120 Saturdays

A few days later I am now in Ubud, and a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver The diving is here is amazing! The water here is 30 degrees celsius, even at 30m depth! Compare that to 16 degrees in California, it makes diving so much more fun! For the Advanced Open Water I had to do 5 adventure dives, which included a little bit of theory but were mainly just fun. I started of with a wreck dive, in which we explored the USS Liberty which was torpedoed by the Japanese a long time ago. We saw a lot off beautiful fish, and there were all sorts of corals. The most memorable moment of that dive was seeing ‘Nemo’ – the clown fish – from Finding Nemo The coral that these fish live in is exactly the same as in the movie: with very squishy tendrils, seems like a nice place to live In addition to this dive I also did a Underwater Navigation dive, Night Dive, Deep Dive (to 30m)  and finally a dive to practice better buoyancy control.

In these dives I saw to many fish and coral types to name, but a few highlights: during the deep dive we saw the rare Eagle Ray (about 1.5-2m in width). Also we saw a lot of Bumphead fish, which are about 1m long. It was such a great experience to be at 30m depth and to look up to the surface and in the distance to see a group of these huge fish swim buy! Some other fish that we saw: scorpion fish,  stingrays, squids, octopus, cuttlefish and many others!

The place where we stayed was very nice as well (see pictures), and a stone’s throw away from the dive location. The name was Paradise Inn, which seemed very fit given the lush green plants spread throughout and the soothing quiet – which was a great relief after the noisy Kuta streets.

Part of the dive package was that they picked me up and dropped me off wherever I wanted. As I knew that a friend of a friend (Charlotte) was staying in Ubud for her thesis I asked them to drop be off there. Uud is a nice, small,but still very touristic town surrounded by rice fields (sawas). When I arrived I managed t find a very nice yet cheap place, and met up with Charlotte and a friend of hers. They introduced me to the local drink (of which I forgot the name, but its basically palm wine) and we had some good local food. We also ran into another Dutch girl who is traveling around here, so we had a small Dutch get-together :p

Later today I will be doing some exploring to really see what its like here, Ive already spent way too much time in this internet cafe..

For pictures see below:

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Last Friday I safely arrived in Bali after a not-so-bad flight via Hong Kong. In the past I’ve read a lot of other peple’s travels blogs so I feel I am falling into clichés, but it seems I’ve been here for ages already though its only been 48 hours!

When I arrived on Friday and finally managed to get my visa after standing in line for 1.5 hour I walked into the hot, humid Bali air. Hoping not to come over as a ‘stupid’ tourist I had prepared myself a bit in the airplane by learning the numbers from 1 to 10 and the tenfolds in Bahasa Indonesia. It seemed to have helped at least a bit because I managed to go from the starting price of 25 USD down to ‘lima puluh ribu’, which is about 5USD.

On the way to the centre of Kuta – where I had planned to find a place to stay – I was overwhelmed with how different it is here to anything I’ve seen before.  It always smells of something, mainly food, but also things like incense. Then there is the temperature:  during the day pretty much always over 30 degrees celsius. But mainly its just how things ‘are’: the roads, all the scooters, the  people, the entire atmosphere. I guess it shows that I have never been to Asia before

Yesterday I walked around a bit to explore the area; around noon I ended up in the A/C’ed M-minimart where I took a short break to get some water. Here I ran into Arnold: an Indonesian guy from Padang, Sumatra. He was sitting there being bored and browsing the web a bit (as there was free wifi in the minimart). We ended up talking a bit and we decided that since he was bored, and I didnt have anything in particular planned that we should hang out together. Arnold had worked in Bali before (he graduated from Tourism school in Sumatra), but had come back now to look for a job again. As his sister had a house on Bali he was staying there while she was away. We spent the day racing around Kuta, Legian and Seminyak on his scooter and had lunch in a nice local restaurant that he knew. He also showed me his (or actually his sister’s) place, and introduced me to his neighbor where we spent some time talking.

On the way back to Kuta I had an unfortunate incident: after we had stopped to get some petrol, I got back on the scooter a bit too careless and tore my pants open from top to bottom In the words of Arnold: it was a good things that I was wearing underpants Luckily they sell shorts on literally every street corner, and so the problem was quickly solved. This was alos when it started raining, so our plan to go to the beach changed to visiting Discovery Mall, where we had dinner. Finally the day came to an end after a good night of bar hopping and clubbing with Arnold and his friends

Perhaps this explains a bit why it seems like I’ve been here so long: a lot of experiences in a very little time Altoghether I am really enjoying myself! Tomorrow I will start my PADI Advanced diving course with Aquamarine Diving (Thanks for the referral Laurent!)

Below some pictures:

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ps. I love this place: I just spent an hour on the internet for about 90 cents