Bali and Lembongan
I flew to Bali on January 7, 2016 with some dear friends, one I went to high school with and in a strange way our lives paralleled to the point that we ran back into each other a few years back and I am now his son’s nomadic ‘uncle’. The child is the cutest monster I’ve had the pleasure of watching break everything. They invited me to their villa in Sanur where time has a way of becoming insignificant.
My friend hadn’t been scuba diving in a while so I took it upon myself to invite him along and find out if he still liked it. We drove an hour north and joined up with a lovely couple from Russia. I say Russia because they’re Russian but also live in other parts of the world. They are pure class and I was honored to have lunch with them. The husband didn’t speak much English but his beautiful wife spoke English and a bit of French and acted as translator and it added a lot.
Our guide was French and he did the best he could considering there was a firm current during our first dive and we just hovered over the coral and drifted at about 2-3 knots and came up before we entered the big blue.
The second dive was also in a current zone but we maneuvered up close behind an island called Tepe Kong and found a small group of juvenile White Tip Reef sharks hanging out under a crag. We watched for a while before ascending up through some leaning boulders and out into another beautiful soft coral slope.The dives weren’t long but still enough time to get my friend’s feet wet and he came up all smiles and ready to go again in the near future.
I arranged to stay at Big Fish Diving on Lembongan Island just off the coast of Bali. I hadn’t been there before but had heard great things about the diving so I left my friends and soloed out on a Glory Express Boat (ph. # 081-139-9765) that takes about an hour from Sanur, Bali. I had emailed Big Fish to book a bungalow at Secret Garden Bungalows and all my dives. www.bigfishdiving.com +62 081-353-136-861 or email at info@bigfishdiving.com.
The grounds were clean and there was a pool out my front door. I had asked to do an afternoon dive the day I arrived and off we went straight into it. Lembongan has been a surfing hot spot long before it was a diving hot spot and now many are attracted to it for whatever reason. People can take a Glory Express boat over for the day or a few days depending on your schedule and what you want. It’s a little cheaper if you know when you are returning but in all fairness, it’s not worth the schedule to force a return.
Many of the dives around Lembongan and Penida are drift dives meaning you are in 15-25 meters of water and moving at 2 knots, more or less, with the current passing between the three island triangle off the coast of Bali. Some of the dives are a little trickier than others but the guides will access your ability and chose your dive sites accordingly. In four days I dove 10 times with only one repeat dive from the opposite end so I didn’t really notice.
Whilst out diving I met three tech divers that I was immediately interested in and attracted to for various reasons, diving knowledge, style of diving, and I do have to say beauty in one in particular, a Spanish woman working for Wicked Diving out on Komodo Island. I’m still attracted to her for her knowledge of the sea and her life choices among other reasons. Unfortunately I feel she’s out of my league but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to learn from her or her friends.
I did little exploring of the island. I didn’t have a motorbike or anything, I was just there to dive and 10 dives later I felt I had just begun. There is a bridge that joins Lembongan to the next island so everything becomes accessible.
At Big Fish Diving there were some scheduled evening talks about Coral; plant or animal? There was another talk about Manta Rays and the impact man has put on the sea in general. Big Fish Diving and Blue Corner Diving among others are working on awareness for divers and conservationists across the board. There are many groups participating in research and aquatic protection possibilities. I believe the coral triangle is part of this awareness program.
I returned to Bali with little planned but went back to Diving Indo and spoke with a woman there who set me up with a dive to Tulamben, the ship wreck of the Liberty, an American vessel hit by a Japanese submarine torpedo. The boat didn’t sink when it was hit and they tried to tow is to a safe harbor to repair it. They got it as far as Tulamben and left it there. When Bali’s volcano blew in 1963 it shook and rolled the vessel on it’s side and there it has stayed growing all kinds of colorful coral. It is shallow enough to snorkel at low tide being maybe five meters from the surface and the low point being around 28 meters. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to put my GoPro footage on to Blogger yet. There seems to be a format issue so you don’t get the full affect of turtles and colorful corals but I can make stills. That’ll have to do for now.
I went back to Bali for a few more days visiting old friends and new. One of my friends has been living there for a few years building surfboards and surfing when it comes up. I was with him and a group of college mates on a surf trip around the Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra.
I did get to Ubud and a viewpoint to see the volcano but unfortunately it had changed too much for me to take a picture. I pushed biked the Indonesian main islands back in 1989 when Ubud was a quaint little artist town surrounded by rice fields and jungle. It is tethered to Sanur by houses and shops now.
It was a short trip to Bali that really worked well with my visa breaks. I got out of Thailand the day before my Thai visa expired and I returned to Thailand a week before my two month Thai visa expired entry. Here we go.
