The Hidden Paradise (Safari Part One)

Is it the wind that whispering to my ear
Is it the huge silk blue clothe that waving to the shore
Is it the cottony sky that hovering above my head
Or is it the smile that I see on the faces around me
Makes me feel like home?


Bali Safari (11-20th November 2005)
WARNING: LONG AND WET

Just our luck that our long trip so far were all happened out of the best season. We went for the first one on March and the second one on November, while the best season runs from April to October. So during that, we were just looking up to the sky and wondering why.

But, who said we made the wrong decision?


11th November, Friday, First Day
The Departure


Whoever talked to me about work after was ignored on Thursday; all I cared about was Friday. After counting down since eight months ago, the last two months had been flying very fast, and well hell, let's skip the boring talk…

It was five of us, me, Hubby, Froggie, Leo and Cynthia. We’ve known Froggie since we started diving, knew Leo and Cynthia since the first trip. After that, we are all dive buddies.
Traveled by MRT with huge and heavy bags, we made it to the airport.

We had luxurious seats on the plane; half of the plane was filled with Russian. Found out that except Japanese and Australian, Russian was one of the most common tourists in Bali. They were more excited than us, although we made equal noises, those guys with thumbs bigger than my toes were so glad being in Bali, they were even clapping their hands when we touched down. I could imagine, they might have been flying thousands and thousands of miles.

Despite my worries, the immigration process was very smooth. ADA, the operator, was ready outside. We introduced ourselves with Prass, our Dive Master, Christian, and Aris, the driver.

After stopping by for snack, whoaaa, Indonesian product, Chitato, nyam nyam, and the numerous zeroes, we then traveled for three and a half hours through the rocky, dark, narrow and winding road, it was a rough journey.

01.30 am, we reached the hotel, Aneka Bagus Pemutaran. We were tired, but the hotel was niceeee. The surrounding was dark but beautiful, exotic, right in front of our room we could see a big mountain, we had three bedrooms.
Me and Hubby had two super single bed with mosquito net around the bed, high into the ceiling. It made me feel like princess, mhaha….



12th & 13th November, Saturday and Sunday, Second and Third Day
Destination : Menjangan and Secret Bay Gilimanuk

We had huge American breakfast at the hotel. The hotel is located right beside the sea, the swimming pool was right next to it. The garden was beautiful, the beauty of Bali, most of the hotels are low level, have generous landscape and outdoor spaces. I felt like escaping from the Lion city.


Menjangan Island, North of Bali

I could see sky and green everywhere. We took half an hour car ride and gathered at the sea side warung, I remember the name, Wild Wild West warung. Kekekekke...
I could feel Indonesian touch everywhere. Bamboo building, outdoor seating, roaming chicken, cats, and dogs, and the earth.

We had briefing, and off we went for twenty minutes boat ride to the island.
In the boat, here came my first challenge. I had to fit in my 3mm wetsuit. It was new and uhm, tight, and I hate tight and thick wetsuit. But because we heard Bali is cool, we were all dress up with the thickest wetsuit we had for the first day.
So, I spent almost ten minutes to put on the wetsuit and vest. It was quite torturing to wear in the land, but it looked better, mhehehhe...

Everything looked promising, the clear blue water, the calm sea, and the sunny weather.

So we jumped.

Menjangan used to be the best dive site in Bali, it is located far from the rest dive site of Bali. It offers warm water, wall and drift diving. This is one of my most favorite dive sites. I can remember the feeling of the colorful underwater life, giant gorgonian sea fans, numerous colorful fish, and the magic of the garden eels, the best point.

I remembered garden eels in Sipadan was not really clear because of rocks and corals. In Menjangan, imagine sea desert, huge area of clean sand and thousands, thousand of eels were peeping out from their home and made some dancing movement.
We were parked there, quiet and mesmerized, watching and almost held our breath trying to blend with the life. When we passed, hovering above them, they were hiding slowly and gradually like being swept by silent signal, disappearing into the holes, but the garden was so huge that we could stop above one point but still had surround-dancing friends around us.

Menjangan also has the perfect image most people have about diving. In the brochure, in the video, when they promote about this sport, we see colorful reef and fish, the rich diversity, the dancing fish and anemones.
This is not what we always have when we really go down there, there are a lot of variety, Menjangan is the closest so far that I’ve been to that image, the landscaping was almost perfect that I felt very sad to leave it at the end of every dive.

We visited one Wreck, they called it Anker Wooden Boat, because the anchor lies 6-8 metres from the surface, the wreck lies up to forty meters deep, it was used to transport the slaves in the past, nobody knows the real name.
When we descended, I followed Prass the DM as usual, I kept heading down until one point I remembered that we were going to the wreck, I kept looking to the front, searching for dark figure of ship but found nothing (I thought we were supposed to see the wreck immediately since the first point was about 6 meter depth)…, then I looked at my watch and oppps, I was already at 39 meters depth.

I looked back and then realized that the wreck was scattered around, most of them were covered by corals, anemone and gorgonian sea fans, the big metal boat was divided into smaller parts, I (being a very bad navigator) couldn’t put away the pieces together to form a boat in my wet brain hehehe…., we stayed for a few minutes and ascend to the shallower part.
Lucky I didn’t feel narcosis, the high feeling like we are on drugs if we stay too deep for too long.

In Menjangan, it was the first time we saw the infamous pigmy sea horse. The sea horse was disguise perfectly in the sea fans, the adult sea horse is about l cm or less (yesss it’s microscopic) and the body looked exactly like the sea fan. If you were an expert in Where’s Wally, that is nothing compared with the challenges of seeing this pigmy. Even when Prass had already pointed the location to us, I still had difficulties in figuring out where was the head, eyes and backside?…

I left the mystery in my head, about whether I looked at the correct thing or it was just the shape I made. On the second visit to that dive site, I finally could see perfectly the sea horses. One was fat and cute (I call it piggy sea horse), one was skinny and the other one was jumping here and there. I gave Leo the magnifying glass (he is long sighted and couldn’t see the pigmy at all on the first chance). He was so happy grabbing the magnifying glass from my hand, after a while, he signaled ok, he’s seen it and I could see him laughing. It was really a challenge mhehehe…. I spent about ten minutes then watching a bunch of pretty anemone shrimp (which was small also) waiting for others to take pictures of pigmy. I was the only one without camera.

On the second day at Garden Eel, last few minutes of the dive, the current was very strong. I stayed too far away for the seabed because the tank was almost empty, I had positive buoyancy. Quite suddenly, the current changed direction and we had to swim against it. Prass was in front; he finned followed by Leo and Hubby. It was too late for me to grab the bottom, so I was hovering about one and a half meter above sea bed, no matter how I finned, I couldn't reach them, it was like running on the treadmill, holly molly!! It would have been easier if I reached the bottom and crawled.
After awhile, cursing and swearing, I looked behind, from between legs :D and saw Cynthia, Froggie and Christian were still far behind, they were taking pictures, the current hadn't reached them. In front of me Hubby, Leo and Prass were clinging to a rock, flapping like flags. So, I gave up fighting and let the current carried me near Froggie. I was between suffering, angry and laughing while I fought the current, I finned endlessly but stayed in one point.
It must have looked ridiculous, lucky, I think, nobody was looking...

The island was called Menjangan, means Deer in English. On our Surface Interval, in between dive, we spent the time in the island, having tea break and chatted about dives, compared pictures, swam in the beach an did our nature calls.
I have to make something clear here. Sea is our, uhm, restroom. If we happened to land on an island, we would run to the water and did it. If we were on the boat, we would cling at the end of the boat or standing on the ladder.

There are only three types of divers in the world:
1. Those who pee in their wetsuit.
2. Those who lie about it
3. Those who haven’t dived long enough.

Menjangan really stands for its name. We found a huge deer sunbathing on the shore while the wave kept coming, hitting his backside. It enjoyed the sun so much that I envied the satisfied look on its face. At the other side of the island, we saw lots of huge deer, no wonder where the island got its name.

It was the first place we did shore dive. All along our dive experiences we always did boat dive, either jumped or back-rolled from the boat. Bali was the first time we did shore dive. It could be hard and easy, depending on the location and sea condition.
I did my first one quite tediously; I forgot where I put my hand and learned how to put BCD the dive jacket in the water. It was floating everywhere, refused to stick on your back, so I had to throw my back above it, or used my strength to pull it near to me. We could make it easier by standing in the shallower water, where the water level in the waist, but we did the first shore dive in between two boat, water level as high as our neck and we had to fish out our BCD thrown by the boat man. So, it was an experience.

We did five dives in Menjangan, three on Saturday, two on Sunday, we moved to Secret Bay for the third dive. I kept saying, this was only the first two day, I still have a lot of time, and BAM, I’m here, the holiday is ended… :"(


Secret Bay, Gilimanuk

We departed half an hour from Wild Wild West warung to Secret Bay. Secret Bay was nothing for the first glance.

It’s not deep; the deepest was only about eight meter. It didn’t have rich reef and colorful corals; it was a dark brown sea bed with lots of rubbish, yes rubbish.
We did one dive there and found lots of bottle, cans, snack like Taro, Yakult bottle and even, the most hilarious object, we found a bra. Wonder what happen to the lady until she dropped it. We suspected it was 34A, no wonder bra, mhehehehhehe….

But, actually, it was a rich and unique dive; we found lots of macro (small creatures or fish), things that we had never seen from other dives before. The sand was covered but green algae, below that, we found shrimp, crabs, miniature fish (the juveniles, when they became adult they would swim to the deeper sea), couldn't remember the species and latino names, have to do a lot of study in order to be able to identify them all.

We found a big tree bark and spent a lot of time there, we were busy, so many things to see. There was a school of big bat fish with their juvenile, a huge puffer fish inside the group (identity mistake hehehhe), three beautiful ghost pipe fish, file fish, huge cleaner shrimp, scorpion, lion, cat fish. Lots of thing, the visibility was not good about five metres and the water was quite cold.

We spent good one and a half hours below. Our longest and first muck-dive so far.

We were excited but cold, so we postponed the night dive to other day, we gathered for a hot tea break, we wore happy faces, every dive was a great one. After tea, we headed back to the hotel.
We had dinner at the hotel. Our hotel was out of nowhere, so these three days we couldn’t go anywhere. For three days, we haven’t even met Asian except the hotel staff and warung staff. Every corner of the hotel, every dive boat that passed by our way, we saw Caucasians, there were hellos everywhere. But, whatever the occasion, it turned out that we were always the loudest.

Five of us, we cracked jokes every time, and most of the jokes was not moderate funny, but extreme until our stomach cramped of laughing. Since we were already so convenient with each other, having known each other for almost and more than a year, we were able to tell ordinary, polite to dirty and extreme jokes. :)



P.S: We are all still in the process of holiday recovery. I have headache looking at the monitor. We slept for nine hours last night. We have three buckets of laundry to do. And there are Christmas songs playing everywhere.