Travel bucket list ideas:
Multiple countries
Graceful, gliding, gigantic yet manta rays are an awe-inspiring sight to behold, and getting up close to these harmless filter feeders in a once-in-a-lifetime experience worthy of any travel bucket list.
Traditionally less appealing due a potentially deadly sting, (friendly) stingray encounters offer a more accessible opportunity to get up close to these bewitching fish, in just a few feet of water.
Here’s our round-up of the best places in the world to swim with them.
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Cocos Island, Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica
Bucket List Experience
550km off the Costa Rican coast, Cocos Island is a world-class dive site famous for huge congregations of rays which converge in the swirling currents welling up from deep water. Access is on 11-day live-aboard dive trips, from December to May, departing from Puntarenas.
Adult price: £1500
Min age 18
Good for age: 18+
Duration: 3 hours
Cocos Island, Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica
Bucket List Experience
550km off the Costa Rican coast, Cocos Island is a world-class dive site famous for huge congregations of rays which converge in the swirling currents welling up from deep water. Access is on 11-day live-aboard dive trips, from December to May, departing from Puntarenas.
Adult price: £1500
Min age 18
Good for age: 18+
Duration: 3 hours
Hanifaru Bay, Maldives
Growing up to 9m wide, these elegant but harmless plankton feeders are a spellbinding sight for the diver. Hanifaru Bay, a huge lagoon on the Baa Atoll Hanifaru in the Maldives, has become renowned as a global manta ray hotspot.
Mantas gather here in their hundreds, along with whale sharks and other big pelagics, to engage in a feeding frenzy on the unusually-rich plankton blooms that appear here each year from June to October.
Diving is banned in Hanifaru Bay, but if ever you wanted to snorkel with mantas, this is just about as good as it gets.
Adult price: £200
Min age 8
Good for age: 13+
Duration: 2-3 hours
Bimini, Bahamas
Bucket List Experience
Honeymoon Harbour on the small islet of Gun Cay is home to a friendly population of southern stingrays. In exchange for fish morsels, the rays will obligingly congregate and interact with you, in the shallows just offshore or from the back of the tour boat. Half-day tours, for all ages, depart twice daily from Bimini.
Adult price: £80
Min age 10
Good for age: 10+
Duration: Half day
George Town, Grand Cayman, United Kingdom (UK)
This shallow sandbar, nicknamed ‘Stingray City’, was for years a dumping ground for the unwanted catch of local fishermen. Stingrays now congregate here in their hundreds, associating boats and people with an easy meal. Today, they are so habituated to people that you can hold them (some, believe or not, appear to enjoy being tickled under their wings). It’s perfectly safe – the stingrays are bordering on tame and the water is just three feet deep.
Adult price: £35
Good for age: 5+
Duration: 3 hours
