Japanese Garden


Japanese Garden is the whole bay east of Koh Nang Yuan. From the easier dive sites of Koh Tao this is one of my favorites. It's underestimated by many dive professionals but if you take your time to look around you will be amazed what it has to offer. It's a beautiful dive site for first timers, courses, experienced divers, for snorkelers and even freedivers.


Some instructors like to joke: it’s called Japanese Garden because there are so many Japanese divers. But as far as I know this name was given because the way they coral boulders are placed reminded the name giver to a carefully organized Japanese Garden.

First timers who are doing the Padi Discover Scuba Diving will find shallow places to take their first breaths in a confined and safe area. There they get already to see schools of rabbit fishes, sergeant major fishes and the odd, curious red breasted wrasse. For their dives, there are sandy areas between a beautiful collection of coral boulders. This is important to ensure they won’t hurt themselves and wont damage any marine life.

Open Water Diver students find easily sandy places to do their skills, learn and improve their buoyancy skills and explore the reefs.

Experienced divers love this dive site for its beautiful underwater landscape. With average depths of 12-15 m there is enough air to do long dives of an hour or more. In my many years, I had so many very experienced divers who said that their dive here was one of their best. Not because it is the most amazing dive site but because diving is so relaxing like a Sunday walk through a forest.


Snorkelers have so much to explore here. I love snorkeling here. There are some of the best coral gardens around, you can swim between huge boulders of granite rock, if you have a guide who knows his way around, he can bring you to caves, what makes snorkeling exciting. There is one cave, if you are there at the right time of the day you can experience a spectacular laser light show of sun light rays.


Freediver who love to “sky dive” along beautiful reefs, explore countless cracks and enjoy the occasional chat with a turtle, are just at the right place.

The whole bay is called Japanese Garden. But you could divert the bay into three dive sites.

To the north, you have a reef at a sloping wall. If you go outside the bay you can reach up to 16-17m. At one place there is a very old tube anemone, a very alien looking creature. I like to dive around 14-15m out of the bay. Right at the corner of the bay at 15m there is this alien looking tube anemone. Its there for many years. I wonder how old those creatures can get. 


You should look under the big coral boulders and look for stingrays and turtles. Be careful not to damage the many cable and spiral black corals. If you are very lucky you can find one of the very rare spider crabs at one of those corals. I usually turn around when the first diver reaches 120 bar and go a bit shallower. At around 8-12 m the reef is different than in the deeper area and has a more diverse coral life. Look out for porcupine and puffer fishes and banded sea snake.  

Outside the bay here is a beautiful cave at around 13m depth. It's an about 12m long swim through with a few exit points. Flooded with light rays this is something hard to forget. To go there you have to be an experienced diver who can swim fast and has a good air consumption, as it's quite far away. 

Another option to get to the cave could be to drop off at Red Rock. You might be interested to read the article about Red Rock.
In the middle of the bay you find lots of sandy areas with an average depth of 8m. This by no means a boring area. If you take your time and explore the ocean floor with patience you can find the strangest things, like snails, small stone fishes or indian walkman. Furthermore there are a few coral gardens, some being mostly of mushroom corals, other of daisy corals.

To the south, again, there is a reef at a sloping wall with a huge coral landscape around. Average depth 10-14m. The landscape is very different compared to the north. When I dive there I feel like flying through a landscape of mountains. If you go slow and check all the cracks and holes you can find moray eels, crabs, flat worms and groupers. Go outside the bay and you find a lot of fishes around the secret pinnacles. On the way back in about 5-8 m there is a small cave. Diving through there makes the end of the dive to something special.





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