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Published: October 15th 2008
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Swimming with Mantas
Our Dive master doing what he told us not to. Manta Point, Nusa Penida Bali. From my experiences, Bali is kind of like that really popular girl that you know back in high school. She always seemed to have everybody convinced that she was just a little prettier than she really was, but for some reason, everybody still wanted to be with her. Fortunately for us, Bali is not exactly like that girl in high school we all knew and it has some redeeming qualities. For me, I like to call those qualities, scuba diving.
Knowing that we were going to avoid the heavily touristed areas of Kuta beach and Nusa Dua, we took the hour long ferry over from Java and proceeded north east in a clockwise direction. This made the touts trying to get us onto their buses to Denpasar, quite frustrated. Stepping off the ferry, we found out how most of Bali operates when dealing with a group of backpacked westerners not already on some sort of tour bus. All prices of transport, including the so called “public transport”, will be at least three times the price it should be. Haggling for a reasonable price is a fun game that we have learned how to play called Walk away until you
Preparation
The author getting ready for another dive. Look at that stress. get a price that dosent make you want to laugh. It’s a really fun game that the locals know how to play well and wastes hours of our time. That’s all Im going to say about that.
On the positive side, Bali has some great, if not over dived sights. Our first few days of diving happened to be with a group of Bali natives that I like to call Balesians. I don’t think that that is the correct terminology, but Im going with it. Sonny, the long haired leader of this gang/band just seemed like such a nice guy, forcing Arak (Indonesian palm wine) and Johnny Walker shots down our throats while his buddies messed up the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and the ever present Hotel California, all night on the beach. Over the course of three late nights on the beach with Sonny and the Destroyers, the so-called Drunk Divers Club was born and I subsequently viewed the underwater world, those 4 dives, in a brand new way. Our new alcohol councilor must have been quite disappointed.
Why does it seem like maps are always trying their damnedest to lie to you?
No? Well maybe its just me, but as I carefully unfolded the heavily creased, hand drawn map of Bali and located our present position- Lovina and our desired destination- Padangbai, it seemed like the journey would take no less than three full days and no small amount of patients. In reality, the guy who took us for a ride, made the journey from the north of the island to the south, last just over two hours. Time to buy a new map. The southern side of the island resembles much more of what I pictured the whole of Bali to look like. While the great majority of the northern side looks like it would go up in smoke like Cheech and Chong, at any second, the south seems to get a smidge more moisture keeping the vegetation a lovely shade of green. But, it wasn’t the vegetation showing off its prowess in the art of photosynthesis that surprised me the most. It was the water temperature.
The three of us had made the journey to Padangbai specifically to dive the world famous sites off the nearby island, Nusa Penida, but when our dive master handed each of us a
Pygmy Seahorse
Menjangan Island, Northern Bali wetsuit thick enough for a dive trip to Alaska with the flexibility of a medieval suit of armor, we started to wonder where exactly they planned to take us. Turns out that we were slated to do three dives at Crystal Bay and Manta Point, and no, the suits are not overkill. In my oh so lengthy dive career up until that point, I had completed some 85 dives, some specifically to see the elusive manta ray, but have always come up as empty handed as the Bush Administration’s search for Osama. We knew that mantas lived in those places, we just couldn’t find them. So we went somewhere else. In this time of uncertainty, we were almost guaranteed to see mantas at this highly frequented cleaning station called Manta Point. Ya know, when it is my turn to name things like dive sights or mountain ranges or…boats, you can be sure that my names will be way more creative and interesting than Manta Point…Manta Point! Anyways, it didn’t take long, after overcoming the shock of 19 degree Celsius water (yes Im whining) and descending to a maximum depth of 12 meters, before I saw something flying towards me through
Diving is Super Sweet!
The only sober member of the Drunk Divers Club and Sonny who is not quite sober, but hey when you have a wet suit like that, you can do what you want. the churned up water. What I saw was the first of 8 massive manta rays effortlessly circling us in the heavily surging current. While the ten or so of us in the water were getting tossed around like empty promises in a presidential election, the mantas performed an elegant underwater ballet of circling the submerged pinnacle and sitting, nose to the surface, while the tiny cleaner wrasses performed their services. When the cleansing was finished, the giant birds quietly flapped their wings and disappeared as quickly as they had come. Its going to take a lot to top a submarine experience like that in my logbook.
Mola Mola. Kind of sounds like something that would grow on your face or back and sprout unsightly hairs that always grow three times faster than the rest of your body hair. But no, this Mola Mola is a fish. Also known as the Oceanic Sunfish, this fish that was put together while Mother Nature was off on her lunch break, sneaking shots of Arak, spends most of its time at depths that you will never find me blowing bubbles at. For some reason, that only special fish scientists know, these large bony
Garden Eels
At the USS Liberty wreck. Bali fish choose to come to the surface off the coast of Nusa Penida during the months of September and October. This event, of course creates a frenzy among the tropical diving community. You may ask yourself, “ if these fish are so damn cool, why hasn’t this dude put any pictures of them in this blog?” Oh yea, that’s because we spent the majority of two dives hanging on to pieces of coral at 25 meters (so long that we almost went into decompression), waiting for this crazy fish to rise from the depths, but it never did. Maybe it had something to do with the 30 some dive boats in the bay, waiting for the same thing as us. Maybe not, but if you really want to see a pic of this mola mola thing, some other guy on this blog thingie has some excellent pictures of the two he saw, just days after us. Have a look at them. Im going to Lombok.
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Daniel
non-member comment
awesome
Those are some great photos man, thanks