Misool Island, Indonesia Jun 11, 2022

Misool Island, Indonesia

You may think finding a tropical paradise that"s still largely untouched by people is merely a pipe dream. You may be wrong. Raja Ampat, an archipelago in the province of West Papua, Indonesia, has a mere 64,000 inhabitants, and they all live on or around its four main islands—Batanta, Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo. (In fact, the name Raja Ampat means "Four Kings" and derives from an ancient legend that says four young kings were hatched from dragon eggs, one ruler for each of those main islands.) The rest of Raja Ampat is made up of about 1,500 smaller islands and cays—and astonishingly, hundreds of these tiny islands have yet to be explored by humans.

© Elsy Saldek/Getty Images

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