It was time for a new adventure as we are on our way to Pemuteran, a small city on the northwest side of Bali to spend a week of diving. The trip took about 2 1/2 hour on windy roads through small villages doted along the coast and through Bali's second larges city Singaraja before arriving at our destination the Adi Assari Resort.
We arrived at the hotel and were met by sunshine, which we had been waiting for after all the rain and thunder showers, and best of all a sandy beach (the Tulamben beach area was just rocks)! After an afternoon in the sun it was time to dive, at the resort we found the dive centre Sea Rovers.
I was met with big smiles and laughter and this is how it was every day! I would be diving without Jorunn the first two days as she was out with a cold, we had some very good dives and my dive guide Made was great at finding things and we had lot's of laughs. Dive sites we visited were: Deep reef, Napoleon reef, Pos1, Pos2, the Temple (the last three were at Menjangan island), and Secret bay.
One place we dived was Secret bay which is a 40 minute drive to the town of Gilimanuk, this is where people catch the ferry to Java and when you look west you see the three towering volcanic peaks on the other side. Secret bay is a typical muck dive where there is lot's of garbage lying around. Now this dive was not very deep, only 8 meters, mainly sand, some garbage and some coral here and there. Most people would not want to dive here but they would have missed a lot of interesting stuff.
What you can see here: Frogfish, seahorses, sea snakes, snake eels, moray eels, devil scorpion fish, cockatoo waspfish, crocodilefish, banggai cardinal fish, anemone shrimp and thousands of small fish under the pier. You know this is a shallow dive when you're trying to take a picture and the kids jumping off the pier start pulling on your fins to have some fun!
When not diving we spent our time lying in the sun and working on getting a tan and walking on the beach as we knew at some we would have to go back to the Norwegian winter. Also the resort was really nice and relaxing, with good food. There were two places down the beach that were interesting: one was the turtle sanctuary where they helped injured turtles and had a hatchery for turtle eggs so that they have a better chance to survive.
The second place was out in the water for the most part and this had to do with coral growth, this was where they set up metal structures with a small electric charge going through it and adding small pieces of coral around it to start a new coral reef or help with damaged areas (the electric current stimulates the coral to grow faster).
After a week of diving and enjoying the sunshine it was time to move as we wanted to spend some time on a white sandy beach instead of the volcanic black sandy beaches of the north. Our drive south became more of a guided tour instead of driving directly to Legian, just north of Kuta Beach. We drove along the coast past the Monkey Temple (we did not stop to monkey around) before we started up the steep green volcanic sloops. The higher we went, the more we could see of the steep valleys covered in tropical green forest speckled with rice fields, we passed through many small villages as the road got windyer and windyer with lot's of hair pin turns.
At our first stop we walked through the tropical forest for 500 meters to reach a towering water fall (Munduk waterfall) that fell through trees thundering into a stream below throwing up a fine mist into the surrounding area. As we continued our ride up and over the volcanic slopes we reached the top where there is a drop in temperature as we drive into the clouds.
Suddenly there were a lot of old Volkswagen Beetles (boble in Norwegian), apparently a veteran car run, not what we would have expected in the mountain areas of Bali. When the fog breaks we can see the valley floor with two large lakes, we also had traffic that we later found was due to a holiday. On the way down we saw people by the road feeding groups of monkeys before we reached the valley floor. We decided not to stop at the temple by the lake because of the crowds, we met more and more traffic as we neared our destination.
The check-in in at Legian was very frustrating as we arrived at one, tired and sweaty after a long drive, but check-in time was two so we had some lunch and waited, while Jorunn used the computer to kill some time I sat in reception, after two I noticed that new people had arrived and received welcome drinks and not long after were taken to their rooms. After this had happened three times and it was two thirty, I went to reception to ask and soon realised that they had forgotten us and the room had been ready for some time :-( )
We took a long walk on the beach and later had a a very filling dinner at a place call Blossom. One of the people working there had worked on a cruise ship just like me so we had long enjoyable chat about life after working on a cruise ship and life on Bali. After dinner we wobbled around a bit to digest our food before heading back to our hotel room.
The next day we headed right to the beach after breakfast as time was getting short and we wanted to get as much sun as possible before we headed home. In the late afternoon we went to do some shopping at Rip Curl, Billabong, Quicksilver, Roxy as things are sooo much cheaper here (Jorunn found three tops that cost just as much as one in Norway, and there's a lot of variety). The taxi ride took forever due to traffic, as always, but saved a very sweaty walk, but we did walk back as the sun was going down and it wasn't as hot and sticky.
Going out to eat at night is an experience as the streest are narrow and with cars and scooters parked in one lane there was even less room. To make things worse there were stalls everywhere with people trying to get you attention to get you to buy something (t-shirts, handbags, watches, sunglasses and lot's of other stuff) or have a massage. Now this was fun enough dodging car and hawks, now come the fun part, when you first find a nice quiet sidewalk beware as I found out that the scooters use the sidewalks to sneak past the traffic (when the scooters came Jorunn would move out of the way while I just kept on walking, had three scooters behind me once).
This is Asia at it's best, chaos, fun, challenging, frightening, frustrating, OH what a life! Time to leave Bali so we packed our gear and headed down to the beach for a little more sun before we fly back to Singapore.
Back in Singapore we stayed at a small hotel, South East Asia Hotel in Bugis where we had stayed on another trip, and after a short rest headed out to Raffles for a good Chinese meal (great food in Singapore) and to walk around a bit. Our last day in Singapore (our fight was leaving at 23:50) was spent on Sentosa Island, which is great way to spend the day as they have beaches, restaurants, shops and lot's of activities.
In the end it was time to leave so we had quick meal in the Raffles area before heading back to the hotel to pick up our baggage and later to the airport. On this flight we got lucky and we each had two seats and slept fairly well and after a stop in Istanbul we arrived home to minus 18 degrees the next morning. As it was 32 degress in Singapore that made for a 50 degree difference. I was really tempted to jump on the Thai Airways plane parked next us leaving for Thailand that evening.
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