A tiny sandbar-fringed island where the coral reef starts right where the sand ends, no boat required.
We’d already spent two days chasing dragons around Rinca by the time our boat driver in Labuan Bajo mentioned Kanawa. “No dragons there,” he said, almost apologetically, like it might disappoint us. It didn’t. After two hours of open water on a wooden boat, watching the hills of Flores shrink behind us, we pulled up to a sliver of white sand so narrow you could see both shorelines of the island from the boat. Lia was in the water before I’d finished tying my shoes to my bag.
That’s the thing about Kanawa — you don’t need a dinghy, a dive guide, or a scheduled excursion to see the reef. I just walked in from the beach, mask already on, and within maybe twenty meters the sand gave way to a wall of coral, hard branching staghorns crowded next to soft corals swaying with the current. A whole school of small silver fish parted around me like I was nobody’s business, which, out there, I wasn’t.
We ended up staying the night at one of the handful of simple guesthouses on the island — nothing fancy, a fan, a mattress, a shared bathroom, and dinner of grilled fish that the owner’s son had caught that same afternoon. We ate it on a wooden table with our feet basically in the sand, watching the boats from Labuan Bajo pack up and leave for the day, the noise of the national park’s more famous stops fading with them. By the time it got dark, Kanawa was just us, the guesthouse family, and the sound of water.
What struck me most, thinking back on it, is how Kanawa doesn’t try to be Komodo or Rinca. It sits outside the zones where the dragons roam, and it knows exactly what it’s there for — swimming, snorkeling, floating on your back and looking at nothing but sky. After days of trekking in the heat looking for lizards, that was exactly the pace Lia and I needed.
When to go: We went in July, squarely in the dry season that runs from April to December, when the seas around Kanawa stay calm and the water clears up enough to see the reef from the surface — worth timing your visit for if snorkeling is the whole point.