Raja Ampat is also one of the few major reef systems whose health has broadly held up, and in places improved, over the past two decades — a period in which the world lost 14% of its living coral between 2009 and 2018, according to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network’s most comprehensive assessment. Raja Ampat is one of the clearest examples anywhere of that logic working in the ocean’s favor: a reef system whose visitors arrive by small boat, pay for its protection, and leave the coastline exactly as they found it. But if the reef’s best defense is being seen, then the greenest seat in the house might genuinely be a bunk on a boat — and liveaboard diving, done the Raja Ampat way, is about as close as sustainable diving gets to paying its own way.