Bali, Indonesia

Dear Fellow Diver,

At Sidem off Tulamben in east Bali, I slipped into the dark water, inwardly grumbling that this night dive kept me from a timely dinner and early bed. But the dive became special when I heard the dive guides whoop as they exulted over a perfect pair of tiny filamentous scorpionfish, a white hen and a red male. Back on the boat, photographer Rob van der Loos (a legend in the dive industry for pioneering muck diving in PNG's Milne Bay) said he had only seen these creatures twice before, once in Milne Bay and once in Tulamben. Usually, I am a lazy slug when it comes to night diving, but it was so great in Tulamben that I hopped into the boat four nights in a row.

My buddy and I had decided on an all-Bali dive trip to avoid Indonesia's inter-island flights and to maximize our relaxation time. Destinations like Raja Ampat, Lembeh, and Wakatobi require flying from Bali and other islands (and in the case of Raja Ampat, often three flights). The uncomfortable flights are crowded and often late. So, it would be a week in Bali's far northwest, the Pemuteran-Menjangan area, and nine days in Tulamben, on Bali's east coast, with relaxing stays at south Bali hotels in between. This meant long drives on slow roads, but it would be spectacular scenery along the way.

We began our May-June stay in Bali at our favorite hotel near the airport, The Balé Nusa Dua, where the pool villas are so private that swimsuits are optional. After we spent a few days chilling out, an SUV arranged by our Menjangan hotel took us on the five-hour drive (it's only about 90 miles) over the volcanoes to the far northwest. Country roads in Bali feature hairpin turns and slow trucks on two narrow lanes, so we packed our patience and enjoyed the views! Still, it's better than flying on Lion Air.

But first, a word about our two luxurious dive resort choices. Before you reject them because they sound so pricey, in Bali, you get twice the luxury of Caribbean resorts for half the price, less than $2000 a week for two, and in one case, extraordinary meals were included. And you will see more fish and unique fish in a day than in a week in the Caribbean. So, read on.

Though there is a Mimpi dive resort on Menjangan Island, I wanted more privacy and space, so I booked a seaside mangrove villa at the Plataran Menjangan ecotourism resort in the West Bali national park. It holds about 50 guests in 17 luxury villas. I chose to dive with Sea Rovers, not only because it had stellar reviews, but also because I enjoyed my emails with its owner, Paul Turley, originally from Newcastle, UK. Billing themselves as "the pirates who dive," they proved to be passionate about conservation -- as well as pirates' booty. We stopped by their headquarters on the way to Plataran to unload our scuba gear so we didn't have to mess with it until the week's end, when it was washed, dried, and ready for transport.

After settling into our comfortable villa and enjoying an excellent Indonesian dinner, I awoke ready for action. Sea Rovers has three simple skiffs with sun protection and big outboards that take six divers. I had arranged for a private boat for just my partner and me, with a captain and guide who picked us up at the Plataran's jetty every morning for the 15-minute run to Menjangan Island. After zipping across the water -- so close to Java that three massive Javanese volcanoes blocked the horizon -- I was helped with my gear, then I rolled backward into the 82-degree water and headed down for our first dive at Underwater Cave, which boasted both soft coral shallows and a steep wall. I found a Denise pygmy seahorse nestled in a seafan, and Edi pointed out a huge orange frogfish tucked into an orange rope sponge. I also saw false clown, pink, and Clark's anemonefishes as well as a hawksbill turtle. Not bad for a checkout dive! And when it came to our dive gear, Captain Toni and DM Edi did all the heavy lifting.

After a cup of Bali coffee and a snack, we were ready for Coral Gardens, where in a brisk current I cruised over seafans, beautiful stony corals, and clouds of small fish in the shallow water. Though the mainland beaches were dark volcanic sand, the sand around Menjangan Island was white: coral rather than volcanic in origin. It is home to lush soft corals and so many crinoids in every color that twice I ended up with a crinoid corsage clinging to me. Next was lunch on the boat, which they brought from the local warung: scrumptious mie goreng with chicken, egg, and an addictive spicy sambal. I ate it six days in a row with no complaints! After lunch came our third dive.

On our second dive day, my Atomic first stage succumbed to the effects, I must confess, of my grossly deferred maintenance. Paul put my hoses and gauges on one of his rental first stages, and then checked to see if he could repair mine -- nope, the closest source of Atomic parts was Jakarta. I was grateful for his help, and he did not charge me anything extra. When I returned to Denpasar City, I decided to pop for a new first stage at the Bali Dive Shop, which has a massive inventory, and I got a backup first stage for a very modest price (a high-end balanced reg for well under US$200).

Menjangan Island is home to important Balinese Hindu shrines, and one dive site is called Temple Point. The dives are mostly walls with big sponges and soft corals hanging from them and fields of stony corals. Currents abounded, so all my dives were drifts, and although we were asked to stay with our guide, I never felt restricted. Visibility was generally fair, around 20-30 feet, but never great. I saw plenty of Indo-Pacific fish, like anemonefishes in all their variety, leaf scorpions, pygmy seahorses, frogfish, and invertebrates like mantis shrimp and lobsters. All our diving was quite chilled out, usually around 75 minutes. Most were between 50 and 75 feet.

The resort is set in the jungle (something you notice on the bumpy roads in and out), with dense tree cover and a lot of animals (notably monkeys and graceful deer). Our hotel was one of several in the West Bali national park, and most visitors - mainly Australians -- were there for birdwatching, hiking, kayaking, snorkeling, and viewing the animals. They run workshops and activities every day, including a number for children. We went to the spa for massages twice, especially enjoying the stunning view overlooking the water.

Be forewarned, though. This property is really huge -- 944 acres -- so you will need sturdy shoes. To get around, the hotel provides buggy service, gaspowered carts and drivers, which we summoned using the hotel's WhatsApp group. Not only did we use it every morning to catch a ride to the jetty, but also for scheduling massages and ordering room service. The hotel staff could not have been kinder or more helpful. Breakfast was included every day, and we found that the most delicious foods were all Indonesian specialties rather than the Westernstyle dishes. They offer several Australian wines, mainly in the $50-$100 range (alcohol is costly in Indonesia). The cocktail menu was quite long, and most were around $12.

We dived one day around Pemuteran to see what treasures the dark sand might yield. At Napoleon Reef, I saw a juvenile pinnate batfish as I began our drift over a hard and soft coral slope. The site Coral Bommie, right in the heart of Pemuteran bay, was mucky and low visibility, but amazing. Coral was growing on some artificial structures, and I watched a pair of ringed pipefish weave in and out of a latticed wall. But the real star was an enormous bommie of potato coral, alive with colorful anthias, damsels, squirrel, butter, and trigger fish. Huge table corals cantilevered off the edge, and part of the bommie featured lettuce coral in a large bowl -- a great place for a scenic safety stop!

I really enjoyed diving in the far northwest, a great place. I was quite pleased with the Sea Rovers' service, and especially enjoyed their kind and affable owner, Paul. We had a chat about his boat's practical names: Cutthroat Cuttlefish, Nasty Nemo, and Cynical Seahorse. I suggested the Swaggering Sweetlips, which they loved!

After a week of diving, we were ready for some time off at our favorite place in South Bali, the Ametis Villas in Canggu. I'm old enough to remember when Canggu was all rice paddies, but today it's filled with tattooed young surfers, motorbikes, and buzzy restaurants. Ametis is a quiet oasis in a busy place. Each villa has its own pool, a full kitchen, lavish bedroom and bath, and a butler (who brought our breakfast every morning, drove us around, made reservations, and oversaw our stay). The wall surrounding the villa allows for skinny-dipping as well (perhaps you infer a theme in my hotel choices).

After four nights of bliss at Ametis, we hopped into an SUV sent by the Villa Markisa resort for the three-hour journey from Canggu to Tulamben. I wrote about the beautiful Villa Markisa (the Balinese word for passion fruit) in Undercurrent 2017 and longed to return. This visit confirmed that it is clearly the best dive resort on Bali's east coast. Hands-on owners Christiane Waldrich and Pedro Wettstein managed every detail of this special place. Christiane greeted us when we arrived and showed us to our room, the Master Bedroom, overlooking the pool and the ocean. In addition to being pristinely clean and well-managed, I love the architecture and décor. Christiane collects Indonesian textiles and wood carvings, and each space is accented with striking local art. The resort holds 16 guests in rooms, cottages, and a villa, and the dive operation takes no more than 16.

The exquisite grounds and common areas display her staff's fanatical attention to vegetation and cleanliness, guided by Christiane's intelligent and savvy taste. Lots of local arts, elegant simple furnishings, and open spaces.

And my, the extraordinary food. All the Tulamben resorts are full board (all meals included), so some cut corners and serve bad food. Christiane, however, employs a large kitchen staff and four chefs who use fresh ingredients from a local mountain farm. At breakfast each morning, they offered a printed card for us to order our lunch choices for the day. Dinner is always a buffet with choices for every dietary preference. I enjoyed fresh local fruits at every meal, and usually preferred the Indonesian dishes, but sometimes enjoyed gnocchi or risotto. Wine by the bottle ran around $50-80; you could also get it by the glass, around $10, and cocktails were available. We brought some Tasmanian whisky and shared it at the table one night.

Beautiful buildings and great food aren't worth much if the dive operation is a mess, but it's top-tier. The resort has two simple boats (sites are never more than 15 minutes away), rare in a place where most people shore dive only, which means a lot of options for dive sites. Boat dives are offered at 7:30, 10:30, 2:30, and 6:00. The crew carried all our gear to the boat, helped us don it, and washed and hung it at day's end. The only glitch was getting into the boats, which you swim to and climb aboard via a ladder. It was rough and windy, so the staff ran a line to the boat so we could pull ourselves along, a huge help. Getting out in the surf was tricky, so the crew was on hand to help pull us out quickly. Most divers were senior divers, and we all survived. Each buddy team has its own guide -- that could mean eight guides if the hotel were full of divers -- so we could crawl along at our own pace. All limits were common sense -- just return in time for the next scheduled dive. It is very photographer-friendly, and indeed, we dived with some well-known underwater photographers while there, each of whom had their own dive guide.

The house reef, called Seraya Secrets, is an amazing muck dive --dive it whenever you want -- and though I dived it only once this trip, I saw a stargazer and a relative of the Bobbit worm, which Duro, our dive guide, called an octoworm. (I must digress. The Bobbit worm is named after Loreen Bobbit, who, in Manassas, Virginia, in 1993, "dismembered" her violent husband with a carving knife. You don't wiggle your finger in front of a Bobbit worm.)

Duro accompanied us on every dive, and the guy must have X-ray vision. Nothing escaped his notice. Tulamben's most famous dive, the huge wreck USAT (U.S. Army Transport) Liberty, was built in 1918 and torpedoed by the Japanese in 1942. More than 400 feet long, it sits between 35 and 110 feet on the reef slope. Festooned with crinoids and soft corals, it was a great place to look for leaf scorpionfish amidst the clouds of fish that haunt its overhangs.

At least 35 dive sites are in easy striking distance, all with dark volcanic sand, almost always current, and sometimes lowish visibility, around 15-30 feet. Like Lembeh, a 2.5-hour flight from Bali, the bottom abounds with weird and wonderful creatures: a golden mantis shrimp in its hole, an orange hairy frogfish the size of my pinky toenail, a displaying male flasher wrasse; the very shy twin spot biocellatus lionfish; a tiny baby harlequin shrimp being a badass and feeding on a starfish; a large hairy octopus; and a roughsnout ghost pipefish. And this was in addition to many leaf scorpionfishes, peacock and pink-eared mantis shrimp, stonefish, octopuses, seahorses, and frogfish everywhere!

After my first night dive at Sidem, which I logged as being "off-the-hook great," I hopped out of bed early the next morning, hoping for another amazing dive. At Bulakan Slope, we began our dive with a wonderpus in full display, and 20 minutes later, had a close encounter with a hunting mimic octopus, which we watched eat part of a crab and then stash a claw in its hole for later. I made three more night dives at Sidem because the hits just kept on coming. Filamentous scorpionfishes; a total of 24 frogfish of all types; a tiny Pegasus dragonet; thorny seahorses; velvet, halameda, robust, and ornate ghost pipefish. These are on top of the usual suspects!

Although Bali is known for some big fish places like Nusa Penida (mola-molas and mantas), it is not where you would go if you are eager for big animals and nothing but. The sealife is lush, often obscure and fascinating, and abundant -- but I saw no large pelagics on this trip.

As a break from diving, one morning, Villa Markisa arranged a car and guide for us to visit the famed traditional village of Tenganan, known for its handicrafts, especially ikat weavings. I had visited it in the past, and I had lust in my heart for a double ikat (or geringsing), a unique textile with complicated dying patterns. I came home with gamelan music in my ears, a beautiful double ikat for us, and gifts for family members.

My appreciation of the diving at Tulamben and the Villa Markisa dive operation was enhanced when new guests arrived on our third day, Scottish nudibranch specialist Jim Anderson and Australian Rob van der Loos, former owner of MV Chertan and Tawali dive resort in Milne Bay, PNG. Rob has closed his businesses, he said, because PNG is so dangerous, and for him, diving in Tulamben was easily one of the best places for a naturalist and photographer. I thank Rob for introducing me to the very rare filamen-tous scorpionfish.

After logging 16 dives in Menjangan and 22 in Tulamben, it was time to dry the gear and head to south Bali. We spent three more nights at The Balé Nusa Dua, where we celebrated an anniversary with a glorious candlelight dinner at our villa, before packing up and heading to the airport. We had a great all-Bali dive trip, and this was without diving the Gilis or Nusa Penida/Lembongan (all great diving as well).

I've learned that you don't have to fly out of Bali to enjoy excellent diving.

-- A.E.L

Our undercover diver's bio: Our writer has written for Undercurrent for almost 20 years. An experienced diver (over 4000 logged dives), A.E.L. has dived all over the warm-water world.

DIVER'S COMPASS: Bali (DPS) is served by a host of airlines, but nonstop flights are unavailable from the U.S. We took Garuda to DPS and Qatar home . . . Sea Rovers (www.searovers.net) sells several dive packages (7 dives at Menjangan runs $240 per person). Plataran Menjangan (www.plataran.com/property/plataran-menjangan/) runs from around $200-450 a night . . . Ametis Villas is about $400 a night and has a lot of special packages. I arranged our transport with each hotel, which cost about $100 each way . . . . Villa Markisa (https://www.villa-markisa.com/) is only bookable directly; rooms (with full board) run between $175 and $480, and a 20-dive package is around $1150 . . . . The dive shop has a big staff and offers high-quality rental gear (most European brands) and will make quick repairs.