Indonesia, Malaysia & Singapore, November 2022

We woke up to a beautiful day, with blue sky and few couds, we could even see Mount Rinjani, Indonesia's 2nd highest volcano with its 3,726 meters, and it is actually still active. For the adventurous there are multi day hikes to the summit.

We enjoyed a great breakfast and the hurried to the dive center. Resort diving is so easy... Just get onboard the boat, everything is already onboard, and you just check that the guys who have done this hundreds of times, haven't messed up. And so we set sail for our first dive site!

Our first dive was on the reef, located just off the the peninsula where the resort is. The shelf runs about 200 meters out with very shallow water, and then drops off when you get to the reef. On this first dive we saw some very nice, both soft and hard, coral. It appeared light blue under water, but is actually shining white. Lots of different fish, amongst others Harlequin Sweetlips, Blackspotted Pufferfish, Razorfish, Moorish Idol, three types of nudibranches and a first, bubble algae or sea pearl. Visibility was very nice, hard to see any grain in the photos, and must say that I'm quite happy with that little camera and box. :-)

Again surfaced we had to wait about 1 hour as we had been down almost 1 hour. So we enjoyed the view and the slow steaming to to a spot North of Gili Air.

And then it was off to the last dive of the day. We were optimistic as Gilles (a frenchman, but believe it or not, quite nice) had promised turtles... Off we went and we got our moneyes worth of fish and more again. A lot of repeats, but this time also scorpion fish, lion fish, trigger fish, cuttle fish and last but not least - 4 turtles... The first was a massive specimen who appeared out of the grey, swam towards us and then turned. I was sure that that was it, and still quite a sight, but I was wrong. It circled round and came back as a 747, and landed head first in the "bed", brakes kicked in, and there it was. Didn't really care about us, and while we were buzzing around the big guy a smaller came in to land, but had to land on the "floor" beside the bed... Further along we saw another 2 turtles. Amazing experience, and Jannie went to heaven for a little while this noon...