Brought to you by the colour green

Taking the advice of everyone in Singapore, we decided to get out of a Chinese populated area over Chinese New Year. This isn't as crazy as it sounds, because unlike our version where drinking as many alcopops as possible is the order of the day and having yourself vigorously shaken upside down by club owners and taxi drivers, the Chinese actually spend the time with their families, often travelling significant distances to do so. The upshot of this is that it's impossible to get fed or find a taxi anywhere in Singapore, so we headed to Bali for the CNY break.

The trip did not get off to a flying start basically due to a last minute repack at check in by Beatrice in order to redistribute her baggage allowance to avoid paying the usurious excess baggage fees the low cost airlines inflict here. Two of her chosen methods of lightening her bag of heavy metallic objects was to pack her dive knife (attached to her dive regulator) and some sharp scissors in her hand luggage which were promptly picked up at the gate security. Being Asia, the ground staff very reasonably and helpfully offered to transport the items but as checked in luggage. Being Asia, they also forgot to put the bag onto the plane for us. Leaving us with a long, annoying wait at Denpasar airport for the next flight out of Singapore to bring us these items (plus Beatrice's toiletries, contact lenses etc that were also in the bag) as being a budget airline they had no intention of couriering us the bag when it arrived. You get what you pay for it seems. Respect to the driver from Tauch Terminal (where we stayed) who stoically waited for us to get the bag, and then let us fall asleep on the journey there, didn't crash from being so tired himself and the member of staff who waited up for us with a welcome drink and was still cheerful at 2am when we were so grumpy. You can see how nice the resort is at the webpage and there are a few pics at the holiday album here. Everyone was so nice and helpful the entire week and I can't say enough nice things about the manager Robert, who on hearing the Beatrice got sea sick, offered as an alternative to a boat ride to drive her overland to the dive site, and then drive some tablets out to her later so she could come back on the boat. This is in stark contrast to most UK operations who would sell your kit if you died on their boat, claiming salvage rights to the metal.

The resort is in a tiny village called Tulamben and is literally 3m from the sea. It is famous mostly for the wreck of the USS Liberty, coined as the worlds easiest wreck dive. Although the site is obviously a wreck, the proliferation of life on the ship really renders the dive more of a reef in many ways and for the most part the dives there concentrate on the marine creatures that live on the wreck. And what an amazing array of life there is in Tulamben Bay. In deference to the non divers, I've split the photos up again - so the diving album is here.

Orange frog fish	Deepwater lionfish
Juvenile Octopus on the run	Spot the seahorse (answer here)

So many creatures that I've always wanted to see were present, and many rarer forms of the ones I'm familiar with were also nonchalantly swimming around, unaware of how excited I was. I make no apologies for posting so many pictures of the pair of harlequin shrimp munching on a starfish arm, and to see baby octopus and cuttle fish (my favourite undersea animals anyway) was stupendous. The other sites in the bay, although wreck-less are equally amazing, with lava flow drop offs extending into the ocean and in other areas, piles of rocks with life nestling in nearly every cranny. One feature of the area is that it is volcanic (you can see the mighty and very holy volcano Agung in some of the pictures, especially dramatic when the clouds rolled back) and this leads to black sand which in turn leads to the sport of macro diving. This is an odd past time which can be best described as scouring what appears to be an initially black and featureless bottom for interesting and rare forms of life. What this leads to is you floating around with your head pointing down towards the sand for an hour or so, examining rocks and what have you to see if it is really some form of highly camouflaged animal. The prime spot in this area is called Seraya Secrets and we were lucky enough to do 3 dives there, including one night dive, which rates as one of the best dives I have ever done in terms of life to see. Added to this the resort supplies free Nitrox (a gas that allows you in simple terms to dive for longer than air at shallow depths), a water temperature of 30 degrees and we were clocking up dives of 90 minutes plus quite happily.

Another feature that will make hardened UK divers shiver with anger in their drysuits is that you don't even have to carry your tanks yourself if you don't want to. The famous tank women of Tulamben are more than capable of picking up 2 sets of kit, swinging them into position on their heads and navigating the boulders and cobbles of the beach without so much as looking down, and twice as fast as you can carry your fins and mask to the same spot. I had a different run in with the locals whilst Beatrice was resting during the afternoon. I'd decided to go and check out the village, which didn't turn out to take very long as it's really only a road with some houses and restaurants to cater to the dive trade along it. However I was drawn to the unmistakable sounds of a heavy bassline that appeared to be emanating from down the road. Sadly that bassline appeared to be associated with the Euro outfit 'Scooter' but I felt duty bound to investigate. What I found was a group of guys sitting in the garden underneath the mother of all sky dishes, with two whopping big speakers having themselves a bit of a mid afternoon party. What the video doesn't show (as I pan round) is the guy who gets up and walks over to me is presenting me with the worlds scariest looking drink and offering it to me and inviting me into the party. I'd like to say that I accepted, but the glass looked like it had been used for mixing paint and motor oil in and the drink looked like it would remove the paint from the glass if spilt.

Click to view video


I also went down to the beach near the temple where some local kids were swimming and throwing stones into the sea. I decided to do some stone skipping, which was approximately the equivalent of walking into a Japanese high school with a PS3 two weeks ahead of launch date and resulted in me being inundated with swarms of children who all demanded to be taught how to do the same thing. If anyone goes back to Bali and they are having the island stone skipping championships in a couple of years then you know where it started from.

We also took some time to head into Ubud, the artisans village in the centre of Bali. I'd actually been there with James a few years ago and I was quite shocked at how much the place has commercialised in the last few years, with extensive building and expansion of the arts and crafts galleries and many more upmarket restaurants and bars than my last visit. That said, it's dead easy to walk for 15 minutes or so and get out of the centre and this part of the trip, like Sesame Street, is brought to you by the colour green. Everything is so lush and verdant, from the lizards that we saw to the rice paddy fields we walked past. The monkey forest (a must do for any visitor) is incredible and the monkeys inhabit the temple of the dead, just like in Disney's version of the Jungle Book. Particularly fearsome statues of demons eating babies are found there, possibly to keep kids well behaved in Sunday school. On the way to the forest we bumped into two friends from Singapore, Nico and Ayako, which was pretty surprising.

We took in some traditional Balinese dancing for the evenings entertainment, which I have to say was pretty dull and not that inspiring. Performances are sometimes many hours long and to be honest even the tourist lite version of 90 minutes that we got left me shifting in my seat and fidgeting restlessly. It can be best described as someone beautifully dressed on stage, suffering from St Vitus Dance, whilst an orchestra drops bags of rusty plumbing instruments onto a harp from about 3 metres height (also known as the Gamelan orchestra). The audience was predominately Japanese tourists who all videoed the entire performance so they could inflict the same amount of pain on their families back home, or perhaps it was making a showing on the latest Japanese gameshow - 'How long can you listen to Gamelan for without yawning?'

We had booked into a self titled 'health resort', where we stayed in a cute little two storey villa which was open to the night sky on the top floor. Despite Beatrice worrying incessantly about mosquito invasion, the provided tent over the bed was very effective and the lack of sleeping under air conditioning meant I slept perhaps the soundest sleep I've had in months. This was a good job as we had a long, long journey back to Singapore, via Jakarta as we couldn't get direct flights. But there were at least plenty of taxis when we arrived.