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John and I are back from Bali after 19 days. We did a fairly comprehensive tour of Bali covering all the good diving sites from east to west. We ended up not diving Soraya in Tulamben and PJ near Lovina but that was due to logistics and forgetting about Soraya. We did dive Gili Mimpang, Gili Tepekon, Gili Bahia, Gili Selang, Nusa Penida, the island of Menjangan, the Japanese wreck at Amed, Secret Bay at Amed, shore diving Kubu, and all the sites except Soraya at Tulamben. We ended up doing 38 or 39 dives during our trip. The most wonderful part of the trip was all the good people we met along the way. The hotel and boat crew all along our trip from Absolute Scuba, Ocean Sun Dive Shop at Tulamben, the staff at the Paradise resort in Tulamben, the staff at the Sunari Resort, and our favorite driver at the end of our trip Gede who took us down to Sanur and Kuta and finally to the airport the next day. WOW! What cool people.


In the beginning we headed down to Padang Bai and dove with Absolute Scuba at all the local and distant sites like Blue Lagoon, Gili Mimpang, Gili Tepekong, and Nusa Penida. I was pretty unimpressed with Blue Lagoon. The site has very little living coral and not very many fish. We did see some nudis but they can live anywhere with some food supply. I would skip blue Lagoon all together and dive Mimpang and Tekekong or dive Nusa Penida instead. Mimpang and Tepekong were excellent dive sites with abundant healthy corals and interesting critters. I believe it was Telekong which had the shark cave where we saw 3-4 White Tip Sharks, but the hilight of those sites was the very healthy corals, 100+ feet of visibility and the 80+ degree water temperature. Diving from the JuKung was a fun experience which I'm sure John and I won't soon forget. After diving Tepekong and Mimpang we went on a bigger boat over to Nusa Penida and trip to dive the backside where Manta Point lies. As we entered the strait between Nusa Penida and Nusa Lembongan the waves were too massive and we had to turn around. We had a few moments of panic since we didn't get any briefing on life jackets (where they are), but thankfully we turned and got out of the waves within a few minutes. John had noticed our DM wearing a life jacket under his shirt  which I found amusing later :) After we headed up the coast we found our first site and I was advised not to bring my camera for the dive due to the current. The dive was great, but the current wasn't an issue. Dive two, I got the same advice but I elected to bring the camera. We had some very strong current and we had a ripping dive down the coast. Since John and I are both experienced divers we had no issues. Some people on the boat were new divers and they had a few issues but all-in-all everyone did well. We were diving with a group of 3 Chinese from Hong Kong and a few Australians who all turned out to be nice people. The dive was excellent. Our DM deployed his reef hook at one point but there was no need. We could hide from the current behind rocks and in "sand holes" behind the rocks. I really love current diving! The final dive was pretty much the same. We saw some octos, a few turtles, a cuttlefish or two and some really nice reef fish. The next day we dove Mimpang again and Tepekong. The DM wanted to dive Blue Lagoon but I had him turn around the Jukung and head back to Tepekong for our 2nd dive. We had great dives at these sites seeing some Pelagics, Cuttlefish, a black Frogfish, a Long-nosed Hawkfish, some nudis and tons of fish and beautiful corals. I'll go into the diving at Tulamben on my next blog post.