remote & beautiful ...from Wikipedia Located off the northwest tip of Bird's Head Peninsula on the island of New Guinea, in Indonesia's West Papua province, Raja Ampat, or the Four Kings, is an archipelago comprising over 1,500 small islands, cays, and shoals surrounding the four main islands of Misool, Salawati, Batanta, and Waigeo, and the smaller island of Kofiau. The Raja Ampat archipelago is the part of Coral Triangle which contains the richest marine biodiversity on earth. The name of Raja Ampat comes from local mythology that tells about a woman who finds seven eggs. Four of the seven eggs hatch and become kings that occupy four of Raja Ampat biggest islands whilst the other three become a ghost, a woman, and a stone.
I haven't been, but was recently at Wakatobi in SE Salawesi. It was spectacular, particularly underwater!! I've heard the Raja is starting to suffer the effects of too many live-aboard dive boats. So visit before it's ruined!
Never got around very extensively in Indonesia,...just a few places while working for company doing subcontracts in offshore oil industry. Sure would like to visit more, but it got real uncomfortable there for Americas after our stupid incursion into Iraq. We had an all Indonesian crew working for the company I was working for,...real great bunch of guys, hard workers.
Indonesia's treatment of West Papua's natives and it's resources is horrendous; that is political and should be stated. However Raja Ampat is spectacular and the marine life is stunning; tourism indeed has it's negative effects and that is not being sufficiently addressed to fully mitigate the issue. Many of my diving colleagues have worked there and relayed their experiences.
In many areas over in SE Asia I was appalled at the plastic container trash that was just casually disposed of in the waters, by the uneducated native people. I say uneducated in that they were never taught to care, or did not realize how they were effecting the future of their sea resources. In many cases they had never taken any opportunity to view their underwater world. Even our more advanced civilization has often applied a 'out-of-site, out-of-mind' approach to mass dumping at sea.