How Hot is It? Eight degrees.

Eight degrees from the equator. That's damn hot. It's taken a while to get used to it, but Bali is an easy place to get used to.


We left Jogja over two weeks ago and landed in Bali. We immediately went north to spend a week in a time share resort in Candidasa, a small fishing village on Bali’s east coast. The week was a gift from Linda, Jenna’s mom, and we milked it to the fullest. This was by far the nicest hotel we’ve stayed in on the trip. We had our own bungalow with a pool outside our door. The ocean was 20 steps from the bed, as was the restaurant, and they even offered room service in case you couldn’t be bothered with the walk. Most importantly, it was our good fortune that the resort was on the same harbor as Gili Mimpang, Gili Tepekong, and Gili Biaha – some of the best dive sites in Bali. We used the resort’s dive company, and it was a 3-6 minute boat ride
(depending on the site) from our resort’s pier to the mooring lines for the nearest dive sites.

The diving was wonderful, although the currents were fierce at times. On one dive at Tepekong we ran into currents of about 5 knots at a depth of 10 metres as soon as we descended. There was no mooring line to hold and nothing to do – we kicked as hard as we could and were still moving backwards until we just held onto the reef to stay in place. There was no waiting it out, and after 12 minutes of furious work we had exhausted over half our air. We aborted the dive, and promised to try it again another day. Sure enough, two days later we headed back and were rewarded with calm (although very cold!) waters and a gorgeous reef.

Before we go any further, here’s the part you have to take on credit, because it is more than a fisherman’s tale: we saw both an oceanic sunfish (mola-mola) and a whale shark, and have no photos to prove it. The whale shark was a fast visit during a wall dive at Tulamben (a few seconds, nothing more), and we found the mola-mola on a camera test-dive at Gili Mimpang (I had just re-lubricated the o-ring on the camera case and wanted to take it down sealed and packed with tissue paper to ensure there were no leaks).

The mola-mola was really incredible. We were down at around 20 metres in a mild current with a visibility range of about 10 meters at Gili Mimpang, and the sun was in front of us, so that objects we approached were silhouetted. Our guide motioned up and to the left, and looking there I noticed that we were very slowly approaching a large and somewhat triangular black shape, almost like a rock overhang or pinnacle that I had somehow failed to spot earlier. Then I realized that although the pinnacle was getting bigger, I wasn’t moving. I was in the middle of one of those Obi-wan Kenobi “that’s no moon” moments, and before I could communicate with Ms. Skywalker at my side we were face to face with a mola-mola. It was huge – at least two meters tall, and a meter and a half long. There were full grown butterfly fish and moorish idols picking at the scales around its back, and they looked like pimples compared to the big fish. We spent a good 15 minutes hunkered down on a few pieces of coral watching the mola-mola do her thing. Mostly her “thing” consisted of hovering in place and letting the smaller fish scrape off whatever was growing on her. Occasionally she eye-balled us to be sure we were keeping a fair distance – I think that her eye was big and yellow – kind of like a shark eye.

In short, life in Candidasa was splendid. We were having one of those terrific Bali experiences that you here people talk about at dinner parties – the weather was stunning, the diving was terrific, we were in a quiet little backwater and being pampered every which way. There was even a massage table by the ocean where you could get a traditional Balinese massage ($7/hour) while listening to the waves break on the concrete pier below. We also rented a motorbike and took a spin up to the north coast to the village of Amed – another Balinese diving mecca. We checked out Eco-Dive, a great dive shop that we ended up diving with for a few days, and on our way home Jenna took the wheel as we took the long way home. The long way was a winding coastal rode that stretched out for nearly 50km up and down the hills of northeast valley. It was the Balinese equivalent of driving in the Gaspe peninsula. But instead of small Quebecois fishing villages around every beautiful bend of a well paved road, we had a narrow and bumpy road, often with no guard rail, small and quite poor Balinese fishing villages, and a surplus of mango trees laden down with ripe fruit. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to hop off the back of the bike and sneak into some farmer’s orchard to snag a ripe fruit. And to top it off, we had stunning views – of the ocean, of Mount Agung (Bali’s highest peak), of narrow valleys, terraced hillsides, and children bathing in the waterways by the roadside (apparently most of the villagers in Northeast Bali do not have running water in their homes).

After we left Candidasa the diving stayed as good, and perhaps even improved. We spent a few days in Amed and used them to dive in Amed, Tulamben, Gili Selang, and another small bay near Amed called Bunutan. Tulamben is famous as the site of the wreck of the Liberty, an American naval vessel that was torpedoed by the Japanese in WWII, beached, and then sank when it was pushed out to sea by a volcanic eruption in 1963. Today it is an amazing dive site – a wonderful artificial reef where I saw the biggest groupers and sweetlips I’ve ever seen – each was well over a metre long, and we have a picture of the sweetlips to prove it. But the sites up north are also great for finding the small and hard to find creatures that are the real divers treat – we saw ghost pipe fish that looked so much like coral you almost needed to poke them to see them. We found a crab so well camouflaged that I couldn’t find it whenever I looked away for even a split second – it was brown, slightly hairy, and looked so much like a hard coral that it took me 30 seconds to find the head even after the dive guide had pointed me right at it. We’ll try to post up a few pictures, but as always, connection speeds are quite slow.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Flores. We’ll use it as a home base to dive the islands of Komodo and Rinca. Hopefully our next update will have photos of Komodo dragons, and of hiking on Flores. With any luck we’ll hit two important sites. The first is a series of volcanic lakes in the mountains of western Flores that allegedly change color throughout the day as the chemicals in them react with sunlight. The second is the archeological site where Homo Floresiensis (“Flores Man”) was recently discovered. Apparently, a different hominid group was alive and doing quite well as recently as 13,000 years ago, until Homo Sapiens showed up on Flores. There’s a good article on them that we found in the Scientific American special issue on evolution that came out in August/September. If you have time and a curious mind, it’s a neat issue to get your hands on.

The gist of the Homo Floresiensis story is that they migrated to/were trapped on Flores long ago and evolved separately from other hominid groups. Like many animals above a certain size, they “dwarfed” when trapped on an island as a reaction to the ecological conditions of island life (I don’t know what these are exactly or why they tend to lead to dwarfish, but this is something I picked up from the Sci-Am special issue. It seems that animals below a certain size (roughly that of a rabbit) have the opposite reaction and grow to “giant” sizes for their genus. Thus the Flores man was full grown at 3.5 to 4 feet, and hunted pygmy elephants. If we can learn more on Flores then we’ll share. Unfortunately, I’m afraid we may get the chance to learn too much, and too close. In theory the archeological sites and their artifacts should be closed to all but official tours (if there even are any), but Indonesia is flagrantly corrupt, even to our naïve tourist eyes, and some specimens from the Flores digs have already disappeared. I hope to find a local museum, or archeology buff, or an official tour schedule, but am scared we will be offered fossils that we have no business laying our hands on.

We’ll report back in a while. We probably won't have decent internet access again until we reach Kuala Lumpur. After Flores we fly to Kuala Lumpur for a few days to renew our Indonesian visas, then we will spend a week in Jakarta with Sidney, Wayne, and Sam again. After that we'll head off to Hong Kong for a few days, then we're done, back in New York. Thanks for reading, we'll be in touch again in around two weeks.