April 28th, 29th, 30th and May 1st Life on Gili Air

Saturday was to be scuba diving for both of us but David had some tummy trouble so the dive was postponed till Sunday.  We spent the day making hotel reservations and travel tickets to get from Gili Air back to Denpasar.  We will be traveling on a Skoot fast boat which will stop at Gili T, Nusa Lembongan off of Bali and then drop us in Sanur with taxi transport to our hotel. We will stay 2 nights in the Villa Bali Jegeg again, which is close to Helma and then move on to Legian for 2 nights.  Legian beach is a good surfing beach and there are surfing schools near there. Our friends Joe and Marie arrived on Gili Air today and are staying at Juliantos as well.

Sunday was David's big scuba diving day and a big day for me too as I did not have to go scuba diving.  I really do not share an interest in going deep - I would love to scuba to 5 feet of water so I could look eye to eye at the fish and still pop up to the surf to clear my mask etc. Need to find a place that would let me do that. 

David went out on the boat with the instructor, Alex, that we had on Thursday, and did 2 dives about 50 minutes down each time to an maximum depth of 16 meters/50 feet . The locations were "the wall" and the other was very close to the dive school.  The weather that day was very rough and so boats could only travel in a certain direction away from the big waves.  The first dive we drifted about 400 meters with the current starting about 12 meters down, and went along an underwater cliff-like drop-off (wall), seeing first a black lionfish, an uncommon adolescent form which I had never seen before.  We also saw many lobsters, five or six sea turtles, some of which were grazing on the sea bottom and were not bothered until the instructor stroked their backs - then they only went up for air, then came back down next to us to graze again. We also saw two smallish moray eels, many other fish, lots of corals, a colorful sea slug,  about 15 sea anenomies with clown fish and dacilis, and I picked up a live cowrie.  The dive boat picked the instructor Alex and me up after he launched a baloon signal, and we hovered at 5 meters for a few minutes as our safety time.  Then we went to a type of "muck" dive just off the dive center - saw cuttlefish, couple of turtles, a beautiful coral mountain, and many other odd things including 5-foot long striped sea cucumbers walking along and eating.  All in all, it was great.

Meanwhile, Leslie attended an hour and half yoga session at H2O Yoga and Meditation Center which, while I couldn't do it very well, I throughly enjoyed. There were 4 other ladies there in the class.

Monday we went with Joe, Maria and a young french couple on a "glass" bottom boat snorkeling around the area including the "coral gardens" which is between Gili Meno and Gili T, on to another spot in front of Gili T harbor where we saw 2 turtles and enjoyed swimming along with them -- us and 40 other tourists. We then motored on and snorkeled in front of Gili Meno before having lunch on the island. We walked down the "boardwalk" to the turtle scantuary which has more turtles than here on Gili Air. Gili Meno has a nice long sandy beach and the accomodation looked nice but it did not look like they had AC. Horse carts and bikes are the mode of transportation on that island as well.  For our last snorkle spot we requested to go back to the coral garden.  The guide took us a little further down that reef to a sunken ship.  I prefered the closer in coral reef so we swam in to that area again.  I saw a Valentine Puffer fish like the one we had in our aquarium and was very happy.

Our routine in the evening is to go with our friends to a cafe to watch the sunset and then go on for a grilled fish dinner.

May 1, Tuesday, we were off back to Jimbaran Beach on Bali to have dinner with Helma