Yesterday we spent the day doing chores. Eric changed the generator oil and oil filter. Christi cleaned. For dinner, we went into Sanur again. We walked down the street, eyeing the menus at a few restaurants we passed. We settled on a place called Melanie’s Café that had an eclectic menu with a bizarre variety of foods. Eric wanted to eat there because they had a few Mexican dishes on the menu. Christi rolled her eyes, sure that a place that served Indian/Italian/Greek/American/Indonesian/Chinese/Mexican/Japanese was probably going to have terrible Mexican food.

Just like our last Mexican meal in Australia, we ordered fajitas and enchiladas. Much to our surprise, the food was actually pretty good. Granted, our standards are lower these days, but they got all the basics right. The enchiladas had the smallest smattering of enchilada sauce, but there was plenty of salsa on the plate to compensate. The fajita meat didn’t have grilled onions and bell peppers in it, but there were chopped onions on the side, and plenty of salsa, guacamole, and sour cream. Even though the food was not bad, we dreamed of the subtle things that make Mexican food so good, like poblano chiles and cilantro.

Today we went diving. We originally wanted to go to the little islands directly east of Benoa Harbor. They all are supposed have some of the best diving around Bali. The dive shop told us that normally the diving is spectacular there, but for some unknown reason the water clarity had gotten bad over the last couple of weeks. She said the clarity was better in the north of the island and advised us to go to the part of town called Tulamben.

We were picked up from the marina at 0730 and drove to the north east end of Bali, which took about an hour and a half. We took a different road, one that ran near the shoreline, and from time to time there were pretty views of the ocean. We even got a nice view of the island we had originally wanted to dive at. There was a visible point where the tourist area ended. The number of buildings thinned out and the quality of the buildings became more spotty. Few of the buildings were shops, and the ones that were shops were selling goods geared at locals, not the tourists. Signs were in Indonesian or Balinese, not in English. The landscape became mostly farmland, and we got to see acre upon acre of terraced rice fields flooded with water and glistening in the sun. As we got farther north, the car climbed up and down some large hills, with lots of untouched forest surrounding the farms. The north is definitely more our speed than the south. We like low key, mellow, and not touristy. We are traveling to see how the locals live, and in the south it is all touristville. It’s too bad we didn’t make it up here sooner. We would have liked to have spent more time up here.

We pulled into a parking lot, grabbed our gear, and made the short walk to the shoreline. The shoreline is black volcanic rock, and difficult to walk in holding the gear. Fortunately, it was a short walk. Getting into the gear on the unstable ground was tricky! The first dive was on the American freighter ship USAT Liberty, torpedoed by the Japanese on January 11, 1942, during World War II, while carrying rubber and railway parts from Australia to the Philippines. After being hit, the crew landed the rapidly sinking ship at the shore of Tulamben. The ship is 120 meters long (360 feet). It now sits only 30 meters (90 feet) from the shoreline, on its side, parallel to the shore. It is broken in two pieces. The top of the wreck is only 8 feet deep, so it is a good snorkel site, as well as dive site. The lowest part of the wreck is 90 feet deep.

This ship looks like what we had expected the Coolidge to look like. Every inch of metal is completely covered in coral, and there are loads of fish swimming around the coral garden. The boat was pretty well stripped of everything by the locals, so there weren’t any hazards to be wary of. Many upper sections of the boat have collapsed from age, earthquakes and volcanic activity, creating huge, open, well lit areas to swim through. You can get somewhat of a sense of what the interior of this or that area probably once looked like, but it is certainly not like the Coolidge where you know for sure you are swimming through a cargo hold or a dining room. There might still be some scary dark passages to swim through somewhere on the boat, but we didn’t go into any. We stayed either on the exterior or in the open interior areas and enjoyed the pretty coral and the fish. It was pretty to look up from the bottom and see the graceful wall of the ship with tons of fish swimming about.

The water clarity was”¦

To be continued”¦