Our first job of our final day in Tulamben was to refill our water bottles. The hotel has a water filter that apparently uses water from a mountain spring. Whilst we filled the first bottle the owner came to check we were ok and asked whether we had heard it ...
We didn't understand what she meant, so asked her to explain.
Mt Agung erupted last night! Apparently there was a huge bang and fire shooting from the top. The owner showed us photos of the eruption on her phone. The staff at the resort were cleaning up fine ash that lay scattered everywhere. Worryingly, we didn't hear or see a thing! Mount Agung is about 10km away from Tulamben but it most certainly doesn't look like it, the volcano looks really close!
News article from Coconut Bali,
"Bali’s Mount Agung erupted again yesterday evening, and though officials reiterated the need for maintaining an exclusion zone of 4km in radius from the volcano’s crater, they also said there’s no need for anybody to evacuate just yet." ... Yikes!
After a delicious breakfast of chocolate cereal and Pandan UHT milk eaten in our plastic tubs with our plastic spoons, we said goodbye to our dive resort Seahua haha. These 2 items have come in so handy on our trip for eating, storing things and keeping the ants away from our biscuits! Earlier that morning we had already waved off our English companions. Now it was our turn to leave.
We walked to the bus stop with a friendly backpacker from Malaysia. He had just finished university and was taking a freediving course in Tulamben. He was heading out of town for a few days of rest before he completed the course. The bus driver arrived in good time and had his breakfast as we waited at the Perama bus stop. When we finally left, we were joined by a freediver from Belgium who had been working on various commercial fishing boats in Australia and New Zealand for the last few years. He was now off to complete his PADI scuba instructor course on the Gili Islands.
The bus dropped us right outside our accommodation, The Amed Stop Inn, which was great as it is a 2km hike to the official Perama bus stop. The room we had booked hadn't been vacated yet but we opted to take another as we thought it might be in the shade most of the day and stay nice and cool. The scenery surrounding the area was magnificent. Rice fields one side, hills the another and Mt Agung peering down on the lot! We are going to be staying in Amed for a while so our first job was to find a huge bottle of of drinking water. A short walk and we arrived at a local shop where we negotiated hiring a refillable bottle. Deal done with a small deposit left, we carried the 20kg water bottle back to our room. Water is not the lightest thing to carry and the refillable bottles an awkward shape too!
Lunch was quick and cheap. Next to where we are staying a lady makes gado gado, a peanut based sauce with rice and vegetables. We watched carefully as she made it from scratch. She crushed the peanuts with her 'volcanic rock' pestle and mortar, added many ingredients: coconut, an unusual block of fish paste, several more and chilli! We opted for a little spicy so in went a small chilli. Vegetables and sticky rice added and all was complete. It was so delicious. We had shared it so stopped again just over the road for another meal. This time rice, vegetables and tempe. It was nice to have so many vegetables because there wasn't a huge amount of places to eat in Tulamben. Well that is not strictly true. There were plenty of expensive, empty places to eat catering for 'package holiday' divers!
We collected our snorkelling equipment and headed to Amed beach, a 5 minute walk away. We didn't know the exact place for the best snorkelling so planned to search for it. We swam about 2km across a black volcanic sand bottom searching the 'muck' for signs of life. We did see a lot of sand, some concrete fish and coral attracting sites plus a few interesting creatures; sea snakes, cuttlefish, a huge moray eel, schooling banner fish and an unusual longhorn cowfish. Right at the end of our snorkelling trip a reef appeared where we spotted a turtle and lots of other fish. We couldn't stay long as we were now cold after a long swim, so we will be exploring the reef more tomorrow.
A quick change out of our now dry snorkelling attire, following our hot walk back to base and it was back to the beach for sunset. Unfortunately the beach doesn't quite face to the west so we didn't see the perfect sunset from our particular beach. We continued on the road to a busier part of Amed. There was more places to eat than we expected. We treated ourselves to Bakso before watching a fantastic freediving video with dolphins. It was now pitch black so we turned around and headed back to our accommodation.
