On Monday, September 13th, eight of us left Honolulu for a ten day diving trip to Bali. The following is an account of that trip with a lot of help from Jeri Mullen’s notes.
The group comprised Jeri and her husband Scott, Luke and Rona Spence, Jane Ellen Bagwell, Tim Moore, my wife Mayumi, and me. Many others had wanted to go but other things such as real life got in the way. We arrived in Bali thirteen hours after departure including a forty five minute stop to switch planes in Guam.
Our travel arrangements had been made through a travel agent here, but all accommodation and diving arrangements had been made by Bali Hai Divers in Bali (diverse@indosat.net.id). Michael Cortenbach is the General Manager of Bali Hai Divers and I can’t say enough in praise of the services he and his excellent staff rendered. His vehicles met us at the airport and took us to the Kuta Seaview Cottages, close to the airport and in the beach town of Kuta where he met us. We were originally to have stayed at the Santika Beach Hotel but that had fallen through for some reason. Too bad, because I later visited the Santika Beach Hotel and found it to be a good couple of notches up the scale in both quality and neighborhood from Kuta Seaview which was certainly more than adequate and was across the street from one of Bali’s famous surfing beaches. Michael met us at the hotel and spent a couple of hours with us there giving us the low down on what we’d be doing and something about the flavor of his operation.
The next morning we were picked up for the short ride to Bali Hai’s terminal at Benoa Harbor where we boarded a fairly luxurious 90’ three deck power catamaran headed fourteen miles across the Badung strait to Lembongan Island, a little speck three kilometers by two. There were about two hundred people on the catamaran, almost all of whom were on a day trip. The ride took about 90 minutes. Nusa Lembongan is nestled against even smaller Ceningan Island and about half mile across from Penida Island. We disembarked from the catamaran to a huge floating platform where many of the day trippers stayed for intro dives, snorkeling, banana boat rides, semi-submersible rides, parasailing, etc. Our crowd and many of the day trippers boarded mini-LCVPs for a five minute ride to the beach. The shore side facility, as well as the catamaran, is operated by Bali Hai Cruises and is quite spectacularly beautiful. Take a look at http://www.bali-paradise.com/balihai/hai-tide-huts.html for the merest inkling.
The centerpiece of the facility is a uniquely shaped salt water swimming pool with an island in the middle that is connected to the pool side by a bridge. The pool is surrounded by thatch “umbrellas” and lounge chairs. There is a bar area that’s open but roofed which adjoins an encircled barbecue area where a couple of cooks work to prepare buffet lunches. A quite large roofed, open eating structure is next to the bar. Toilet and shower facilities are in a separate structure along with what serves as a registration desk and administrative area. There are six thatch roofed huts on stilts with a very attractive lounge area beneath each, and these are where we stayed. Listen up – there is only room for twelve overnight guests. Wonderful! All of this is immediately adjacent to the beach which in itself is quite beautiful. At about 1530 the day trippers begin to leave and the last of them are gone by 1630. Then things get really quiet. We ate the very good buffet lunch, stowed our gear in our huts, and boarded the boat for our first dive in Indonesia.
Things got off to a little bit of a bumpy start for the first dive but all ended well. We motored to a point about a mile from Hai Tide Huts only about fifty yards off-shore from an area where the locals were tending their crop of sea weed. We were accompanied by a local dive master and a nice French gal, Annabelle, who is an instructor. The local guy is a little full of himself which was a somewhat irritating to start with, and he gave an exceptionally perfunctory brief without letting Annabelle get a word in. The brief was something on the order of, “I know you’re all experienced drift divers. Get in the water. Hurry. Hurry.” He will forever after be known among our group as the scuba nazi.
This was a pretty wild dive and was a bit scary in the bargain for a few of us since the briefing was so inadequate. We rolled out of the boat into the water and grabbed a short line streaming behind the boat until everyone was in the water and ready. On cue we all descended to a depth of about thirty feet where we pulled ourselves across the current like crabs on the bottom to the drop-off and then went down the wall to around 100 feet. The current was ROARing. Later the dive crew said it was about 3.5 knots but I know that’s not right. I was screaming along a good deal faster than I can walk. Turning your head sideways to the current was risking loss of your mask or regulator. NOT an exaggeration. A reference I have claims the current gets up to seven knots along here. This site turned out to have been a poor choice at this particular time in the tidal cycle: There are normally upwellings of cold water along this wall. When the tide is receding there is also water cascading down the wall at points. So here we go tearing along this wall being thrown up in a column of pretty chilly water one minute and then being pushed down the wall the next. Temperature changes of as much as twenty degrees can occur. Scott got pushed down to 125 feet without realizing the depth he’d reached and learned that his regulator breathes harder at that depth. Poor Jane Ellen didn’t understand that the boat would follow our bubbles and stay above us. She thought we’d have to swim back to the boat. Even Mark Spitz on his best day wouldn’t have had a chance against that current. Anyway, she got a little excited and hyperventilated a bit. She was a really relieved girl when we got to the surface and the dive boat was awaiting us.
The dive itself was great. We saw literally tons of fish we hadn’t encountered before and the corals and sponges were fantastic. We saw a couple of sharks, one black tip and one white tip.
Back at the huts several of our party got one hour massages for about $6. During the course of the evening we let Annabelle know that we weren’t terribly enamored of the dive nazi and we never saw him again. We also made her aware that we often dive together and are a pretty cohesive group, familiar with each others’ abilities, accustomed to communicating with each other beneath the surface, and quite able to take care of each other. She quickly got the idea that what we needed from her were good briefings and guidance to the topography, flora, and fauna. From there on it was superlative diving in a highly congenial atmosphere. Unfortunately, neither she nor her successor seemed to know much about identification of the flora and fauna in English. As a result, we saw lots of beautiful stuff that we can’t tell you much about.
That dive site is called Blue Corner and is also called Jurassic Point. We dived it twice more during our four days on Lembongon and could have dived it every day for a month. Tim dubbed the dive itself “The Roller Coaster” and that’s a pretty fair description. Except the ride is different each time and the topography you traverse changes from dive to dive depending on the currents. The real attraction here at this particular time of year is the giant ocean sunfish. This is a big, dumb lookin’ dude shaped like an overgrown silver dollar standing on edge with one long dorsal and one long anal fin – 10’ from top to bottom. Immense! We managed to see four of them on our last dive at this site. There is a large hole in the wall with a sandy bottom. Dropping into the hole, you’re out of the current. We found eleven black rays or marble rays in this hole. They ran five or six feet across and seemed pretty unconcerned by Scott and Tim sticking cameras in their faces.
We dived four other locations while staying on the island, all along the shore of Nusa Penida and about twenty minutes by boat from our quarters. Most of these were drift dives although much more sedate than those at Blue Corner. There wasn’t one place along the walls we dived where you could lay a hand without putting it on magnificent corals and sponges. We saw endless razor corals two feet long as compared with perhaps four inches here. I didn’t know that anemones grew so large or in so many colors. The clown fish dwelling among them are pretty brave. Scott and Jeri were attacked by them several times. One bit Jeri’s glove and she had to shake her hand pretty vigorously to get it off. Of course, they’re so small they’re completely harmless. Several times we encountered lion fish that had to be eight inches in length – usually in pairs. On one dive the current carried us in one direction along the wall for about thirty minutes and then reversed. Neat!
During the evenings we’d have dinner by candle light on the well tended lawn at Hai Tide Huts or at the restaurant of another place near by. Meals throughout Bali are exceptionally inexpensive. On the island our breakfasts and lunches were included in our packages. Dinner there rarely ran to $10 for two. It was only a little higher at the alternative place we went. As the only guests at Hai Tide, we could use the pool whenever we wanted and it got some use for skinny dipping and one slightly inebriated party. Jane Ellen’s favorite drink was the Bananarama. There were no bathroom facilities in our huts, so we had to walk about 30 yards which was no big deal. The guys didn’t always make it that far in the dead of night ;-).
There are two villages on the island, and we visited one of them a couple of times. I indicated one of the new and nicer looking native homes in the village and asked a local how much it would cost to buy such a house. $1,250! A main source of income for the village is seaweed farming. The seaweed is eventually shipped to Europe, Japan, and the U.S. for use in the manufacture of cosmetics. The farmers get about $0.15/lb for it – dried! That’s a pretty meager living. The village is just crammed with Hindu temples. We even saw one with a small wooden, hand operated Ferris wheel in front. The major temple is atop a hill above the town and I took some photos there. It’s somewhat run down but still pretty impressive.
We learned later that Annabelle had extended her contract with Bali Hai just to stay with us. Her brother and father were waiting for her in another city on Bali and the three of them were going to tour the rest of Indonesia. On our last day of diving on Lembongan she brought along Wayan (Why-AHN) who would be our guide for the remainder of our diving. All first sons among the lowest caste in Bali (97% of the population) are named Wayan. All second sons are named Made (MAH-day), third sons are Nyoman (N’YO-man), and fourth sons are Ketut (Kay-TUT). Now for the real wrinkle: fifth sons are Wayan and the cycle starts again. The same sort of system exists among the higher castes, but they don’t associate with the likes of us so I can’t tell you their names.