Bunny goes plop in Bali part I

Fantastic fish in the sea and banana leaves, beautiful mountains and beach, friendly dogs, cats, and monkeys, yoga pants and bikinis. Life can never be boring in Bali.

Fab for diving too.

Fab is one good looking dive master (@French kiss divers).

12 dives and 14 days in and around Bali. Gone in a blink.

This is the route we followed:

This is a very no nonsense (unlike all my other blog posts) outline of our diving trip around Bali. It’s divided based on the locations for easier reading / skipping (but you won’t do that, will you? 😒).

Day 1-5: Nusa Lembongan (part 1)

Day 6-7: Ubud

Day 8: Transit to Pemuteran with Munduk waterfalls on the way

Day 8-9: Pula Menjangen+Pemuteran

Day 10-13: Diving around Amed (My favourite part)

Day 14: Layover in Sanur

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Here we pop:

Day 1: spent mostly in the plane.

Day 2: arrival in Bali and transfer to the Nusa Lembongan island

First sign of organized tourism. Picture taken at the Bali airport while waiting for our luggage.

Hung out in Sanur for our boat to Lembongan. We liked Bali already.

Some serious life advice on our boat to Nusa Lembongan. Main your head. Remember that.

The only way to go around this island is a Vespa bike! From little children (locals) to rich old men (tourists), everyone is on a bike. The roads are special though. Here is a quiz for you- which of them is a road.

The answer is- both!

Since we were on the west side of the island (the east is mostly mangroves and unreachable), we knew we were in for a spectacular sunset. So on our little scooter on roads and not, we went looking for the sunset, following the sun, looking for a spot to no success. In the end, we felt dejected and decided to go back to the beach next to our hotel (Jungutbatu beach) and saw this:

The colours reflected off the little fishing village on the shore.

It looked so pretty.

It felt a bit like the Alchemist (book), where the guy goes around everywhere looking for a treasure, and finally finds it where he began from. Sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t read the book. It’s too late anyway. 😛

Day 3: some snorkeling and finding the gem of Lembongan

We snorkeled at Mangroves (diving there later was much much better).

View from the sea near the Mangroves snorkeling spot.

Our boat skipper took us to this place then. 

Warung coming. The gem of Lembongan. A Little unpretentious warung with a great view and great food.

The warung from our snorkeling boat from the sea.

Then we hunted down French kiss divers, where we did our open water course in Koh Tao and found our instructor, Greg, there! Crazy. They made us do all those scary exercises (such as removing the mask underwater) in a pool (so muddy that I could barely see my hands) first.

And then we were declared ready for some Manta rays for the next day!

Post diving refreshal test, we decided to find another sunset location. We took some pictures of Mount Agung overlooking our little island from the hillside point.

The view was explosive. 😛

There we met an American environmentalist, who was working in Bali to research on marine ecology (so cool). It was he who guided us to the Nusa Ceningan for the sunset and the view and the colours were spectacular!

We then ate at xyz restaurant on the little island watching some locals go around in the shallow sea waters (it was super low tide) with torch lights looking for … crabs? I don’t know. It just looked nice with the little torchlit spots in the sea.

A dramatic end to the day.

Day 4:

Dive 1: We went to crystal bay which was very unexciting.

Dive 2: @Manta point!

Manta rays go clean themselves here and it is a HUGE tourist attraction. I am super glad we went in very low season because Fab said there could be more than 200 divers down at the same time during high season! It’s like having 200 uninvited people coming to watch you in your bathroom. Poor mantas!

But the feeling of Manta Rays checking you out, opening their seriously large mouths (to say hello I suppose), and sweeping past right next to you, is so unreal. So alien. So beautiful.

Fab also had a really interesting story to tell – he once freed a manta ray caught in a net. The manta was preggy and as soon as she was free, she delivered the baby. Now whenever he goes there and does a particular call sign, the same manta and the baby always come to him. Isn’t that incredible?!

Manta point from the top. So serene.

 

That evening we went to the Devil’s tear to watch the sunset.

There, we saw some dramatic waves crashing into a cave and all but no spectacular sunset (at first). I was despairing and getting impatient that the sunset colours would never come. But oh they did…

in neon.

Day 5: 3 dives

All drift dives between Nusa Lembongan and Nusa Penida. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical diving in strong currents. But one doesn’t fight the current. We just let it sweep  us through pretty corals, colourful fish, and a turtle (yeah!). But somewhere during this day, we lost our underwater camera to the sea! 😭 If you find it (a Yi4k), could you please write to me? Much underwater love.

Day 6: Time for some culture in Ubud, comes in part II.