Unda da Sea, Padang Bai Journey 2

bubbles escape from USS Liberty

Part 2 Two- Finish the Dive! 

I thought I would be more scared diving on a wreck but really it was fine. I expected it to be a big old skeleton ghost ship, graying among some ominous shadows. It was covered in plant life and fish darting and hovering around; life is harboring there. Chilled out fish, floated through port holes and door ways and fellow divers exhaled silvery bubbles in messy columns. It's a really popular site, but there was no groaning feeling of about how many people there are. Instead everyone watched out for each other and pointed to exciting things. The sun cascaded down in pillars on to the wreck-come-reef and reflected the emptiness of escaped CO2 from all these souls. 

I like diving more with each dive. It's only three years after my first dive and I am finally certified. What was even nicer was

coral and fish thriving on the wreck

seeing no

 rubbish at all. I saw a piece of bamboo, possibly a leftover gift to a shrine somewhere, but I have no problem with natural plant matter in the sea. I wonder if I should? It was a test of my metal going in to that shipwreck.

'I'm not going in there!' I thought but followed dutifully in to the cavern, still supported by big girders covered in coral and plants.

Grouper fish captured through a port hole. 

What was going to happen really? No ghosts were going to jump out, no great sea monsters were lurking beneath, and the erosion wasn't enough to be overtly dangerous. With Data on hand to guide me through I remembered I was in safe hands. As soon as he spotted a grouper fish, Data signaled for me to swim over to the creature. Snapping through a 'pot' covered port hole, forgetting for a few minutes where I was, the big fish sat there, seemingly enjoying the attention from these strange creatures. I could have stayed there far longer if the safety wasn't so important. Which it is.

After the first dive I asked Data if he still finds it as exciting as the first time. "Yeah! You always finding something new. You love it more each time." "Even on sites you go to all the time?" A nod. We're eating nasi campur out of lunch boxes, Indonesian bento if you will, passing the time on our surface break to rid our bodies of excess nitrogen. 

It was a weekend of firsts. First ever wreck dive, first pineapple pancake,Ozone cafe style Padang Bai, and tomorrow first ever white water rafting trip. To Ubud! 

Padang Bai: Learning how not to die unda da sea.

Part 1: Hello Padang Bai! 

Padang Bai bay

"So this is the place I should have been for the last two months", was my first thought as I wound my way through a sexily curved hill. I had passed out of Sanur, through open and windy bypass accompanied by the three tenors of jungle, countryside and mountains. Music to my eyes. Frequencies of other people became less and less and I cannot tell you the sheer joy I felt as I turned off the bypass for the town. No one followed, no one in front. Just me and Gloria, my heart soaring, I could be a true recluse for at least five minutes! Anyone with introvert tendencies will tell you how wonderful it feels to be somewhere and be alone, because even though you can't explain it, you kind of hate everyone as a whole mass herd. It's nothing personal. 

Padang Bai is a small, annexed fishing village with a little bay, a secret white sand beach (that's the beach's actual name) a few warungs and guest houses and some deep emerald hills directly behind. Despite its' fishy orientation there's a freshness there that is missing in South Bali. It's the lack of bike fumes and rubbish. Most people pass through on their way to get their rocks off on Gilli-T. Big mistake, this place gets my vibe. 

Fire poi at Sunshine Bar, Padang Bai

"This is my jam!" says Katia. My Aussie travel pal of a few years now, she's as short, blue eyed, hyperactive and also laid back hippy-rooted antipodean 'cousin' who appreciates food as much as I do. We met in New Zealand and bonded over wine and a shared hatred of shivering in the cold; it was always going to be friendship at first giggle and glug. She's really talking about the music playing at Sunshine bar, but in my head, while watching fire poi and a few dogs playing in the darkness, that's how I feel about Padang Bai. 

Facing fears bobbing along

I have a couple of irrational fears, the first being spiders. The second being the ocean, and sharks. It's so big, I'm so small, they're so toothy, the usual stuff, and I had come to Padang Bai to face them by learning to dive. When you learn to dive, you're basically learning how not to die. I have gone diving in Fiji and Australia but learning to understand this apparatus on which your life is reliant gave me a wonderful feeling of control. That covered in the classroom it was time for Data, my instructor at Geko Dive, to take me out and test me, live. 

Sunken Buddhas at Jepun reef

One skill to test was my ability to help tired divers. Darta, clearly enjoyed teaching this skill as all you have to do is lie back while the student pushes you along to safety. 

"Divers are really lazy, aren't they!" I puff. 

"Yeah," came a happy reply. It suits the sport and I was thankful he's my size, it would be far more tiring to pull a bruiser to safety. 

Unless you have some unhygienic aversion to baths, everyone knows how calming it is to be

submerged in water. Neither floating or sinking is the aim when diving and once you master it, moving slowly along with the current, marveling at this foreign environment, you discover a new way of seeing the world. For me it was a return to seeing the world like a child. Where a child might be excited by playing imaginatively with a cardboard box, or perhaps, how my Mother or great Aunt might be flabbergasted by technology, I am enthralled by the alien world under the sea. Upon seeing plastic bags floating in the sea, instead of glamourising littering like in 'American Beauty', I had an urge to be a more responsible human. 

When I drove home at the end of my chilled weekend I saw a FAT cumulonimbus nimbus cloud, partially silhouetting the sunset. The view was astounding, and I felt a really appreciative love of the opportunity I had just had, as well as for this place that is just totally different from what I have experienced of Bali so far. Again the childlike wonder rose to the surface, my need to see the world beating in my chest running with the lyrics 'Hey Now' by London Grammar pulsing down my ear canals. 

I thought to myself, "We live in an amazing, mind boggling, frightening and extraordinarily beautiful and diverse world". 

The fat cloud passing over Ngurah Rai bypass

Journeys around Bali: biophilia

Journeys and pondering about being Green: an environmental rant

On the bypass to Padang Bai

Taoism: The sense that you are in front of something greater than yourself.

"Have you heard of Green School?" my friend Stephanie peers at me from over her iced green tea. 

Shisha pungency mixes with whiffs of charred meat and rose petals. We're nestled in low velvet lined chairs underneath a fabric canopy, where moroccan lamps hang from an apex and the AC allows us to escape the afternoon Indonesian scorch. 

I raise an eyebrow over a somewhat large mouthful of hummus and baba-ganoush. We are sporadically unable to allow conversation to flow, instead pitta-puffed cheeks ensue. She goes on to explain it's  a school up in Ubud, where the children have their usual lessons with a side of environmental awareness, and also yoga! Love it!

"Jane Goodall, you know the one who lived with monkeys, she's speaking there soon." 

I'm becoming more conscious of my carbon footprint and the apparent lack of recycling facilities here. The duty to really think about this escaped me back in England; because I think we are more accepting of how things run when we are home as it's what we're used to. But there is so much development for tourism and then inevitably waste. I've been talking to Steph of my quandary. What happens to the surplus debris at hotel building sites? Where do all the noodle packets and the endless stream of plastic bags go?

Plastic wrapping is abundant in Bali. It clogs up the rivers, rots in the streets of Kuta and during rainy season it washes up on the shores and works it's way around your ankles while you try to catch a wave. Everyone who dives

Buddhas at Jepun, East Bali

experiences the heart sinking moment of watching plastic bags roll in the tide. I think of it like this: I don't have gills, so I am an alien down there. Fish have gills, this is their home. Wouldn't you be annoyed if someone came in to your home, dropped their rubbish, even in seemingly invisible ways, and just left? The detritus for which we are responsible should then be removed by us. 

The other day, I bought a hygienically sealed donut from a street cart. The hawker, a small leathery woman with a toothy grin, helped my inept handling of change and reverse wrapped my pre-sealed sugary lump in another plastic bag for extra hygienic care. You buy a McDonalds in a paper bag, you get given an extra plastic one and the supermarkets are ready to hand them out in vast quantities. My Bahasa is kecil and I am an orang asing (foreigner) but you don't need to be local or an expert, to see that this is a totally superfluous use of packaging. Nobody needs a coconut that comes in cling-film.

Recently I bought a packet of coffee from a road side shop, full of additives and sugars, perhaps even a little msg. It was only when I got it home that I saw the sugar was palm sugar. A dilemma presented itself. Do you drink the coffee you've already paid for, even though it's from an industry widely known to be quite destructive and unregulated, as the ghosts of many a Bornean orangutan can tell you? Or do you take it back to the lady on the side of the street who's trying to earn a living, and demand your money back? No I didn't think so  either. 

My petrol consumption is also hard to monitor on an automatic bike. Most people speed every where, zooming off as soon as the light turns green or before, so fumes chug out of engines in to the air we all breathe. You drive along, passing through big black puffs of it. The worst was in Tabanan. The guidebooks had all told me this was somewhere to wonder. It wasn't. I tried to find a Warung but they were all on the side of the road, and the road was a busy highway. No trees, just concrete buildings. I like my food sans a side of carbon monoxide thanks. 

Infrastructural quandaries

Most roads are fairly smooth so there is enough infrastructure to provide platforms for modern developed life, and a non bumpy road underneath your posterior. Yet I have been struggling for a long time with the notion that whatever we humans do, has to be done by making money and that that is the most important thing. Upon returning to England over a year ago, I looked around at my surroundings, at people on the Underground, rushing about their daily lives, literally rats in a race. It made no sense to me, and the only way I could reconcile it in my mind was to put it in terms of modern humans' version of survival of the fittest. Yet this isn't for everyone, myself included, and rejecting that frame of mind then begs the question, who says that 'development' needs to come from  (a Western idea of) economic growth? As Clare Short once said, in BBC's Planet Earth additional 'Future' series: "it's not any longer going to be economic growth for economic growth's sake, but a more equitable world...and we cease to find the meaning of life out of more and more economic growth and more and more consumption, because...it's not only plundering the world and unsustainable, it's making people miserable."

Tanah Lot 

There's no denying that tourism is a cyclical industry, which along with all the waste, brings in a lot of money needed to support it's own demands. To me this means that eco-friendly tourism needs to be investigated and then, implemented. Think about it. Bali gets about the same amount of visitors as Thailand, around 6 million people per year. Thailand is around three times the size of Bali (I'm guessing) so if you think in terms of land ratio and consumer numbers, it's no wonder that much of the island has been ravaged. So I have to ask what is the actual (because potential can't be relevant) impact? 

But I really like the sound of Green School.

The mountains behind my house at sunrise.

www.mundayjourneys.blogspot.com