Bali 2000 Dive Trip
Note: Most of the information about Balinese culture and customs has been omitted from the following. You can read about it in the description of the trip we made last year by clicking on the Bali ’99 link. Clicking on the hyperlinks below will take you to sites operated by the named places.
On August 26th Tim Moore, Mayumi and I left for Bali. We arrived about 10:00 p.m. on the 27th due to crossing the International Date Line. We were met at the airport by a representative of Bali Hai Dive Adventures and taken directly to the Kuta Seaview Cottages Hotel in Kuta, about two miles from the airport. After having breakfast the following morning our rental car arrived and the adventure began.
Vehicles are driven on the left side of the road in Bali, and it always takes me a few minutes to get “calibrated” to that custom. Traffic in the Kuta area is particularly dense, so my calibration process involved the removal of about three rear view mirrors from parked cars in the first twenty minutes of driving. We headed out for Pemuteran on the north side of the western end of Bali, about a three and a half hour drive on winding and narrow two lane roads on which all traffic laws are considered to be merely advisory and on which the dominant (and independently minded) form of traffic is the motorcycle. These motorcycles are interspersed with over-laden trucks, a few cars, bicycles piled high with fodder, push carts, pedestrians, and the occasional local who finds the road bed to be a convenient place to rest his weary buttocks. It might be unfair to say that Tim is a white knuckle passenger, but we did have some fear that gangrene was going to set into his fingers by the time we arrived in Pemuteran. He wasn’t especially eager to drive either, however he was an excellent navigator. Early in the trip we stopped to visit the Tanah Lot Temple, the most famous and photographed in Bali. Tim and I visited the snake caves which we found to be overblown by a very great extent. Much of the drive to Pemuteran is quite beautiful with the road lying beside the beaches and running through rice fields. The last part of the drive skirts three sides of the East Bali National Forrest where we saw monkeys (mean tempered long tailed macaques) sitting beside the road. During the last twenty miles or so, we were actually able to get the speed up from about 35 mph tops to around 60 from time to time.
We arrived at the Pondok Sari (Happy Hut) Hotel in late afternoon. The Yos Dive Center is affiliated with the hotel and has a small dive shop on the premises. Tim and I made arrangements there to dive along Menjangen (Deer) Island for the following morning. The setting of the Pondak Sari is quite beautiful. This and the two flanking hotels follow the same format for their layout. Entering from the road you first encounter a parking lot and then a reception area. To the rear of the reception area is a very large garden filled with flowering plants and palm trees in which individual or double cottages are sprinkled. Between the cottages and the beach lie the dining room and dive shop. Along the beach are chaise lounges where service from the bar is available along with very inexpensive massages: $1.83/hour. We paid about $38.00/night for an air conditioned double while Tim’s single (same set up) was about $30.00. Don’t be mislead, you really can find places for under $5.00/night.
The following morning our dive gear was picked up at our rooms and we were driven to an embarkation point about ten miles away for our dives along Menjangen. Tim and I were put together with another diver from Italy while other less experienced divers went in a separate boat. We had a boat of about 35’ length to ourselves along with a dive master who turned out to be pretty good. On this and the following day we dived Eel Garden, Bat Cave, Anchor Wreck and Hanging Garden. All were really great dives along walls of varying slope. Eel Garden is appropriately named for the garden eels to be found in abundance there. Between dives our boat joined other boats with divers and snorkelers at a beach where we had a light box lunch. We paid a total of $180 for the eight dives the two of us made there. Pretty good price for diving in a famous dive area.