Bali-still

Five days left, and it is raining. Bali has been much better than what i had expected. I expected a Spring Break type of touristy town. I think Pre- Terrorist attacks that is what it was. Now it is kind of like a ghost town in terms of tourists. The place is set up for them, hotels, shops and restaurants. The locals are pretty friendly and easily ignored when they try and push you to buy stuff.  It is really hot and muggy here, It rains mostly at night and on occasion, like today during the day.  We have not really done much while we have been here. Johnny bought a surfboard and he and Malika hit the waves at least once a day.  I usually just sit on the beach and watch. I have discovered a Bali dish called Bakso that i am a big fan of. $.50 gets you spicy soup with glass noodles some fish balls, greens and if you are lucky a deep fried battered boiled egg. Malika hitched a ride from the airport with a Canadian named James and we have hooked up with him and his group of friends a few nights for drinks. We were going to see them tonight, but may just stay in and watch movies instead? I’ve booked us a dive for tomorrow. Two dives at the USS Liberty a WWII shipwreck just off the coast. In the evening we are doing our first night dive. We will spend the night in the coastal town of Tulumbane and then do two more dives the next day. $162 for the whole package. We can buy additional dives if we are so inclined to do so.  
  A couple days ago we took  a ride to the small town of Ubud, it reminded me a bit of a tropical Angles Camp, quaint with small little shops. We walked down to the end of Monkey Forrest rd. to a monkey sanctuary. I bought some bananas and had fun feeding them to the little monkeys as we walked around. Johnny and Malika went into a temple to take pictures while i sat on a bench next to the grampa monkey. his tail was sitting right next to my hand so i thought it would be ok to touch it,  Nope! i got away with petting it twice but on the third time he aggressively turned, got this crazed look on his face, opened his mouth showing me his rather large front teeth. He bit me in the lower back and started in on my shoulder as i cautiously jumped up with my hands out front telling him “Wooh, it’s cool!” He went back to sitting where he was and i moved far away. He showed me who was boss. I figured since i had just given him my last banana that we were bro’s
  April 18
     Diving was great.  We were picked up from our hotel in the morning and driven to Tulumben about 2.5 hours away. I slept the first hour, I awoke in time to see some good landscape. Lots of lush jungle mixed in with terraced rice fields. A lot of back and fourth roads up and over a little mountain past the volcano and back down to the ocean.  There is not much in Tulumben. The only thing that brings people around is the diving. We stayed in a little hotel right on the water. We arrived about 10am and were geared up, briefed and on our way to the water by 10:30. We had to walk a few hundred yards dwon the beach to where we enter the water. They had local women carrying our tanks. Barefoot across lava rock with a full tank balanced on their head. Our first dive was the USAT Liberty, an old WWII shipwreck torpedoed by the Japanese. There wasn’t much of a ship. It is pretty much completely covered in coral, you could make out a couple of bulkheads and ship parts. The entire crew had been rescued so there were no ghosts. We cruised around for about 45 minutes. We then took a breather, had lunch and dove straight out from our hotel in the “Coral Garden” an amazing amount of sea life. Not as much as in Borneo, which was kind of good because you could stop and look at just one thing instead of being overloaded with fishes. We spotted our second shark. ‘Black Tipped Reef Shark’ this one was much larger than the white tipped ones we saw in Borneo. It was big, but far enough away not to be nervous. After a five hour break and as soon as the sun went down we went back out to the wreck for our night dive. This was a neat experience, but i like day dives better. We each had a spot light. It seemed really quiet down there. Pitch black except where the light shines. If you turned off your light you could stir up the phosphorescence in the water and the whole area around would glow. It was a clear night when we surfaced so we floated on our backs and watched the stars. The next day we did two more dives and left that afternoon. On the last dive i tried to stay under until my tank was completely empty because i knew it was going to be my last dive for some time.
   Today we are headed up the coast to co?? some little beach that Johnny wants to see. Malika and Johnny will surf and i will just kick it on the beach. I am still nervous about falling in the shallows and jacking up my leg.
   We have heard that there is a really nice beach restaurant down south a bit where they sit you at a table on the beach and you can get cheap lobster, shrimp or whatever seafood. They say it is quite nice at sunset. I think we will go with our Canadian friends one of these nights.