Candidasa

Last flight of the day. Singapore to Bali.

I love Indonesia. It’s been a while since I was last here (2.5 years!).

Not the nicest welcome. At midnight. And passport queue larger than the room allows for. It took over an hour. Awful.

Then over an hours drive to the hotel. And finally almost 3am, bed time. Not forgetting ginger tea first, which they served when I got here!!

Thursday 2 May 2019

Today is a day of nothing. Nothing being swimming, walking along the beach, sitting.

The hotel is amazing. Easily one of the best I’ve stayed at. So quiet. So pretty. No hassle. And a huge room of four rooms.

I usually don’t like Bali. But it’s been growing on me recently. Lots of vegan food. And pretty places to stay.

Today is a nothing day. Swimming. Eating. Walking along the beach. That’s all I did. I haven’t done nothing for a while and it was great.

I had a tofu and tempeh curry for dinner. It was amazing – something different from the plain vegetables and rice of Bhutan for the past few weeks.

Friday 3 May 2019

I’m going diving today. This is partly why I stayed in the eastern corner of Bali – so that I can dive in Tulamben.

After breakfast of a smoothie bowl and fruit, I was picked up at 8am for the one hour drive north, to Tulamben.

We stopped off in a couple of places enroute, to look at rice fields, the volcano and to buy some rambutan! It was a really clear day, so the view of the volcano was great.

Tulamben beach is famous for a wreck dive that can be accessed from the shore. The ferry is laying just a few meters offshore from around 9-22m deep. It’s on the list of top 100 dives in the world (which I’m slowly ticking my way through…!).

I was the only person, so had the guide to myself. As we were there fairly early it wasn’t too busy and we did a 95 minute dive (as we weren’t limited by the rapid air consumption of other people!).

It was ok – it wasn’t too much of a wreck anymore, instead it was covered in corals and basically looked like part of the reef. We saw a few nudibranchs and a few small schools of fish. But nothing that exciting.

However, when we came up, it was chaos. So many people. Probably near 100. Lots of day trips come over to Tulamben from all over the island (which is a very long drive for some!).

We had lunch at the cafe on the beach. Just gado gado, but it was so delicious!

Then a short drive south to another beach, ready for another dive.

This was a muck dive. Diving on a sandy slope, looking for small things hiding in the sand / small bits of coral / rubbish. I like this kind of diving.

We found harlequin shrimps, a boxer crab and some cool nudibranchs.