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Pacific Ocean highlights
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Australia's Great Barrier Reef
The world's longest barrier reef stretches more than 2,300km along the eastern coast of Queensland, Australia. With over 1,500 species of fish and 400 species of coral, as well as a great diversity of other marine life, Great Barrier Reef dive sites are an explosion of colour and beauty.
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Fiji Islands
The islands of the Fiji archipelago are part of one of the largest and most extensive reef systems to be found. The main attraction for divers is the abundance and variety of soft corals, which form incredibly colourful and lush landscapes. The archipelago is often called the soft coral capital of the world.
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Galapagos Islands
Diving in the Galapagos cannot be compared to many other dive destinations. Although the islands are located directly on the equator, the water can get cold. The sea life is abundant, with a bizarre mixture of cold and warm water species, including sharks, sea lions, rays, turtles and even penguins.
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Cocos Island, Costa Rica
This is one of the few places on earth where you can get really close to hammerhead sharks. The remote island of Cocos, and its surrounding seamounts, boast a rich array of pelagic marine life. In addition to hammerheads and giant Pacific manta rays, divers find massive whale sharks and vast groups of silky sharks.
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Sipadan
The island of Sipadan, off Borneo, is so small that you can walk right around it in about 10 minutes. But the diving along its steep, underwater walls is spectacular. Amongst the most famous marine residents of Sipadan are the hundreds of chevron barracudas, that form vast silvery tornado-shaped shoals, and the numerous turtles that come ashore each night to lay their eggs.
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Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea is located north of Australia and, with its remote dive locations, extreme depths and open-ocean conditions, is best suited to experienced divers. The rewards can be great though, with spectacular reefs and shark encounters, famous World War II wrecks and only small numbers of other divers.
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Hawaii
Diving in the Hawaiian Islands is more famous for its underwater landscape than for its coral reefs. With strange underwater formations, such as lava tubes and caverns created by volcanic eruptions, the dive sites of Hawaii are pretty unusual. The Big Island of Hawaii is probably best known for night-time encounters with feeding manta rays.
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Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean highlights
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The Bahamas
The islands of the Bahamas are as spectacular underwater as they are above the surface.
Grand Bahama island features unique diving experiences with sharks, dolphins and shipwrecks.
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Belize
Boasting the second-longest barrier reef in the world, Belize is an exciting Central American dive destination. Belize offers great shore-diving in crystal-clear waters, with nurse shark, stingray and whale shark encounters on the menu.
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Bonaire
The marine park which surrounds the entire island of Bonaire has carefully preserved its coral reefs since the 1970s. They are home to an incredible amount underwater life - the island apparently boasts six of the ten most diverse dive sites in the Caribbean.
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Cayman Islands
The Cayman Islands are home to some of the most renowned diving in the world, with the island of Grand Cayman being the best known. From its world-famous ‘Stingray City’ to some of the best wall diving in the world, this location has a lot on offer.
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Cozumel, Mexico
This is Mexico's most popular diving destination and for good reason. Most of the trips around Cozumel feature drift dives, making diving a bit like watching an underwater movie as you drift past the reefs and marine life.
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Florida Keys
Apparently, the Florida Keys are the most-visited dive destination in the world. The Keys are perhaps most famous for their wreck diving, from historic shipwrecks run aground in an earlier era, to modern ships sunk intentionally as dive attractions. But with excellent underwater visibility and plentiful marine life, there’s a lot more to see if shipwrecks aren’t your cup of tea.
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Indian Ocean and Red Sea highlights
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The Red Sea
The unusual marine environment between the Arabian Peninsula and the continent of Africa offers unique diving and underwater life. The Red Sea boasts a diversity of more than 1,000 fish and 200 coral species and you can dive everything from shallow coral gardens to deep vertical walls and large intact shipwrecks.
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The Maldives
The Maldives consist of more than 1,100 coral islands and atolls that stretch across the middle of the Indian Ocean. Seawater moves in and out of the atoll lagoons at an impressive rate and currents here can be very strong. But with the currents come plankton and following the plankton come some of the biggest plankton-feeders in the sea, manta rays and whale sharks.
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South Africa
South Africa provides a unique opportunity to combine world-class game viewing on safari with some of the world's best opportunities for white shark encounters.
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