"Spratly Islands" a Spratly Islands Travel Page by Ekahau

The Spratly Islands are another of those wonderful remote places that get listed as a “country” on VT. The Spratly Islands are made up of about 250 small islands, reefs hunks of rocks, and reefs that connect the Pacific and Indian oceans in the South China Sea. What is really import in this real estate is that the nations in the area are all squabbling about who is the owner of these small hunks of land. Even though the Islands are spread over about 150,000 SQ/k of the south China sea all together the land above sealevel is only a few Sq/K of land.

But that being said because there is such a fuss over ownership there are VT travel opportunities. The Spratly Island by the name of Swallow's Reef has become a major Dive destination as a way of the Government of Malaysia to hold on to its claim to the sea around it. Swallow's Reef is very small about a 0.2 square/k speck but Malaysia has filled in the sea between two of the reefs with sand and rock built a runway.

The Resort is on the Swallow's Reef of the Spratly Islands is called Layang Layang and has wonderful diving and give you the VT country collector a new blue speck ( all be it a very small one on your map.

I first learned of the reef when watching Jacque Cousteau and his description of the 2,000 meter wall well I had to go. They have seen and recorded over 3,300 species of marine life in the area and with an average visibility of 50m you can see a lot of them. The reefs and the walls have just spectacular corals some of the most imprssive I have seen anywhere in the world.