SCUBA DIVE LOVER · EVERY REEF, WRECK & WALL
Find your next dive.
Reviews of the best scuba diving trips on earth, coast by coast. Red Sea reefs and Cozumel drift walls, Great Barrier Reef day boats and North Shore shark cages, Bali manta cleaning stations and the rift at Silfra. From a first try-dive to a liveaboard week, we sort the operators so you book the right boat.
Worth the airfare
Three dives you can only do on one stretch of water.
Reefs and wrecks turn up on every coast. But diving the crack between two continents at Silfra, dropping a cage among great whites off Gansbaai, and hanging at a manta cleaning station off Nusa Penida belong to those three places alone.
Between two continents
Silfra, Iceland
In Thingvellir National Park a flooded rift runs between the North American and Eurasian plates, and you dive straight down the crack. The glacial meltwater is so clear the visibility runs past sixty metres; you float in a blue-white canyon with a wall of one continent on each side. A drysuit keeps the two-degree water out. There is nowhere else on earth you can do this.
- 1 Silfra: Diving Between Tectonic Plates – Meet on Location
- 2 Silfra: Diving Between Tectonic Plates and Pick Up from Reykjavik
- 3 Dive the Divide: Silfra Fissure Scuba Tour | Meet at Thingvellir
Cage down
Great Whites off Gansbaai
Two hours from Cape Town, Shark Alley runs between Dyer Island and its seal colony, and it is the best place on the planet to come face to face with a great white. You drop into a cage off the boat as the crew brings the sharks in close; five metres of muscle and teeth glides past the bars at arm’s length. No certification needed, just nerve.
- 1 Shark Cage Diving and Viewing with transport from Cape Town
- 2 Cape Town: Gansbaai Eco-Friendly Shark Cage Diving Cruise
- 3 Half-Day White Shark Cage Diving from Gansbaai
Big-animal water
Manta Point, Nusa Penida
Off Bali’s neighbour island the current sweeps cool, plankton-rich water past a cleaning station, and reef mantas with four-metre wingspans queue up to be cleaned. You hang on the reef and watch them bank overhead one after another. Time it for the cold season and the ocean sunfish, the strange disc-shaped mola mola, rises from the deep too.
- 1 2 Days Discover Scuba Diving in Nusa Lembongan – Scuba Initiation
- 2 5 Fun Dives in Nusa Lembongan (for certified divers) – Swim with a Mola Mola
- 3 Nusa Penida Two Dives Trip for Certified Divers
The dive everyone books
If you only get one day on the boat.
More divers reach for this one than anything else on the site. A safe, well-run first booking on a coast you have yet to get wet on.
The classics
The World’s Most Popular Dives
The Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea, Cozumel, Oahu, the Canaries. The boats and reefs divers reach for first, on the coasts they most want to get under.
Where to dive
Pick your patch of ocean.
The Red Sea for warm water and easy reefs. Cozumel for the drift. The Great Barrier Reef for the day boats. Hawaii for the sharks. The Canaries for year-round Atlantic. Bali for the big animals. Each one is its own kind of trip.
Before you book
What kind of diver are you today?
The right trip depends on your logbook as much as the coast. Three ways into the water, by where you are in your diving and how big a day you are after.
The warm-water classic
The Red Sea is where most divers fall for it.
There is a reason half the world’s logbooks open here. The water off Hurghada and Sharm el Sheikh is bath-warm and glass-clear, the coral runs right up to the shore, and the reefs teem with anthias, lionfish and the odd reef shark. Add the wrecks of the Strait of Tiran and you have a coast that suits a first try-dive and a hundredth dive equally.
See the best Red Sea dive trips →Cyprus & the Zenobia
One of the best wreck dives anywhere.
A Swedish ferry that rolled and sank off Larnaca in 1980, the Zenobia lies on her side in clear, warm Mediterranean water with her cargo of lorries still chained to the deck. Penetration routes run through the car deck for the trained; everyone else swims her flank past resident grouper and barracuda. Protaras and Paphos add easy reef dives to round out the week.
See the best Cyprus dive trips →The reason we do it
Below the surface, the noise stops.
There is a moment a few metres down when the world above goes quiet and the reef opens out in front of you: the slow wingbeat of a ray, a turtle ignoring you completely, a wall dropping away into deeper blue than you can see the bottom of. It is the closest most of us get to weightlessness, and once you have felt it you keep coming back for more.
Browse every dive trip →The Pacific
Hawaii dives big.
Off Oahu’s North Shore you drop a cage among Galapagos and sandbar sharks in the open blue; off Maui you ring the Molokini crater and trace lava tubes alive with green turtles. The water is clear, the marine life is large, and the boats run year-round. A crew that works these sites daily knows the conditions before you splash.
- 1 First-Time Scuba Diving in Honolulu + Free Videos
- 2 Oahu Shark Dive
- 3 Oahu: Shark Cage Dive on the North Shore
By experience
How far do you want to go under?
Some divers have never breathed off a regulator. Some have an open-water card and a hundred logged dives. And some are chasing the one descent they will remember forever. Tell us where you are, we will point you at the trip.
Never dived before
Take your first breath underwater.Try-dives and Discover Scuba in warm, shallow water: a few metres down, an instructor on your shoulder, your first reef and your first sea turtle. No certificate needed.
Certified and ready
Drop onto the famous dives.Open-water divers head for the headline sites: Great Barrier Reef day boats, North Shore shark cages, the Zenobia wreck off Cyprus. Two-tank mornings with a guide who knows the site.
Chasing the big one
Go where divers plan a trip around.The bucket-list descents: between the tectonic plates at Silfra, eye to eye with a great white off Gansbaai, drifting Manta Point at Nusa Penida. The dives you talk about for years.
Let the current do the work
In Cozumel you fly along the wall.
Cozumel is a drift-diving island. You roll off the boat onto the Palancar and Santa Rosa walls, and the current carries you past sponge gardens, turtles and eagle rays while you barely kick. Back on the Riviera Maya mainland, the cenotes flip the script: still, fresh, mineral-clear caverns with light beaming down through the rock. One trip, two completely different dives.
See all 34 Mexico dive trips →By destination
Pick a coast and get wet.
Hurghada for warm Red Sea reefs. Cozumel for the drift walls. Oahu for the shark cages. Tenerife for turtles and year-round Atlantic. The Great Barrier Reef for the outer-reef day boats. Nusa Penida for the manta rays.
By country
Or start with the country.
Egypt for the Red Sea, Mexico for Cozumel and the cenotes, the USA for Hawaii and the Florida Keys, Australia for the reef, Indonesia for Bali, Thailand for the Gulf islands, Greece and Spain for the Mediterranean. Pick the flag and dive in.
Plan the trip
Three trips worth booking the leave for.
Some destinations are a day out; these three are the whole holiday. Whether you want easy warm water, the most famous reef on earth, or the big-animal encounters, here is where to point a week of diving.
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