Diving in Tulamben, Bali, Indonesia

Bali has long been famous with its diving points. Following the fame, I also went to dive in Balinese coasts. As I have mentioned in the previous posts, I have arranged my dives beforehand with the dive center called Bali International Diving Professionals. The dive site is located at a fairly distant location from the main touristic locations where most of the hotels are. To give you a perspective about the distance, I can say that it takes two and a half hours of driving from the dive canter which is at Sanur. The major reason for the distance to take so long is that Bali has no decent highways although the island is pretty big (almost 10 times larger than Singapore). And also, two volcanoes located at the center of the island makes such an infrastructure hard to be constructed. So be prepared to wake up early and sleep in the van in order to dive in Tulamben.

When you get to the dive site, you park the car in a parking spot which is encircled by a restaurant where you have the lunch or munchies, café (Kopi house), change rooms and toilets. Well, apparently those are almost everything you have in the close neighborhood. After you change, you have a short walk to the beach which is 50-100 meters away. This is a rocky beach where you have several wooden benches under the trees to put your diving gear and bags. Normally all group of divers or dive schools settles around those benches and plan their dives. There is one kiosk where you can have refreshments but you may not need them if your dive center supplies drinking water line BIDP. There are also several kids wondering around to sell you t-shirts and stuff like that. Well, if you can have a good bargain, you may buy the stuff. Me, I have reduced the rice of a Tulamben t-shirt, which was nice actually, to 50000IDR. So I recommend you not to pay more that. There was another thing interesting for me that all of the diving gear and equipments were carried by local young girls and women. There is a constant flux of air bottles carried by those people from the parking to the beach. Normally, I am kinda used to see that your gear are carried by the guys of the dive center but I have seen that is done by the women first time. I guess that does not include the fare trade concept.

I dived to two points in Tulamben: USS Liberty shipwreck and Drop-off. The former is an American Army/Navy transport ship which has beached in 1942 after she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. She was moved away from the beach by a volcanic eruption in 1963 and then become a dive point. Her 120 body lies from 6 to 30 meters depth roughly parallel to the shore. I made two dives around the shipwreck. First one was from port side to the back and the second was other way around. We followed the pieces of the wreck which is mostly aligned on a straight line of the frame when we approached from either direction. I can say that the coral coverage was rare and scattered around the wreck especially as compared to surface of the ship. Volcanic sand and small rocks dominate the sea bottom. You can see anemones and the anemone fishes frequently. Around the larger pieces of rocks at the bottom covered with corals, you may encounter angel fishes, snappers and rarely groupers. When swimming around her, the scenery is mostly dominated with many types of colorful corals, anemones and snappers. The low visibility of the day I dived made it harder to see the fishes mastering camouflage. However, I was lucky enough to see a scorpion fish and a barracuda. On top of that, we, by chance, started the decent with a giant colony of tuna fishes and that was unbelievably nice moment that I wish you experience as well.

The visibility became much better when we dived to drop-off which is relatively  shallower dive point. The corals dominate much larger area and get pretty colorful here. That was much more tranquil and longer dive thanks to the depth, I highly recommend to check this out before leaving Tulamben. Moreover, the nice daylight penetrating well on this depths giving the diver to picture much nicer sceneries. The bottom is much rockier, thus the seeing fishes hiding around is much more possible then on the terrain a bit away from Liberty.

Finally, the dives I had in Tulamben beach was pretty nice in terms of experiencing a relatively shallow shipwreck and nice coral reefs of Indonesian water as starter dives in south east Asia. Therefore, it paid back the long way we had 2 times a day. Highly recommended to be experienced for all of you!....