Diving in Tulamben

Diving in Tulamben

Tuban, Indonesia, Asia

I had the most incredible day diving today! It started with an early morning wake up to be picked up by the tour at 7:30am. I got on the bus and met two of my fellow divers for the day, an Italian couple named Silvia and Gabrielle. They were a very nice couple cardiologists from Genoa who have travelled all over the world together. They were very cool to talk to. We picked up another two guys who were diving, a couple of Parisians, but they weren’t good to chat to. They spoke English, but couldn’t be bothered speaking with myself or the Italians, so we left them on their own.

We had a three hour drive up to Tulamben where our dive site was located. At first there was nothing to look at as we just passed through a few small cities where all we saw were broken down buildings and a lot of traffic. It wasn’t until the third hour that we got up into the northeast quarter of Bali and I started to see why people say this place is so beautiful. We were driving through jungles, small villages, rice paddies and by beautiful beaches. It is much more picturesque in the north than anything I have seen in the south.

We arrived at our first dive site at about 11am and we split into two groups. I went with the dive master Tony and the two Parisians, while the Italians went with the other dive master Peng. The three of us in the first group all had our open water certification, but the Italian couple weren’t certified so were just doing a fun dive, but not as deep. Apparently depth is a funny thing here that doesn’t really mean much to a PADI certified dive master. The three of us in our group are all certified to dive as deep as 18 meters (about 55 ft), keep that in mind.

We walked in from the beach and our first location was called Drop Off. It was just that. About 20 meters off the shore there was a sheer cliff drop and all the wildlife on the wall was astounding! I have never seen so many colorful types of coral anywhere else. There were a lot of fish, but the only one that I saw for the first time was an angel ray. It was massive. The diameter was about 8ft wide. It didn’t come too close to us but it was awesome to see it gliding around 15ft below us. We checked out more coral and other sea creatures for a while, but had to head up to the surface a lot earlier than I was expecting.

I know that when you are deeper in the water, you have to use more air than when you are near the surface. This principle had never really affected me before because when staying within my 18m threshold, it doesn’t make much of a difference. It wasn’t until we got back to shore and we all checked our dive gauges that we realized we had gone a bit deeper than 18m. Our deepest point in the dive was actually 32m! Totally unsafe. But it did explain why we went through so much air so quickly. The first dive only lasted 27 minutes.

We had a little boxed lunch on the shore that the dive company had brought along for us. It had the smallest banana I have ever seen in it. I wish I had my camera at the time, because I really couldn’t believe they actually called this thing a banana. It was literally the size of one of those small travel toothpaste tubes. It was maybe two inches long. I thought it was hilarious, but it tasted alright. After not having bananas in Oz for the last six months because of their $13/kg price tag, I’ll take anything!

Our second dive was just a short walk up the beach, also in Tulamben. This was my first ever wreck dive and it was at the site of the USS Liberty. This was an American ship that was hit by a Japanese torpedo back in 1942. They were trying to get supplies from Australia to the Philippines, and the Japanese were apparently not happy about it, so they sank it. It still resides just about 30 meters offshore. The ship lies between 30ft and 100ft below sea level, so we got to see quite a bit of it.

When we first got down to the ship we looked up to see a HUGE school of jackfish at the surface. It was awesome to see them in their formation flowing across the surface like a silver river in the middle of the ocean. We moved on from that to see the ship and we got to swim through a couple parts of it and pick out some parts that you can still tell were from a ship. We could see the anchor, a few doors and some wheel handles. The amount of coral growing on this thing was just amazing. And because of all the coral, there was a ridiculous number of fish all around it picking off whatever they could to eat. This was a much more sensible dive, where our maximum depth was 18m and we were under for 36 minutes. It was definitely the coolest dive I’ve ever done.

We got our gear all packed up and hit the road for the three hour trek back to Kuta. I don’t know if it was the new depth that I had reached or what, but I had a pounding headache for most of the ride and since I’ve been back at the hotel. I got back around 7pm and I haven’t been able to do much since then. I think I’m just going to grab some dinner here and call it an early night. I hope I don’t have some sort of deep water aneurism!

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