Day 112 - Diving the Blue Lagoon and Tirta Ganga

Woke up this morning and still had no water. I ended up washing up in the washroom in the bar before I went out for the dive. I got fitted for gear and all the gear was way better than it was in Thailand. I was wearing a 5mil full length wetsuit. I couldn't understand why it was so thick when the water was 29C. The dive master was a little Indonesian man named Diduk who was about my size.

We got onto this tiny little boat that looked like it was made by a 12 year old. It held 8 people and our gear and that was about it. No room for moving around. The marine life here is very sparse compared to that in Thailand. However, I did see my first live seahorse. The reef is all dead where we were diving. Probably due to the fact that they do fish bombing here, where they drop dynamite into the water and when it explodes, all the dead fish float to the top and get collected but the reef gets killed. The coral is absolutely destroyed. I could see remnants of it all over the sea floor. It's quite sad. I'm sure this place used to be beautiful to dive but there aren't many fish anymore because there's no where for them to live.

One of the guys I was diving with was the most annoying person I've ever been diving with. We'll just say he's from an unnamed Asian country. He had a metal rod that he used to poke at the coral and at the fish. I really wanted to take it from him and start poking him with it to see how he liked it. He also kept breaking up coral at the bottom by kicking it. It was like the school of Asian tourists I saw in Koh Phi Phi kneeling on the reef and poking at stuff. So ridiculous!

At 2 pm we were picked up and driven to Tirta Ganga, the water palace, a 1 hour drive north of Padang Bai. It was pouring outside when we arrived. Even though it was raining the photos don't lie about this place. It is absolutely beautiful even in the rain.

Later on that night we ended up hanging out with some locals and having a few drinks. The nice thing about this town is that everyone passes through to get to the eastern islands and never stays so the atmosphere here is really friendly and chilled out. There are more locals here than tourists. This is real Bali!