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Published: June 25th 2017
Dream Beach Nusa Cenigan
Nusa Cenigan is a little island connected to Nusa Lembongan by a single lane bridge that is accessible only to motorbikes or pedestrian traffic. After our marathon travel weekend to Darwin, Australia, and a quick overnight stop in Bali, we are once again in new unexplored territory on the Balinese island of Nusa Lembongen, just a half hour boat ride off the south eastern coast of Bali. And it feels good to be here.
Newcomers visiting Bali for the first time will most likely migrate to the more renowned Bukit Peninsula, home of the world famous Ulawatu surf destination, and equally famous Kuta beach resort area, both of which are very developed and very busy. Nusa Lembongen provides a wonderful alternative, is relatively near, and is basically a polar opposite - quiet and laid back, with a variety of options for accommodations from budget to luxury spread out along its beautiful coastline.
Nusa Lembongen has at least four good surfing spots - one of which provided our son Tanner the opportunity to move up a level in his personal growth curve and complete his first barrel ever! Of course, this took place the day after I tenaciously recorded him surfing at the same location on beautiful Dream Beach, when the waves were not nearly as big. I seriously held the camera for a
solid hour, trying to capture him riding some wicked wave, depleting a full battery in the process and feeling in retrospect totally like a hockey mom recording her kid on the ice for a full period, hoping to capture him scoring a goal! So what if my little kid is now 29 years old? Once a mom, always a mom, it seems. I may not have caught the barrel ride, but after editing out about a hundred shots of waves, I did manage to capture a few good live surfing moments, as well as a few great shots of his partner Annie doing a cliff dive.
In addition to surfing, Nusa Lembongen is renowned for a number of spectacular dive sites, including two which attract manta rays. It was here that I decided to take another level of dive instruction, completing five more dives and attaining an Advanced Adventurer Certification from Scuba Schools International (SSI). Working one-on-one with my excellent instructor, Harold Legall from Dive Concepts, with over 3,000 dives to his credit (wow!), I was introduced to deep diving, drift diving, working with a dive computer, underwater photography, and basic underwater marine life identification. It was a major
bonus having the company of Annie on the dive as well, as she is a very experienced diver who always "had my back" and offered me valuable advice to add to my learning curve.
Since completing our Open Water Dive Certification less than a month ago, Stan and I have taken some beautiful dives around the Gilli Islands, Lombok, and off the eastern coast of Bali near Ahmed. Stan has now completed eleven dives, and me fourteen - which I am sure is more than we had anticipated at the onset of this particular adventure. But I believe the drift dive I did with Annie as part of my Advanced Adventurer course in Nusa Lembongan was the most exciting. Every dive has offered something unique, and what I will recall most about this dive will not be the abundant sea life and colourful coral - although it was definitely there - but rather the speed at which we moved along with the current. The momentum momentarily removed all buoancy issues, and left me feeling like I was flying through space, able to control direction easily with a tip of a fin or slight repositioning of an arm. One analogy
Another Day, Another Elusive Wave
Are we having fun yet, cause I am exhausted. Tough job, but somebody's gotta do it. Might as well be me. might be learning to ride a motorbike, and feeling that you can finally do corners with ease at some speed. Or more recently, my discovering how to subtlety change direction on a moving surfboard by simply adding a little weight to one side. But at times the drift dive also felt like floating in space as well, being able to flip upside down and back easily and weightlessly. Or maybe it's just impossible to describe, and you just have to experience it. But it was awesome. Too bad that, at the end of the dive, just when I was feeling like I had reached some new level of diving ability, as soon as we were out of the current I found myself uncontrollably floating to the surface from five metres below. The motorbike had slowed down and now I could no longer keep it steady! So my learning direction is clearly laid out for me - and for Stan, who also still struggles with this one - when we resume diving next year, as controlling buoancy is perhaps the single most important skill that divers need to master if they wish to avoid the countless hazards that diving offers to
Annie Takes the Big Plunge
"If you can't surf" she said, "you might as well be diving." Go girl. the unconscientious and unskilled diver.
And although there were some smaller Manta Rays ( three - four metres across) present at the last dive site we visited, I was so exhausted at the end of my fifth dive in two days, and only saw them from a distance anyway, that I am still keeping the Manta Rays as unchecked on my bucket list. I need to see them up close and personal, in all there gigantic beauty - nine - twelve metres across, I am told by witnesses - before I can check this one off. And for this experience, we must return again to the waters around Flores, Indonesia, the island that is also home to the Komodos, and the tri-coloured volcanic lakes. That is next year country.
But now, we head to Ubud, to spend a few more days with Tanner and Annie before they head home to Canada, and we resume a routine of Yoga study, Bahasa language study, and enjoying the rich artistic and cultural community of Ubud, Bali for the last few weeks of the Dreamchaser's 2015 Adventures.
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Susan
non-member comment
This is such a fabulous thing to do on your winter vacation!