hours in between are spent in somebody’s actual village rather than behind a gate.
The shop is a house with a compressor in the back of it. Lunch is on a mat on the floor of Adi's mother's kitchen. The walkway to your room goes past four families having their evening.
You are not in a resort and there is no version of this week where you are. That is the entire reason the diving is what it is: the people guiding you live two hundred metres from the jetty and have their whole lives.
And the logistics are gone. The boat from the ferry terminal is Pak Hasan. Your room is open. The tide table for the week is already on the wall with the jetty dives marked on it.
“I spent four days photographing the same frogfish and it is the best diving decision I have ever made.”
— Guest, April
“Ninety-minute dives in six metres of grass. I did not know diving was allowed to be this unhurried.”
— Guest, August
“He looked at my screen, said "get lower", and walked off. Three days later I understood the whole sentence.”
— Guest, January
House over the water
The tide comes in under the floor twice a day →
Built on poles at the end of the village walkway, with a deck that hangs over the lagoon and a table on it big enough to strip a housing on. The tide comes in under the floor twice a day and you will hear it.
Rooms
The plainest bed on the island and thirty seconds from the tanks →
Six plain rooms behind the shop under the mango trees. Air conditioning, a bed, a fan and a hook, and the camera table is thirty seconds away through the garden.
Suite
A dry bench, four sockets and a dehumidifier that actually works →
Built for people who travel with two housings. A proper dry bench with lighting and four sockets, a dehumidifier that keeps the room under sixty percent, and a deck facing the mangroves for the last of the light.
There are no big animals. No mantas, no sharks worth the word, nothing that will make a non-diver gasp at a photograph. If what you want is scale, the money is better spent somewhere else and Adi will say so on the phone.
Some of the best diving here happens under a jetty next to a car tyre, in six metres of water, with rubbish on the bottom. People arrive and are visibly disappointed for about ten minutes. Then somebody points at a bottle and there is an octopus in it.
And it is hot and it is slow. The middle of the day is unusable. If a packed schedule is what makes a holiday feel worth it, this island will feel like it is wasting your time — right up until the evening you realise you have not looked at a clock since Tuesday.
So you know exactly what this island does not have. Therefore what is left is how many days, which room, and whether you want the camera bench.
From $165 per night, per person
5 nights · 2 guests
40% deposit · $960 now · balance 30 days before you arrive
Confirmed within 24 hours · a person, not an email
Dates move. Cancel free. If anything goes wrong, that's on us.
The trip you didn't take. The year you said next year.
On the last evening one of your photographs goes through the little printer behind the counter and onto the shop wall for the season, and you will pretend that does not matter to you the entire way to the airport.
The late start
The good hour on the flats is ten, so breakfast is slow and it is meant to be. Rice, sambal, a fried egg, and coffee that arrives already sweet whether you asked for that or not.
The lagoon outside is flat and the colour of a bottle. Two boys are pushing a boat off the mud. Somebody's radio is on in the next house and has been since six.
Adi sits down with a laptop and shows you three frames from yesterday, and one of them is yours, and it is better than you thought it was. That is how most mornings start here.
First dive
Grey slope, ten metres down, and it appears completely empty. That is the whole trick of this coast and it takes most divers three days to stop believing it.
Adi swims a metre off the bottom with his hands folded, stops, and points at a stone. You look. It is a stone. You keep looking and the stone has an eye. Then a mouth. Then it is a stonefish and you are far closer to it than you would like.
Within forty minutes you have seen four things you would have swum past on day one. Within four days you will be the one stopping, and Adi will hover behind you and let you find it.
Surface interval
Six housings open on a wooden table with a towel over it, o-rings drying, and everybody arguing about where the strobes should be.
Adi does not lecture. He looks at your back screen, says one thing, and walks off. It is always one thing. Move the left arm forward. Get lower. Stop shooting down.
By Wednesday somebody's photograph goes up on the wall in the shop, printed on the little dye printer behind the counter, and the person it belongs to will not admit how much that matters to them.
The long middle of the day
Five dishes go in the middle of a mat on the floor and everybody reaches. Nobody serves you and nobody asks if it is too spicy, and after two days you stop wanting them to.
There is fish, there is something green and bitter that you will end up craving, and there is a chilli paste that Adi's mother makes in a quantity that suggests she does not entirely trust the outside world.
Afterwards everyone lies down. The heat between one and three is not survivable standing up and nobody on this island pretends otherwise.
Second dive
It is six metres deep, it is under a working jetty, and there is a car tyre in it. It is also the best square hundred metres of water in the strait and everyone who dives it knows this by minute ten.
Everything that needs somewhere to hide lives here. Octopus in bottles. Juvenile lionfish under the pilings. A pair of frogfish that have been on the same tyre for two seasons and have been photographed by more people than most politicians.
But there are boats over your head and there is a current through the pilings on the ebb. Therefore this dive happens at slack water with a flag on the surface, and it is the one site here Adi will not let you do alone.
Before dinner
Two hours on the deck with the fans on, one laptop each, everybody going through four hundred frames to find six.
Adi walks past and stops behind chairs. He is brutal in a way that never feels unkind: that one is soft, that one has a fin in the corner, that one you have already taken eleven times this week. Then he stops at one and says nothing for a second, which is the highest praise available here.
The light goes at about half six and it goes fast. Somebody shuts a laptop and says they are going to the market and within a minute everybody is going to the market.
Evening
Two streets, forty stalls, and a smell that is charcoal and fish and burnt sugar all at once. You point at a thing. She nods. It arrives.
The prawn stall at the top end is the one to find and there will be a queue at it, which is exactly how you find it. Further down there is a woman making a green pancake on a flat plate who has been in the same spot for thirty years.
Adi eats here most nights and he will take you the first time and stop taking you after that, because after the first time you do not need him and he knows it.
Last dive
You get in while there is still grey light in the water and you come up in the dark, and the site changes completely underneath you while you are on it.
The mandarinfish come out of the rubble in the last ten minutes of daylight to spawn, which lasts about twenty minutes and does not wait for anybody. After that the sand starts moving: bobbit worms, hunting octopus, and crabs the size of a fingernail carrying anemones around like luggage.
Come up, get the tank off, and there is fried rice waiting on the wall in a paper cone because somebody sent one of the boys out for it while you were down.
3–8 m · Shore · the village steps · All levels
Six metres deep, under a jetty people are actually using, with sunlight coming down between the boards in strips. There is rubbish on the bottom and the rubbish is the point: every bottle, tyre and rope end down there is somebody's house.
Two giant frogfish live on the same tyre and have done for two seasons. Octopus fold themselves into bottles and pull the sand over the mouth. Ghost pipefish hang vertically in the weed at the edges, and you will need Adi to find your first one and nobody after that.
But there is traffic overhead and the ebb pushes through the pilings. Therefore it is slack water, a surface flag, and never alone — the only hard rule on this island.
5–24 m · Boat · 6 min · All levels
A slope of black volcanic sand running from five metres down past twenty-four, with almost nothing standing up on it. New divers get to the bottom, look around, and quietly wonder what they have paid for.
Then the guide stops. Flamboyant cuttlefish walking on the sand on two pairs of legs, purple and yellow and the size of a thumb. A mimic octopus flattening itself into a flounder and swimming off. Seamoths, in pairs, always in pairs.
The sand here is fine and it comes up if you touch it, and it stays up for ten minutes. Therefore buoyancy on this site is not a nicety — a diver dragging fins ends the dive for the four people behind them.
2–6 m · Shore · south of the village · All levels
Six metres at the deepest, which means the dive ends when you get bored or hungry and not when the gauge says so. Ninety-minute dives are normal here and nobody comments on them.
The seagrass is a nursery. Everything in it is a juvenile version of something you have seen as an adult on the wall, at a tenth of the size and twice as strange. Thorny seahorses hold onto blades with their tails and let you get close enough to count the rings on them.
Go in the afternoon when the light is coming across rather than down. Adi will tell you the same thing and he will be right.
8–28 m · Boat · 15 min · Open Water
A face maybe eighty metres long, from eight metres down to twenty-eight, and every square metre of it has something growing on it. Where there is sponge there are nudibranchs, and there is sponge everywhere.
Thirty-one species on one dive is the record and it is written on the shop wall with the name of the diver and the date. Somebody tries to beat it most weeks. Nobody has since 2023.
Bring the longest bottom time you can and the closest lens you own. This is not a dive where you cover distance — the whole wall is done in sixty metres of swimming and ninety minutes of not swimming.
12–40 m · Boat · 25 min · Advanced
Twenty-five minutes out to where the shelf ends and the strait goes properly deep. It is the only site on this island where you spend the dive looking outward.
After four days of photographing things the size of a grain of rice, a school of two thousand fusiliers doing one turn together is genuinely disorientating. People come up from this dive quiet.
There is current and it is real, and the shelf edge is where it accelerates. Therefore this is a live-boat drift with a marker, and it is not run on the first two days of anybody's week.
4–10 m · Boat · 4 min · All levels
A patch of broken coral in seven metres of water that looks like nothing for twenty-three and a half hours a day.
In the last twenty minutes of light the mandarinfish come up out of it — orange and green and blue, the size of your thumb, rising in pairs a foot off the rubble, dropping back. It happens every evening. It happens fast. It stops the moment the light goes.
Get in early, get settled, do not use a bright torch, and do not move. Everyone who has ruined this dive has ruined it by getting excited at minute two.
6–16 m · Boat · 10 min · All levels
A slope of rubble and barrel sponge where the frogfish have decided to live. There were six on the last count and Adi knows all of them — not by species, by individual: which sponge, which side of it, which one moves and which one has not moved since March.
The hairy frogfish is the one everybody wants and it is on the sand at the bottom of the slope, and it walks. Actually walks, on modified fins, at about a metre an hour.
This site is why people come back a second year. The animals are individuals here and after a week you will have opinions about them.
10–18 m · Boat · 12 min · Open Water
Thirty-one metres of wooden cargo boat that took on water off the point in 1994 with everybody off her. She is on her starboard side in eighteen metres of sand and there is nothing left of her that is not covered in something.
Soft coral has taken the whole port rail. Batfish hang over the open hold in a group of nine and follow you around the wreck like they have nothing else on. There are scorpionfish on the deck that you will kneel on if you are careless.
She is small enough to swim twice in one dive, so most people do — once wide for the shape of her, once close for what is living on her.
Runs Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
Three sessions, two hours each, using nothing but the frames you took that morning. There is no slideshow of somebody else's work and there is no theory that is not immediately about a photograph you have already taken.
Session one is light: where the strobes go and why yours are in the wrong place. Session two is focus, which is the thing that is actually losing you shots. Session three is editing, and it is mostly Adi teaching you to delete.
He shoots this sand for magazines and has for nineteen years. You are not getting a generalist. You are getting somebody who knows what a hairy frogfish looks like when it is about to move.
Any evening except Monday
You go with Adi's sister, who has eaten here every week of her life and has firm views. The route is not negotiable and it starts at the bottom of the hill so you are hungry by the time you reach the prawns.
Seven or eight things across three hours, sitting on plastic stools, sharing everything. Somewhere in the middle there is a fruit you will not have met before and will not be able to buy at home.
One evening is enough. After this you will go on your own for the rest of the week, which is the entire purpose of doing it once.
Half five, every morning
Half five and the lagoon is a mirror with mist sitting on it. The fish traps go out at this hour and you paddle past them being emptied, which is the only traffic you will meet.
The mangrove channels at the back are narrow enough that you put the paddle down and pull yourself along the roots. Kingfishers. Mudskippers on the banks doing something aggressive at each other. Complete quiet apart from that.
You are back on the deck by half seven with wet shorts and breakfast in front of you, and the whole day has not started yet.
Dark of the moon only
They go out at eight and the lamps go on at nine, and from the hill above the village the whole strait turns into a string of green lights.
On the boat it is loud, wet and slightly chaotic. You jig by hand on a short line and you will catch something within about ten minutes because there is a great deal of squid and it is not subtle.
One warning nobody gives you: they ink. You will be inked. Wear the shirt you were going to throw away and do not lean over the bucket.
Twice a week, flat nights
The boat runs out to where the chart says six hundred metres, drops a weighted line with lights down it, and you dive next to the line in mid-water with nothing below you.
What comes up is the strangest thing most divers ever see. Larval fish with fins twice their body length. Paper nautilus. Juvenile octopus riding jellyfish. Almost all of it is transparent and almost all of it is smaller than a coin.
Two divers at a time and a dedicated safety diver on the line. It is not a difficult dive but it is a disorientating one, and therefore Adi will not run it for anybody in their first three days.
Starts most Sundays
Ten dives over five days and you will shoot maybe six subjects the entire time. That is deliberate. Adi's whole method is that you photograph one frogfish eleven times over four days until you understand what changed.
Evenings are on the deck editing, and the last evening is a print. Everybody chooses one photograph and it goes through the printer behind the counter and onto the wall of the shop for the season.
Housings and strobes are here if you do not own any. Nobody is going to sell you a camera on this island — Adi's opinion is that the third-best camera and the right position beats the reverse every time.
Any day, on request
Two dives in six metres of seagrass working on weight, trim and breathing, and one on the black sand at the end to see whether it stuck.
On this coast it is not a refinement. Fine volcanic sand comes up if you so much as look at it and it stays up for ten minutes, and a diver with their fins down ends the dive for everybody behind them.
Instructors who have taught for years take this. Nobody is embarrassed about it here, because everybody has watched a hairy frogfish disappear into a cloud somebody else made.
On the counter
Eight photographs, all of them taken within two kilometres of the shop, printed here on rag paper and put into a plain folder.
He changes the eight every year and the old sets are not reprinted. The 2023 folder had the hairy frogfish mid-step on it and people still ask for that one.
He will sign them at the counter if you ask and he will look mildly uncomfortable while doing it, which is a reasonable price to pay.
House over the water · 30 m²
The tide comes in under the floor twice a day
Built on poles at the end of the village walkway, with a deck that hangs over the lagoon and a table on it big enough to strip a housing on. The tide comes in under the floor twice a day and you will hear it.
Rooms · 22 m²
The plainest bed on the island and thirty seconds from the tanks
Six plain rooms behind the shop under the mango trees. Air conditioning, a bed, a fan and a hook, and the camera table is thirty seconds away through the garden.
Suite · 48 m²
A dry bench, four sockets and a dehumidifier that actually works
Built for people who travel with two housings. A proper dry bench with lighting and four sockets, a dehumidifier that keeps the room under sixty percent, and a deck facing the mangroves for the last of the light.
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