Is That You Fishy Fishy Fishy (Safari Part Two)

I was quite hesitated to start this part two, because I realized that I have forgotten many details in Part One, like where and when, which and which. Some more, actually, I intended to put in some pictures, but gosh, Hubby and friends had taken at least one thousands pictures for me to choose! (Pictures finally uploaded!)

I promised myself to write journal along the trip, I imagined myself sitting on the boat, hotel balcony, beach etc during break to write in every thought and special occasions. The only thing I thought that I would need to fight was drowsiness caused by seasick pills, but I was wrong. I seldom took pills cause we had a lot of shore dives, but I also didn’t write my journal, I was even lazy to fill my logbook.
Because, every surface interval, every night, we chatted, ate, had fun and even went swimming, or just sat there looking at the sea or scenery. I did it quite often, as I wanted to enjoy every second of it, why would I bother my self to write? That’s why….
I realized that my first part might not be complete, I’ll try to make this and the next one as completed as possible, for my own record. If any of you who read this get bored, hey, get a life, who told you to…. Hehhehe…kidding..but, kalo bosen, problem loe….


The Fourteenth, Monday, Forth Day
Destination : Puri Jati (PJ)

We checked out early in the morning from Aneka Bagus hotel, so at 7.30 am we already hit the road. Good thing about diving, the activity schedules actually make us to have a good habit, wake up early and sleep early.

Destination Puri Jati, this dive site was found (I read it somewhere) in 2004. It is a heaven for macro and one of the favorite destinations for all diver photographer freaks or just a freak like me.
Since we heard the story about PJ from one of friend, we had been longing to dive in PJ. Yesterday at Secret Bay, we had a lot of surprise about the variety and richness of things we saw, and Prass told us that PJ is similar but better that Secret Bay.

The van was oglek-oglek along the paddy field. I think we traveled about one-two hour. This kind of timing details always make me bang my head. I thought, alaaaa, I would remember, didn’t realize that brain cells do die as you grow older. :)
We entered PJ though beautiful and green field. The scenery was so good, just like what we saw in calendars :), and pictures that we used to draw in Kindergarten. Mountain background, paddy field, and a sun peeping up between the mountains. Sometimes I added moon too, because I thought the corner space was too empty. But PJ scenery was realistic; I wouldn’t know that we were reaching. Hey, paddy field and mountain, where is the sea?
Then suddenly, the driver made one left turn and we were face down with the sea, face down because the place we were using as preparation area is about one meter higher than the sea. A lady villager and her daughters prepared the place by putting a plastic sheet on the ground and a big bucket of fresh water. There was one slopping waterfall, the water came directly from the mountain and went to the sea.

So, we unloaded and assembled our equipment to the tank. Prass gave us a short briefing and he took the first step to approach the sea. I thought we were ready to sink, then…he turned right and we had to walk one-two hundred meters with the tank on our back. I climbed mountain with, maybe lighter bag to carry, but at least mountain backpack was comfortable. This…, we were wearing wetsuit, the weather was hot, and the tank sat uncomfortably behind and we had to walk. It felt like forever, and as if, it was not torturing enough, suddenly Froggie ran-passed me with his own share of tank gluduk gluduk gluduk to take picture of all of us. Power Maaan..!

Finally, we went in the water, put the fin and ready to go.
Once we reached two there meter depth, the landscape was like ordinary land grass, after that, it slopped down to black sandy sand. Suddenly Prass was beng keleng keleng his tank and pointed something between the grasses. It was a bent stick pipefish (Trachyrhampus Bioarctatus ~ proud to know one latino name hehhehe), it looked exactly like a tree branch but if you observed carefully, it was one of the pipefish.

First, it was quite a challenge for us to spot things in PJ, even though the things were right before our nose and Prass had pointed them. The underwater life there, they were all masters of camouflage, you’d never realized that every corner, there were tiny eyes looking back, things that were easily mistaken as leave, dirt, rock, ruble were actually something in disguise.
Yesterday at Secret Bay, Cynthia was almost attacked by sea snakes as it buried itself in the sand. It was a venomous and big, one of the dangerous marine life.

Prass pointed us another dirty thing, at a second glance, it was cockatoo waspfish and then a pair of robust ghost pipefish. The amazing thing, some of these animals were actually confident nobody would recognize them that they stayed still and became good model for photography.

Once we got used to the game, it was very fun and busy dive. We found new things again and again, we were so busy following Prass’s signal and made our own discovery. PJ has black sandy bottom covered with small flowery shape beige rock. If we observed, the rock were actually living things, they moved from place to place. There were jellyfish, lots of them staying at the seabed, if we lifted it, it would fly back down. Then, there were holes everywhere, every hole had something watching, either it was goby, lobsters, shrimps or snake eels. We found snake eel first in Menjangan, it was peeping at us, so I saw something like dragon head with something protruding through its nose, same texture with the skin. I had hard time guessing what kind of animal it was, as it looked like dragon, or snake, or lobster or octopus. After that, we were able them identify it well.

Then everywhere, sometimes the sand moved, and something was flying through the bottom of it; It was Flounder. Flounder apparently is not a character in Little Mermaid, the yellow blue fish, but it is a flat fish, swimming on its side on the bottom of the sea. It disguises well with the sand and buried itself. I watched few of them closely as I was able to make as little movement as possible, or they happened to park near me, the flounder has two eyes on the top, but the mouth was facing front. Mhehehe…

Nudibraches, the beautiful invertebrate with two horns and a flower on its back, was everywhere. From tiny baby ones to the biggest that I have seen. So, common size for adult nudibranches is about 4-8 cm, this one, was maybe more than 15 cm. And we also found rare species, those with two pair of thorn, Prass called it Pikachu, it was cute….We also found few ugly ones, they looked like half a flower, huge and ugly.

We called PJ as nursery; there were many tiny fish kids hehhehe everywhere. They were super cute, sometimes they shaped differently with the adult, but many of them were just miniature of the adults. So, imagine if you see an elephant as big as a house cat, or a cat as big as stuart little. They were soooo cute….!

Frog fish, I love this ugly fish, it is kind of fish that stay at one place, and the dorsal fins adapt and become like legs. So, they would sit at one place and ignore everyone, some type, they caught their prey by fishing, so something would come out from their mouth to attract their prey and slurp, in millisecond, they could relax their jaw muscle until 20 times bigger and glup, had their meal.
Their common size for adult is about a man fist until a soccer ball, depends on the type. But the ones we saw in PJ, OMG, the babies were so tiny they could fit into a straw. We found one by accident, orange color, hiding in the sand, we were hunting for something else, then this frog fish was bouncing. The other one, white color, was found by Prass, Hubby tried to put it in his hand, it bounced and hid inside the edge of his compass. We were laughing and kelimpungan trying to corporate with this baby to pose for us.

We found a pair of Ambon scorpion, they looked so hairy that it was funny. And the highlight of PJ, there were many, many of octopus, and the infamous one, Mimic Octopus. This Mimic is known for their ability to mimic other species. They like to hide in the sand, in the hole, showing only their eyes and fore arms, pretended to be mantis shrimp or other species like flounder, scorpion fish etc. When we found a Mimic, we would stayed very calm, then Prass would approach them and made stepping sound on the sand with his pointer, he tried to make the octopus came out from the sand. Once we success, few times we had to catch up when the octopus shoot up and ran. It was quite funny though, that five of us, made two tier, the below one kneeled on the sand, the upper one held on the below’s tank, and Prass in front of us banging the sand while we watched soundlessly.

We had to watch our ‘step’ especially when we kneeled down, because there were quite a lot of sea urchin and jellyfish, sea snake or flounders. Once, I anchored my pointer and almost hit a juvenile stargazer. It was an ugly one, but smooth, unlike what we always seen, the adult who has rough and hard body. This one was pink and smooth, but it stayed calm and just moved a little bit to my left.

We also found Flying Gunard, the beautiful fish with colorful wing, it was one meters away from where we found four legs Mimic, so we were busy busy busy.
Sea horse, pipefish, puffer, porcupine, lionfish, all miniature size, even huge crab and shrimp who carrying a lot of eggs. There was one nervous lobster shrimp who was rolling up and down although we didn’t touch him, guess he was asking for attention.

So, PJ might look boring for the first glance, but actually there were many things and many corners to explore. We did three dives there and every dive we found different things. I heart people could spend one week in a row and still found new things from every dive. We spent one hour half for almost every dives, I must say the dives were GREAT! We had lots of fun.

The other thing about PJ, since we were heading straight from the shore, we needed to save energy and air in order to go back. So, whoever low on air, in a pair, would navigate themselves back to the shore. Of course, Hubby handled the navigation, I would have landed in Singapore had I done the navigation. And fining back, many times against the current, could be a bloody tiring thing to do. The best method was to crawl until we reached the grassy point; from there we would head to the shallower part, ascended and finned or walk to the shore.

The sun was burning high on our head and we had to drag the jacket and fins in the water, when we reached the shore, there were villager boys helping us to carry the fins and small things. They were busy and strong, they carried tank, helped us in assembling and dissembling the equipment, filled the bucket with fresh water for camera etc.

We had lunch in warung nearby, looking at the calendar scenery. There was one friendly dog that was hungry and finished all the leftover fried rice. We had free flow of soft drink and coke tasted so good. On this forth day, we started to realize that they provided teh botol… :)

After the third dive, the boys showed us the spring water in the middle of paddy field, behind a small pura. (A traditional Balinese temple/altar). It was like an earth big bath tub (around 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.2 meter) filled with fresh spring water for us to dip and clean ourselves. We took turn and had a great time, the boys helped us to hold our towel, of course we gave them fat tips. The spring water was refreshing and clean up the sticky feeling left by salt water. We needed it since we were going to travel for two and a half hour to our next destination, Tulamben.

Almost dark, we reached Tulamben area. It looked like they had more civilization than those places we had been. In front of our hotel, Paradise Hotel (Nooo, it was far from Paradise), stood the highest mountain in Bali, Mount Agung. It was glory and gave me nice feeling. Behind the hotel, was, of course, the sea.
Paradise Hotel was the most convenient place for diving; we could just gear up and jumped right from the hotel. The hotel itself was quite standard as it was meant for diver lodge. So, there were many water tubs for rinsing equipments, shower points, and drying decks. Therefore hotel was standard, ugly toilets, ugly beds, unlike our previous one.

So we took shower, and gathered for dinner at the dining area, which was again, next to the sea. We had great dinner; the dinner was better and cheaper than previous hotel. At first, we had quite a shock as our only choice for dinners was at hotels, as we always stayed far from civilization.
From dining lounge, we could see bright light coming from under the sea. Some divers were doing night dive. The moon was perfectly round and bright, ready for our tomorrow.

We were planning to have five dives tomorrow starting with dawn dive.