Pemuteran, Bali

Sam and I are in the middle of nowhere living something out of Animal Planet.  No, seriously, we are in the sticks of Bali.  I did not realize when I was booking our hotel in Pemuteran that our nearest ATM would be 40 minutes away by car, or that the grasshoppers would be the size of my pinky finger, or that we would seriously NEED to use the bug netting around our bed.  Thank God I took more cash out than we thought we needed before we left Seminyak, and also that our hotel allows us to charge all our food at the restaurant to our bill (which we can pay with credit card), and our dive shop takes credit cards too!

Our trip here took us 3 hours by taxi through the center of the island.  (Side note, the public transit on Bali is incredibly unreliable and very inconvenient so all the guidebooks recommend that tourists do all their traveling via taxi and arranged transfers from one hotel to the next.)  It was very beautiful, but our taxi driver was crazy and his constant speeding up to pass and then slamming on the brakes to duck back into our lane was a little tough on our stomachs.  We had negotiated 400,000 rupiah as the fare for the trip (he originally wanted 500,000) and when we were about 15 minutes from our destination he started making comments about how very long the  journey was.  Sam and I caught each other's eye after he told us he'd have to ask for the 500,000 he originally wanted in his broken English.  Sam told him that we had agreed on 400,000 and that was it.  Then things got interesting, our taxi driver pulled over to the side of the road, at which point I was thinking that one of us would have to get out to unload all the luggage from the trunk while the other one refused to leave the car so this crazy dude didn't run off with everything we owned.  It turned out he was just consulting a map, but Sam and I were on pins and needles the last 10 minutes to the hotel worrying that we'd be dumped off in the middle of nowhere when we hadn't seen another taxi for what seemed like hours.  Once we were safe in the lobby (we only ended up paying the guy 420,000 which he was NOT happy about) Sam and I agreed that had the driver not said anything we were both considering giving him 450,000 for his troubles since that was what our previous hotel had offered us as a transfer fee.  The poor dude really screwed up there and he should have just kept his mouth shut!  Needless to say we'll be paying a little more and using the hotel transfer services from now on.

Our first order of business after checking into our room was to drop by the Easy Divers shop where I had arranged for us go SCUBA diving.  As we walked up, the owner, Dusan, came out of the office and said, "Ah, you must be Gianna, and this is Sam!"  Which was really unexpected and impressive that he made the effort to keep my email on hand today so that he could greet us by name.  Sam and I signed our lives away, were fitted with our gear, and headed back to our hotel to do some well-deserved relaxing and sunset watching.  I got a little eager at dinner last night and ordered a sample platter of several Balinese dishes.  Sam was sweet (and reminded me of my Dad) when he traded me his fish dish because he could tell that the Balinese sample platter was not quite my cup of tea.  Another great thing about Sam is he is far more adventurous than I am when it comes to food.  Luckily, we had both been curious about tasting the sample platter to begin with so I didn't feel too horrible about him eating it and me sticking to the fish.

This morning, we had the luxury of meeting at the shop at 9am rather than 7am as we did on Koh Phi Phi.  We took a bus to the dock 20 minutes from our hotel and the dive shop, and we hopped on a little boat to take us the 45 minutes out to Pulau Menjangan Island.  We had three French vacationers on the boat with us, Julie was doing a Discover SCUBA dive while her boyfriend, Ludvick, and friend, Mathilda, dove with Sam and I.  Ludvick is from Lyon, France, and the girls are from Normandy.  They were very nice, and Ludvick's English was very impressive.  Unfortunately, our boat broke down as we were about 10 minutes from the island so we had to get a tow from another boat until a second boat could come out and get us.  

Our first dive was at Sandy Slope.  Let me tell you, the Balinese choose very appropriate names for their dive sites.  Sandy Slope was exactly what it sounds like, but on top of the slope was a very nice coral reef.  Diving in Bali has been relatively shallow, our maximum depth here was 18 meters on both dives, whereas we were doing as deep as 32 meters in Thailand.  I think that has to do with the fact that Mckenna (on Koh Phi Phi) is a dive instructor and today we were with a dive master.  From what I understand, dive instructors are licensed to teach unqualified divers more advanced skills and dive masters are licensed to guide licensed divers during the dives they are qualified for.  had much better visibility than we did in Thailand, maybe 20-30 meters, and also way more sealife.  Not that Bali wasn't good, but we saw a few really cool things (barracuda, sting ray, eels) whereas Bali has amazing and beautiful fish and coral everywhere.  We didn't see as many anemone here, but there were a few, along with their various anemone fish.  

Lunch was another home-cooked meal and man alive, do these Southeast Asians have some great food on their dive trips!  Today we got to eat Mie Goreng which is kind of like the Balinese chow mein.  It's been on the menu a few places, but we hadn't gotten to try it until today.

Our second dive was at Coral Garden, and again, it lived up to its name.  The diving was the best of our trip so far and although there weren't so many amazing things (we didn't see any eel or barracuda) the overall dive was MUCH more exciting.  Coral Garden is a huge sheer face of coral and as we made our way along the middle we were surrounded by schools of fish, anemone, coral, and all kinds of sea plants and animals.  It was really neat!

Sam and I agreed that Bali has definitely lived up to it's diving so far and we're really excited to go SCUBA diving again on Monday- we are taking tomorrow off as a bit of a break so we can check out the turtle hatchery and go snorkeling off the beach at our hotel.  Sam's been going in the afternoons while I hang out on the beach and he said the snorkeling is AMAZING right off the shore where they are creating a new reef.  More on that tomorrow!