Ali Baba – Fakarava (Tuamotu)

Site Overview

Ali Baba is a coral pinnacle rising from the lagoon floor within Fakarava's UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, offering divers of all experience levels a charming and productive dive site that is particularly renowned for its excellent night diving opportunities and its reliable encounters with schooling fish and green turtles. The pinnacle itself is a thriving reef structure that rises from the sandy lagoon bottom to within a few metres of the surface, creating a vertical habitat that concentrates marine life in a relatively small area and provides excellent viewing opportunities for divers circling the formation at various depths. Schools of snapper form dense aggregations around the pinnacle, their golden bodies creating shimmering clouds of fish that patrol the water column above the coral structure in search of small prey items carried by the gentle lagoon currents. Green turtles are regular visitors to the pinnacle, grazing on the algae and seagrass growing on the coral substrate with their characteristic methodical feeding behaviour that allows patient divers to observe them at close range. Parrotfish of various species graze continuously on the coral structure, their powerful beak-like mouths crunching through calcium carbonate in an audible display that carries through the water as they perform their essential ecological role in maintaining reef health. The site's calm conditions and moderate depth profile make it one of the best night diving locations in Fakarava, where torch light reveals a completely different ecosystem with sleeping reef fish, hunting crustaceans, and active nocturnal predators emerging from their daytime hiding places.