We begrudgingly left Ubud for the 2.5 hour drive to Amed. The drive was beautiful as we meandered through rainforests, past volcanoes, and next to amazing rice terraces. Amed was a bit different than we expected. Rather than a concentrated area, it is a long stretch of a fishing village along the coastline. Our first accommodation was a really nice although basic two bedroom villa on the beach at the far east end. It offered amazing views of the next island over (Lombok) at sunrise.
Sunrise view at villa
After driving over twenty minutes each way on the scooters, multiple times per day, we decided to move after about four days.
Scooters for the whole time!
We ended up moving into Villa Bukit Malas which is an amazing three bedroom, three bathroom beautiful villa nearer what would be considered central Amed (owned by the dive shop we ended up spending our time with).
The view at the new place wasn’t terrible.
Our days were almost exclusively filled with diving. Adventure Divers was our diving shop for the entirety of our three weeks. We could not have been more pleased. With first class service, we were able to dive world class sites almost every day. The marine life was phenomenal. Nudiebranchs, huge bumpheads, hawksbill turtles, gigantic moray eels, countless garden eels, and a variety of colorful and beautiful fish harbored by stunning coral made our time there unforgettable. The dive masters and instructors were simply amazing to the degree that Scott and I went ahead and became Advanced Open Water certified. The kids were extremely comfortable in the water with the dive masters and had a blast.
Nanga (one of the many fabulous dive masters) on the boat.
Caden ended up missing about five or six dives due to congestion and I missed the very last day of diving due to illness.
One especially memorable dive days took us to a small island on the southeast corner of Bali called Nusa Penida where we swam with giant mantra rays. These guys were around three meters across and extremely curious about the divers in the water. They would swim close enough that you could easily reach out and touch them (we knew not to).
Manta rays swimming with the sun as a backdrop.
The second dive on the island involved a really fast moving current that we rode along to see some of the most beautiful pristine pink corals yet. It turned out to be Keali’s favorite dive day. It also turned out to be the day I lost the camera during a dive. Oops.
Scott and I would likely agree that our favorite dive day was on a deep dive to the USAT Liberty ship wreck. As part of our AOW certification, we were able to dive inside the wreck and explore the entirety of it. We had an absolute blast. The giant bumphead parrot fish were easily two meters long and weren’t afraid in the least of swimming right up to us.
A six foot long bumphead parrotfish.
The other fish were sometimes a little too big to be as friendly and curious as they were, but we loved seeing them up so close.
Our first night dive was a lot of fun but for Scott almost kneeling down on a lion fish. That would’ve left a mark.
Lionfish at night dive
Amed had more to offer than just diving, but we just didn’t actually make it out to do much. We did take an Indonesian cooking class one night which was fun.
It was a different format than we were used to in that we mostly just watched them cooking. The kids lost interest before the whole thing was done, but we did learn many things about the various spices that go into the Balinese food.
And of course we feasted on the results.
One other fun thing we did was a sunset sailing cruise in a little local fisherman’s boat. They called it a “fishing” cruise, but I’m not sure holding a fishing wire that may or may not have had a lured hook would be considered fishing.
Needless to say, we didn’t catch any fish, but we certainly enjoyed a lovely sailing cruise complete with beautiful sunset views.
The volcano from the boat
The kids did school work on non-dive days. Keeping up with their math and writing was important, but I was mostly thankful for all the reports they did on various critters in the ocean that we saw.
One of Keali’s presentations on Giant Mantis Shrimp
A Giant Mantis Shrimp!
We had an amazing time in Amed. The dive shop we used was called Adventure Divers. It is owned by a British/Belgian couple that were absolutely amazing. Their team of instructors and dive masters were not only professional, but they were so fun and knowledgeable that our trip was all the better because of them. We had the whole crew over for a little tex-mex dinner and cocktails. It’s possible that there were some sore heads the next day.
A few of the instructors/dive masters
Note the empty schnapps bottle.
We finally had to leave Amed. On the way to the airport (for our 1am flight to Australia), we stopped a couple of the water palaces. I didn’t have many expectations, but the two we stopped at were absolutely gorgeous. The first was probably a solid 10 degrees cooler inside the walls than outside of the palace.
Tirtangangga Water Palace
Ujung Water Palace
We did end up taking a few days to go to another Indonesian island called Gili Air. I’ll detail that trip separately.
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