DIVE LOG Australasia

P ADANG B AI ! DIVE INDONESIA :: words and images by KEN HOPPEN SE EXPERIENCE www.kenhoppenphotography.com.au B ali is a brilliant place for a dive holiday. It’s relatively cheap, the closest destination in Asia for Australian locations, and the diving is brilliant. I’ve been to Bali a few times now, and after a gap of many years started returning last year. It was well overdue.

Have an afternoon here to walk out to the Point and see the temple there, and on to Blue Lagoon on the northern side of Padang Bai.

For a few years now I have been seeing Facebook posts from macro life taken around Padang Bai, and there were enough shots of one fish that I have been wanting a photo of for quite a while that made me organise a trip there. And I got the shot on the first dive. This virtually never happens! I wasn’t quite prepared for it and began wondering what to do with the rest of the week. Not that that was ever going to be a problem. Padang Bai is a small village about a two-hour drive north of the airport, on the eastern coast of Bali. It is easy to get to, pickup straight from the airport and at the resort for lunch after our six-hour flight from Melbourne. Once settled into our resort, cameras constructed for the next

day, we spent the afternoon lazing at the pool and having a short walk around the town. Padang Bai is busy. There are heaps of people here, some staying a night, others about to jump on a ferry to go across to the Gili Islands, Nusa Penida, or Lombok. There are times when the small loading jetty is impossible to navigate due to the number of people on it, both exiting and entering the ferries. It is a hub for divers as well as travellers, with dozens of small dive boats taking their six to twelve divers out to the dive sites between the main island and Nusa Pendida. Do not expect to have a dive site to yourself here, though it did happen to us for a couple of dives during the week. More

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DIVE LOG Australasia #408 - October ‘24

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