Salaya Beach Houses, Dumaguete and Apo Island

Located in the southern Visayas, along the heel of Negros Island, the waters around Dauin and Dumaguete continually provide some of SE Asia’s best encounters for critter-loving enthusiasts. Its gently sloping sand plains, dotted with coral patches, are home to the rare, the bizarre and the ugly. From yawning frogfish to camouflaged ghostpipefish, mating flamboyant cuttlefish to hunting coconut octopuses, Dumaguete is a dream location to start crossing off things on that diving bucket list. Other critter highlights include thorny and pygmy seahorses, exotic nudibranchs and flatworms, velvet ghostpipefish, Ambon scorpionfish and mating mandarinfish.

Apart from muck diving, nearby Apo island is surrounded by coral walls and bustling reefs, and makes a great day trip. Just 30 minutes on a traditional Filipino banca, divers visiting Apo Island can see large schools of jacks, plenty of turtles and the occasional roaming pelagic, a testament to the conservation efforts that have protected these reefs for so long. Keep an eye out for the volcanic gases bubbling up through the sand - it is not every day you can say you have dived a geothermal vent.