The club trip this year was to the Amed area of Bali, staying in the Geria Giri Shanti bungalows, diving with Adventure Divers Bali, based on the Geria Giri site.
Diving was a mix of boat and shore diving, either locally in Amed, or in Tulamben, which is around a 20min drive along the coast.
Our accommodation was set just off the main coast road and is built on a fairly steep slope with lush gardens and statues dotted around the site. There was a restaurant and dive centre on-site.
During the day there were lots of birds, lizards & insects in the garden. At night bats & geckos would come out.
Locally there was a good choice of restaurants, a couple of supermarkets, loads of other dive businesses, bank/currency exchange & scooter hire shops. We would regularly go for an early evening drink at local bar (The Barracuda) before moving on to find somewhere to eat.
We dived 3 wrecks, two in Tulamben, being a WW2 Liberty Wreck and at Kubu, the Boga, sunk as an artificial reef in 2012. The third one, known as “The Japanese wreck” was in Jemeluk, quite close to our accommodation in Amed.
Around the Amed area there were more artificial reefs, some structures known as the pyramids, some statues & other sunken artefacts, such as cycles & motorbikes, these all helped attract wildlife to areas devoid of corals.
Throughout the area there was an abundance of Octopus, Turtles (both Green & Hawksbill), nudibranchs – huge variety. Many eel gardens, plenty of ribbon eels. Several large schools of Oxeye Scad. Plenty of Scorpionfish, including several Leaf Scorpionfish of, red, white & blue varieties?? Although the only shark (a small blacktip reef shark) seen was by Mark snorkelling a few feet from the local beach. We did see an Eagle Ray during one dive and plenty of blue spotted stingrays. Several Great Barracuda & a dragonet on the sandy bottom. There was also a large variety of Moray eels
Mid holiday we took a break from diving and took a taxi tour of part of the island. We visited Ulun Danu Beratan a “floating” monastery, set partly in lake Bratan up in the mountains (alt 1200m) passing through the mountains where we saw monkeys. We stopped at a point overlooking two lakes where there were vendors, one of whom had large fruit bats hanging from one of the trees, an iguana and a boa constrictor. Then we moved on to a spa entitled “Holy Hot Springs”
