Backside of Jesus
I had heard that diving in this new country was good because during the Indonesian occupation, people didn’t have access to explosives so they couldn’t fish with dynamite. So much of the coral is unspoilt.
So I wasn’t disappointed with the coral on my first (and only) dive in Dili at the Backside of Jesus (that’s the name of the dive site behind Cristo Rei statue). There weren’t many fish to see. The most significant things were one moray and one shrimp.
It is probably an average dive for some people. But as I’ve been so spoilt with my diving experiences, I decided against doing the second dive which had been described as “similar”.
To be fair, not many world capitals have diving just off the main road! Other divers say that this was the least interesting of their dives, and that other dives had been only slightly better. We’ve also been told that Atauro Island would be much better. But since I have Alor Island and Gili Trawangan on my itinerary, I decided that one dive in Timor Leste was adequate.
Dive Timor Lorosae; the dive operator
I dived with Dive Timor Lorosae; they were handily located. Everything was reasonably well organised and there were no surprises with equipment or anything else 🙂
They were very cool to let me play things by ear and not to commit to two dives on the day. It’s not their fault that the fish weren’t there.