North-east of Gili Meno
Turtle Heaven
A mound climbing from thirty metres to ten, with green turtles resting on top of it.
North-east of Gili Meno
A mound climbing from thirty metres to ten, with green turtles resting on top of it.
Turtle Heaven runs parallel to the shore of Gili Meno as a steep coral slope, and everything on the dive orbits one feature: a large central mound climbing from about thirty metres to within ten metres of the surface.
Green turtles use the top of it as a resting place. They settle onto the coral and let cleaner wrasses and surgeonfish work them over — which is why the divers who hang back and stay still get the good version of this dive. Hawksbills graze the soft corals higher up the slope.
The slope itself is busy: octopus, cuttlefish, peacock mantis shrimp, anemonefish and moray eels, with coral propagation structures on the site pulling in more. Below thirty metres there are bommies where reef sharks, groupers and eagle rays pass through.
What you come for
Because the mound tops out inside ten metres, Turtle Heaven works for beginners as well as it does for Advanced divers. A first-timer spends the dive shallow on the top of the mound while a deeper group takes the bommies at thirty to thirty-five metres — same site, two completely different dives.
A 15-minute boat ride from the dive centre, and a dive for every level from beginner to advanced.
Never promised, never scheduled. Mantas, mola mola and whale sharks are not resident in the Gili Islands — when they turn up it is luck, and we would rather you dived here for the reef.
Nowhere else in the Gilis do you get to watch a green turtle being cleaned at ten metres, with all the time in the world and no decompression clock running in the back of your head.
The same for every site on this list.
Diving works all year here. April to October is the dry season and gives the clearest water, with September, October, May and June the sweet spot; July and August are the busiest. November to March brings plankton and less visibility, and with it a better chance of something big passing through.
Small groups, four divers to a guide, and a crew that picks the site by the conditions rather than the timetable. Message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you what the water is doing today.
Book on WhatsAppEvery site on this page is dived from Gili Air, most of them within a fifteen-minute boat ride.
