Bali - Scuba Diving

By Rough Guy’d

I arrived in Lovina bright and early after the morning climb down the mountain. Whatever delights the town may hold, I was only really interested in seeing the inside of my eyelids and I ended up resting most of the day. After I woke up, I had dinner with my new friends and spurred on by them, I decided to try my hand at scuba diving the next day.

Now, while the idea of scuba diving is nothing too scary or bad, I was petrified and for more than one reason. Firstly, if you go into the water you should ideally be able to swim. As I put it, I can flounder for a bit, splash a bit of water over the place and sort of get myself to my final destination with great expenditure of energy. To say I was a weak swimmer was a bit of an understatement. On top of this, I have a mild form of claustrophobia. Tight spaces worry me a little bit and being underwater, diving as I would be gives you a very strong feeling of being in a tight confining space, even if you are in a body of water that covers the majority of the planet. However, as I said in my very first blog, this trip was a way for me to try many new things.

11^th of May and this was the big day for me. I had planned to go to Menjangan Island to do a cliff dive, considered by many to be the most beautiful in Bali and a mouth-dropping experience. The reality was that the couple who were to go diving at the same time as me came down with a stomach bug and had to cancel. As a result, instead of doing a cliff wall dive, I ended up joining another group and went to Tulamben and diving at a wreck.

Now, I could use a lot of flowery writing to tell you that all my fears were unfounded and that once I hit the water, it was like second nature. But this is real life and not a fairy tale or an ill-concealed attempt at a scuba diving advert. The diving took me a while to get and basically the first tank of air was wasted as I struggled to get used to the feel of the regulator in my mouth. Imagine trying to breathe through your mouth with your lips slightly parted, trying to draw in a deep breath every time and the air tasting slightly different and you’ll get an idea of how alien this was to me at first. Coupled with actually going under the water, well I was feeling a bit forlorn at lunch even though I had finally got the hang of the regulator in my mouth.

Now if the first dive of the day was a bomb, the second dive of the day was the opposite and finally getting down under the water to about 10m and seeing the wreck with all the growth and fishes swimming around made it all worthwhile and my only regret was that I didn’t have enough time in Bali to dive more than this.