( continued)
One last image from Tulamben, of a tiny frog fish.
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DIVING IN CANDIDASA/PADANG BAI (2 dive days)
We moved to the Candi Beach Hotel in Candidasa for our next dive base, and at $200 a night, this was the splurgiest and most luxurious place we stayed at. We had a beachfront sky suite with a spa in the balcony, which would have cost three to four times that price anywhere but Bali. We dove with the hotel’s shop, Diving Candidasa, which is German-managed.
We loved the hotel, but absolutely HATED the dive shop. In an island full of gracious, kind, and courteous people, this shop had somehow assembled a gruff, dismissive, and just plain rude staff. The dive guides were indifferent and just plain sloppy — before getting in the water, I asked one dive guide to make sure my tank was fully open, and he insisted that it was, but I realized he had closed it fully and opened it a quarter turn. He shrugged it off like it was an every day mistake. The other guide on the boat was German, had been in Bali for less than a year, and was attentive only to German divers, rolling her eyes at anyone else.
It was a shame, because the dive sites were quite interesting, though challenging, and with a better dive shop they would have been much more enjoyable. We dove out of Padangbai harbor the first day, because the seas were too rough for boats to come out of Candidasa, and the Blue Lagoon and Jepun sites were quite different from what we’d seen in the north, full of beautiful crinoids of every imaginable color, swaying in strong currents. We spotted a very large black frog fish, anemone frab, and a long snout sea horse, but the crinoids and the very different coral cover for me were the real memorable feature of these dive sites.
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The next day we dove Gili Tepekong and Gili Mimpang, which had a lot of pelagics and the densest fish schools I saw on the trip. There were a couple of white tip reef sharks circling around as well. The water was cold below the thermocline, around 69 degrees, and we hung out looking for molas for about 10 minutes, but they did not make an appear ace, Visibility was low and currents/surge were strong, which the guides attributed to the full moon. The highlight for me at these strange dive sites was seeing a zebra moray hunting.
On the whole, I think the Candidasa area is worth diving, but if I went back I’d definitely look for a different dive operator. I would not under any circumstances stay in the Padang Bai area, because the beach and the harbor, while graced with golden sand and lovely topography, are absolutely covered in trash, which the town makes zero effort to clean up. It’s also a ferry terminal and you can see people getting off the ferry looking in horror at the garbage on the beach. In Pemuteran, the dive shop owner told me that the Pemuteran beach also used to be like that, until the town got together and paid 3-4 locals to clean the beach several times daily. The Pemuteran beach is quite lovely as a result. Padang Bai should do the same.
DIVING IN NUSA PENIDA (1 dive day)
We had left Nusa Penida for the end of the trip, as it was known for challenging conditions, and we could dive it out of Sanur, closer to the airport. We stayed at the very atmospheric and well located Puri Santrian hotel in Sanur, and dive with a Bali Scuba, an Australian-owned shop which we recommend highly. Super friendly, superorganized, super competent — the mirror image of the German-owned operator in Candidasa,
We did a three tank trip, which is standard for operators coming from the Sanur area. The first dive was at Manta Point, and it was epic. We arrived later than other boats on the site, and there were at least a dozen other boats with divers in the water. We got in to find cold and murky water at a shallow manta cleaning station and almost immediately, a manta passed over our heads. However, our very competent guide signaled us to mobpve to a deeper cleaning station, and we went down to about 65 feet. The guide pointed out a spot where about a dozen blue spotted rays were piled on top of each other, and while I filemed the,, my wife yanked in my fins, and pointed to a manta that had arrived at the cleaning station and was just contentedly hovering there. I got a 4-minute clip of the encounter, which felt like 40 minutes:
Our second dive was at Crystal Bay, where all the boats from the manta site had moved for the second dive in search of molas. The water here was at 67 degrees from the moment we got in. We had 5 mm wetsuits with hooded vests, and could tolerate the cold, but there were divers in the water with 3 mm suits, and one diver with no wetsuit at all, which was just crazy. The molas were unfortunately a no-show, and this was a pretty bare site without molas, so we spent most of our time watching the scantily clad divers getting hypothermic. Molas were one of the main reasons we had booked the Bali trip in the first place, though months earlier I had lucked out and seen a dozen molas ina single dive in the Galapagos, so I could live with the disappointment, and was only sorry that my wife didn’t get to see them for the first time.
Our third dive was a drift over a gorgeous reef called Mangroves, which had pristine coral cover. On this dive a manta passed over our guide’s head, and the other two divers from our boat caught a glimpse of a rapidly passing whale shark. We really loved this dive site, so much so that we decided that this would be the last dive of the trip. We had left open the possibility of another dive day, but by this point in the trip we had done 27 dives and the idea of spending a last day getting massages and relaxing before the return trip seemed more appealing.
WHAT WE WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY: Not much. I would have loved to have dived an extra day at Nusa Penida, diving local sites away from the manta/mola fleet of dive boats. My wife wasn’t thrilled with the diving at Candidasa, and said that if she needed to cut something from the trip, it would have been that. My wife also thought that staying at 5 different places was a bit much, though she had great things to say about each of the places we were at, and I personally thought it was just right,
We brought all our own gear on this trip, and while most dive operators provided full gear rental at modest cost (around $15 a day), we like diving our own gear, and we prefer to spend the $15 paying tips for resort staff to lug our own dive gear around.
There are two things we didn’t like about Bali, and they are facts of life there. The first is the air pollution, partly as a result of traffic and diesel engines, but mainly as a result of locals burning vegetation and garbage. We both caught minor colds on the long flights to Bali, but those colds became dry hacking coughs because of the pollution. On the return flight out of Bali, it was striking how many people had identical dry coughs, this is not a place for asthmatics,
The second thing is the constant threat of getting hit by a scooter while walking on any street. The traffic can be horrendous in Ubud in particular, but even in small towns, everyone gets around in scooters. We saw kids as young as 8 driving scooters, teens looking at their cell phones while driving them, and in heavy traffic, lots of scooters trying to save time by climbing such narrow sidewalks as there are on village streets, which sometimes is no sidewalk at all. So you just need to be hyper alert whenever you’re walking around for scooters. I lived in Taiwan for a year many moons ago, and used to drive a scooter myself. Bali traffic and scooters are in a class by themselves,
Overall, though, Bali is just an amazing place. The only place that compares in terms of great diving and cultural riches at low prices is Egypt. Hope this was helpful, and happy to answer any questions.
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