The Week My Husband and I Went Off the Grid – A Raja Ampat Liveaboard Without the Kids

I’m a school nurse in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and until this past February I hadn’t been out of contact with my children for more than one night since our oldest was born in 2013. That changed on a Tuesday morning when my husband Dan and I stepped onto a wooden boat in Sorong, Indonesia, and I watched the last bar of signal on my phone fade somewhere past the harbor wall. I spent months worrying about the wrong things before that trip.

The trip was for our fifteenth anniversary. Dan has been a certified diver since college and had talked about Raja Ampat for years, usually while scrolling photos at the kitchen table after bedtime. I don’t dive. I snorkel, cautiously, and I get queasy on the Tennessee River. We booked it anyway.

Raja Ampat, if you haven’t heard of it, is a scatter of about 1,500 islands off the far eastern edge of Indonesia with the highest count of fish and coral species recorded anywhere on earth. There are no hotels worth mentioning. The best reefs sit hours apart across open water, so visitors see the place from small boats that travel between islands overnight. A journey through Raja Ampat is often defined as much by the nights spent moving between islands as by the dives themselves, and Neptuneliveaboards.com is part of that Raja Ampat liveaboard format, where the vessel serves as both accommodation and the link between remote sites. Our boat carried eleven guests and a crew of fourteen.

The Mistake I Made Before We Left Sorong

I’d promised my mother I would text her the boat’s full itinerary once we reached Sorong. The hotel there had decent Wi-Fi. But we landed at 4:40 in the morning after twenty-six hours of flying, and I fell asleep in my clothes, and the next thing I knew we were on the boat with no signal at all. By Thursday my mother had phoned the operator’s office in Bali twice, convinced something had gone wrong, and a very patient woman named Ayu relayed a message to us by satellite phone. Dan thought it was hilarious. I didn’t, at the time. (My mother still brings it up at Sunday dinner.)

Print the itinerary and put it in the hands of whoever has your kids before you fly.

What the Boat Was Like

We traveled on the Neptune One liveaboard, a two-masted wooden phinisi built by hand in Sulawesi, with cabins smaller than our guest room but with real mattresses and a bathroom of our own. Dan brought the same yellow dry bag he’s owned since 2009, the one with the cracked buckle he refuses to replace, and it sat on the cabin floor all week because there was nowhere else for it. A cook named Wayan baked bread at five each morning, and I could smell it through the door before the coffee was out.

The days ran on a loop I found comforting after the second one.

• Coffee on deck before six, while the guides talked through the first site
• A dive for Dan and a snorkel for me, then a breakfast that was far too large
• The boat moving to a new island around midday
• A second and third session in the water through the afternoon, if the current allowed it and nobody had gotten too much sun
• Dinner at seven under more stars than I have ever seen from a Tennessee backyard

The Morning I Stopped Being Scared of the Water

I need to tell you about Wednesday, because that’s when the trip turned. I’d spent the first day clinging to the ladder, and the guide, a man from Waigeo named Yohanes, had been kind about it but clearly unimpressed. On the second morning, he took me to a bay on the north side of an island whose name I never learned, told me the coral started about three feet down, and then just floated beside me without saying anything. I put my face in. And the whole floor of the sea was moving. Fish in colors I’d only seen in my daughter’s markers, a clam with a purple lip, a turtle the size of our coffee table, and a reef shark that passed underneath so casually I forgot to be afraid until it had gone. I stayed in for an hour and forty minutes. Yohanes had to wave me back to the boat for lunch.

Raja Ampat liveaboard snorkeling turned out to be most of the show, at least for me, because the coral sits so close to the surface. Dan, meanwhile, was doing three dives a day and coming up with stories about manta rays lining up at a cleaning station like cars at a drive-through. Raja Ampat diving is what he’d waited a decade for, and he says it beat the Red Sea. I believe him.

What It Cost Us, in Real Numbers

I’ll be plain about money. The Raja Ampat diving liveaboard week came to $6,870 for the two of us, which covered our cabin, every meal, all of Dan’s dives and my snorkel sessions, the park fees, and every mile the boat moved. Flights from Atlanta through Doha and Jakarta added another $2,340. We paid the boat off in June, eleven months after booking.

• The price felt enormous until I added up what a week at a beach resort in Mexico had cost us in 2022, with dinners and excursions included, and the gap was closer than I expected.
• Anyone thinking about liveaboard diving trips in Indonesia should check whether nitrox and the marine park permit are included, because some boats don’t include them.

The Digression About the Bread

I keep coming back to Wayan’s bread. It wasn’t fancy, just a soft white loaf with a crackly top, but somebody got up at five every morning on a boat in the middle of nowhere to make it for eleven strangers, and by the fourth day I’d started setting an alarm to be on deck when it came out. The loaf was usually gone by half past six.

What I’d Tell Another Mom

The kids were fine. My mother was not, but the kids were fine, and according to her they’d stopped asking about us by day three. I came home to 214 unread messages. Dan is already talking about a Raja Ampat scuba diving trip in two years, with our oldest, who’ll be fifteen and certified by then if the pool course in Chattanooga goes the way he hopes.

I was wrong about the seasickness, by the way. The patches worked, and the boat moved mostly at night. I felt worse on the flight home than I did all week at sea. What I still haven’t worked out is whether I’ll be able to hand my phone over completely again, or whether the week only worked because I had no choice.