More Diving

But first, a little update…

Sorry our last post was so short, we were getting eaten by some nasty little mosquitos in the lobby of our hotel in Lovina, so I will give some more details in this one.

Our stay in Candidasa was excellent… 3 days of just relaxing by the pool and reading. It was just what we needed, and we headed to Amed ready to get back into the water and do some diving. We had three full days of diving planned, and decided that this would be a great chance for Cat to get her Advanced Diving Certificate, so we found a great dive shop to take care of this for us. The diving around Amed is great, excellent corals, lots of fish and two big shipwrecks to explore. Cat had no problem completing the course and I had a great time tagging along taking pictures of everything. Here’s some…

The place we stayed in Amed was again, very nice, ocean view from the front door of our villa, excellent food, a great pool and of course, silly looking ducks…

We said goodbye to the ducks and Amed and headed to Lovina, which was to be our base for exploring the inland a little and see the volcanos. We decided to stay just two nights in Lovina, giving us an extra day of diving at our next stop, Pemuteran. Our trip up the mountains and inland was a nice little break from the temperatures of the beaches, only 25 degrees instead of 35. Near the top of Danan Brahma, there is a botanical gardens and we spent most of the morning there looking at various types of orchids, cacti and various other plants in a huge park overlooking a volcanic lake. We also stopped by an old Hindi temple that was built on this lake centuries ago, and some of the temple now sits well into the lake… it was very beautiful.

We headed back to our hotel for a late afternoon poolside beverage and started getting ready for some more diving. A bit about our hotel here in Lovina… as some of you may know, it is low season for tourism right now. I don’t know why, maybe its because May is when students are writing exams, or summer vacation is just around the corner, or maybe because it’s the hockey playoffs (go Canucks), but anyways, most of the places we have stayed in are generally kind of quiet, which has been nice. This place in Lovina though is, well, eerie… it is an older, established resort, a bit rustic but well kept up, and almost completely empty. If you can remember the winter resort from the movie The Shining with Jack Nicholson where he goes crazy, this place feels like a summer version of that resort. Don’t worry, I didn’t chase after Catherine with an axe, but we both got the same feel from the place and looked forward to moving on.

Anyways, move on we did and we are now in the small seaside town of Pemuteran. This place is all about the diving and snorkeling. People at the other dive shops had been speaking highly of it and we couldn’t wait to get into the water… but we had to because for the first time on this trip, I ended up with a little tummy trouble, and had a miserable night our first night here, so we had to skip our first day of diving. I got some medicine in me and am now 100% better, so this morning we headed out diving and WOW, this place has some fantastic coral life here. Here are some highlights… Well only one actually posted :(

We are headed out again the next two days and will try to post more pics if we can. We have a good Wi-Fi connection here and for those of you who we have been trying to Skype with, I dont think this island can handle video Skype, so we may have to do just audio... it seems to work just fine! Well gotta rest up for tomorrow!

Chat soon,

Tim and Cat