There is a lot to see in the Banda Islands, a place that can bring any visitor back into the past.

The sky is a grey wash. Dark clouds hang low and ragged over a silver sea. Wind whips up white caps ahead of a storm, and sheets of rain are drawn like curtains across the water, smudging the line between sea and sky.

Beneath the water, coral gardens cover the steep slopes and walls. Pink fan corals wave in the currents, blue-tipped staghorn, pale pink barrel sponge, blue coral, plate coral, patches of branching fire, brain coral, feather stars; blues, greens, yellows, reds, browns.

Huge schools of iridescent blue and yellow fish flock past, a group of enormous bump-head parrot fish wanders overhead, lumbering through the water like bison on a prairie. Giant clams open their purple mouths in the deep.

The occasional turtle lifts a scaly head and nods at the passing divers. A striped sea snake slithers below. Bright little clown fish skit about, playing hide-and-seek among the waving green fronds of a sea anemone. And at one point an eagle ray flaps above like a lazy raptor in a clear sky.

The Banda Islands lie around 140 kilometers south of Ambon, the capital of Maluku province, and around 2,000 kilometers east of Java Island.

A tiny clutch of volcanic islands, all but lost in the middle of the sea, Banda is home to the mainly Muslim descendants of immigrants, slaves and plantation workers from the last centuries –– Javanese, Ambonese, Arab, Chinese, European and native islanders, the last of Indonesia’s spice traders.

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