DIVE HAPPY

It's the youngest country in the world and still recovering from a bitter war with Indonesia, but East Timor has some world class dive sites for adventurous scuba divers

South Asian Women's Forum carries an interesting AFP article about the first tourists to go to East Timor, the South East Asian country that only claimed full independence in 2002. 3000 tourists arrived in East Timor last year and that number looks set to grow, thanks in part to the supposedly world class scuba diving off the country's coastline. From the article:

Simon Jeffery, 36, who has worked for Dive Timor Lorosae for three years leading guided dives and captaining their boat, waxes lyrical about the potential for diving in the young nation.

"Big tour organisers come out here and love the place -- it's world-class diving," he says, comparing it to Bali and Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

"The exciting thing about it is that it's all virgin territory -- there are virtually 1,000 -- or 10,000 -- dive sites out there that have never been dived before," he enthuses.

"At traditional dive destinations like Thailand and Fiji now there'll be 200 people at a site and you can't see the fish."

I'd love to get out to East Timor and see for myself - given its position within the archipelago dominated by Indonesia, there's little reason to doubt Jeffery - this area of the world boasts some of the best diving and if there are pristine reefs to discover in Timor, so much the better.

Dive Timor Lorosae can be found at DiveTimor.com, which is a pretty good guide to what the country has to offer divewise.