Tuesday Sept 30th to Sunday Oct 5th, 2025

I will do a brief summary of our activities during our stay here in Bali. The weather has been great and the only rain has been at night, during the day it is hot and humid. The resort is crowded and it is hard to get a seat by the garden pool ( the one we prefer) in the morning after breakfast. If we are having a pool day we will go back to the room after breakfast, around 11 am, and watch TV or read and then go out to the pool later in the afternoon for a few hours.

I have been diving twice more since my last post. Both times I went out to Nusa Penida to hopefully see more mantas but neither day has been as good as the first day I went there. One of the dives the current was so rough & there were way too many divers so with the current and many newbie divers it is hard to stay out of everyone’s way. That is the one negative about Manta point is that there are no regulations so there tend to be unlimited divers and snorkelers. A lot of the divers are new to diving and their only other dive was in the pool at the shop and then they are out in open water with a rough current, all to see the mantas.

The dive shop does have a 15 foot pool which is better than a lot of places that don’t go deeper than 8 feet. The pool has an optical illusion when people are in it and it is freaky to see.

Notice the swimmers body from the view underwater and then their head, which seems detached, above the water. Also when the tide is low they load all the dive gear onto small boats to take to the big boat. It is a lot of hard work but when the dive boats contract with the water taxis this is an included service so it is the taxi service personnel carrying all the tanks and gear to and from the small boat. I guess this way everybody makes a living.

My couple of manta encounters on my 2 other dives.

A zebra moray eel and another octopus which they call “day” octopus which explains why I have seen so many here.

Saw some nice sea turtles

A spotted moray eel and an orange lined trigger fish.

We did see these 3 lion fish swimming along at about 60 feet. It is hard for me to remember that lion fish are actually from this region and do have natural predators unlike in the Caribbean where they are killed as soon as you see them because they eat all the juvenile fish.

Here you have a blue fin trevally and an octopus in the middle and the 2 are hunting partners.

This is a banded sea snake.

The reefs are very healthy with lots of juvenile fish.

I will say that on these last 2 dive days, Sept 30th and Oct 3rd I have been the only English person on board. The rest of the boat has been all Chinese. The owner of the shop is Chinese so she heavily markets to China. The majority of them do speak English but they do have dive masters that speak Chinese.

I remain enamored with the anemone fish and the middle picture was of an anemone fish up top and its home was in bubble anemone which I had not seen before.

Luckily I did not get sick on either of my dive days and with a little more than a week to go I am debating going 1 more time but have made no arrangements yet.

Some of the views around Nusa Penida.

Lots of limestone make lots of holes caused by wave action. On the right is Mount Agung which is almost 10,000 feet high and on a clear day towers over Bali. It is an active volcano which last erupted in 1963.

As to other activities we did take a bike ride one day through the resort. They offer an escorted bike ride through the neighborhood for 45 minutes 3 times a week so we went on Thursday. There were 3 of us and the resort guide. You ride down to the beach and go along the beach boardwalk for quite awhile and then turn up one of the many streets with shops everywhere. Every street has tons of shops, some open stalls and some with air conditioning. They sell t-shirts, knock-off sneakers and purses and then the usual souvenirs. Most of them are the same but they are fun to look in. We rode down a rough road back to the hotel that was pretty busy with lots of motor bikes weaving around cars and that was a little nerve racking. The streets are already pretty narrow and then you have motor bikes parked on both sides narrowing it even more and 2 way traffic it is amazing we did not get hit by a motor bike. We made it back in time to run to the breakfast buffet before it closed and Merv & Michelle had waited for us.

Michelle picks places for us to eat every night at breakfast and sometimes we take a taxi and most times we walk. We have repeated a few just because they are so good. Michelle & Merv have also met some friends for dinner to do some catch up before they leave again and we have gone out on our own. As you walk along the streets, besides passing all the shops, you also pass massage parlors and tattoo shops. There are tons on every block. I have no idea how you pick one over another. If we were so inclined we could get 3 small tattoos for $6 US. Scary thought. Also as you walk along there are motor bikes passing you by the hundreds all offering rides, like Uber for motor bikes, and as they pass you they say “bike, bike, bike”. Makes me laugh every time because I think of the movie Finding Nemo where the sea gulls kept saying “mine, mine, mine”. It is amazing how quickly you get used to the flow and as I said nothing is high pressure. You also learn that when you go into one of the shops or stalls looking for something or just looking the price always seems to start at 900,000 IDR (54 US) and they quickly come down as you show no interest or start to leave.

Most of the restaurants have live music every night. It is always funny to me to hear all our American songs with an Indonesian accent. If you go down by the beach they all have live music which sometimes compete with each other and they also send up fireworks every few minutes even though there are signs all along the beach saying that fireworks are illegal and will incur a large fine.

Kathy has read a ton of books while we have been gone. The resort has a small library at the outside bar by the pool but they are on a high shelf so she has to get help anytime she needs to look at a book. By now the guys know her and they all laugh and say “back again”. We also have “borrowed” some books from our county library and downloaded them to the kindle.

Kathy has also visited the spa a few times. We use the one Michelle recommended since there are so many and you can’t tell which ones to trust. It’s great to have someone who knows the places to eat, shop, get your haircut and use spa services. We did stop on the way home from dinner one night, when we were on our own, to get a 30 minute foot massage. The cost is $4.20. It is very popular, especially at night, and not unusual for all the seats to be full and they have over 40 chairs for pedicures and foot massages. We enjoyed watching a mom and her 3 small kids all get foot massages across from us. 2 of the 3 kids were sound asleep and kept pulling their feet out of the hands of the person giving the massage in their sleep. When the massages were done Mom had a hard time waking them all up to get them out of the chairs.

Us getting foot massages and the girls massaging us watching the kids across the way sleep.

There is a great gelato place on the corner by our hotel for gelato, we have only splurged twice so far and when I say splurge I mean in calories not price. 2 scoops in a cup is $2.10 so we have to pace ourselves. It’s tasty with many flavors.

We are caught up on football and did manage to watch the FSU vs Miami game right after it ended. Expected but still disappointing score.

Starting to plan out our last week here and making sure we have done everything we want to do before the long flight home.