Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Amed, not Club Med! (Mar. 12/09 - Amed, Bali, Indonesia)

It felt like we had been stationary in Ubud for quite a while when we went to pack up our bags this morning, which was nice! A minivan came mid morning to take us over to Amed, where we'll park ourselves for a few days at a quiet little spot overlooking the ocean to do some diving and enjoy the solitude of Bali's less busy eastern side. Other than a couple shortcuts, the driver took basically the same route that we did on the motorbike yesterday. When we pulled into Padangbai, he pulled over and told us we would wait for an hour, as more people were on their way. So we sat down at the restaurant next door to have some lunch and watch the boatloads of tourists coming off tenders from the cruise ship anchored offshore. But ten minutes later, just as our lunch arrived, I saw the driver walking away with our packs and ran after him, only to learn that they were being loaded into another van that was going to Amed, with a bunch of other people inside, leaving right now! Typical. So we had our lunches dumped into plastic bags, which we would have to wait two hours to eat.

In Amed, the driver stopped on the side of the road part way along the spread out strip of hotels, claiming that was as far as he goes. With 3km of road between there and our hotel and no way to get there, we weren't too impressed! Especially since they pick you up at the start of the trip - shouldn't they drop you off too? But we bribed him to keep going, avoiding what would've been an hour long, hot walk. Our room was perfect, with tile floors and a big balcony looking straight out over the bay and the fishing boats hauled up onto the beach. It didn't take us long to dig out our masks and walk down across the black sand beach for a peek at the reef. Even in waist-deep water, small corals and tropical fish covered the bottom, but they grew quickly into large clusters of healthy hard corals that swarmed with a surprising variety and abundance of fish. In less than ten feet of water, we saw tons of batfish, sweetlips, schooling jacks, razorfish, nudibranchs, feather stars, angelfish, triggerfish, and even a tiny bluespotted stingray. We were very impressed to see such a healthy reef within 30 feet from the beach, especially in an area where boats come and go daily and people are in the water constantly. If this was any indication of what the diving will be like, we're going to be in heaven!

We had an early dinner at a beachfront spot, where we enjoyed grilled fish in banana leaves and even met a couple of girls from West Vancouver who just finished driving up the east coast of Australia in a campervan - exactly the same trip we'll be starting next week! Add that to our ever growing list of small world coincidences!

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