Gili Trawangan

We got to the airport and booked an afternoon flight to Bali. We posted home a few Christmas presents and had a wee wander about airport. While reading the guide to Indonesia the plane we thought maybe we would go to an island with volcanic lakes that change colors several times a year. When we went to book it the flights were awkward and boat travel to the island would take hours/days.
We spent the night at Tuban and left the next day for Panganbai. We spent the night there and then got the ferry to Gili Trawangan for some diving.

It is a beautiful and relaxed island. Terry stayed at a café with the luggage while I went to find us somewhere to stay. We booked into Pesona, where we met the Louise and Lars who we hung out with for a while. I spoke to Evan at Blue Marlin about doing my advanced dive course. I decided to do two dives in one day and then see how I felt. Terry booked some fun dives also.

We also met Milva, our favorite Swiss person of all time. The other lovely lovelies that we met were Cheryl and Dave. We were all in the happy situation of going to Bali after we left Trawangan.

On our fun dives the visibility was good. We had never really dived off a boat into such a strong current. We did not do the fun dives together but saw loads of green turtles and terry saw another shark. After that I decided I would do the advanced dive course, as my anxiety levels were dropping.
I had to do a module on navigation and on deep diving. I choose to do the last three on buoyancy, night diving and multilevel diving.
My first was the deep dive to 30 meters, which took a while because my ears are a bit slow to equalize. I had to do a timed task on the surface and then again at depth. It should have proved how your mind becomes fuzzy the deeper you dive. I was faster at depth. Seems my mind is fuzzy on the surface!

Then I did my buoyancy dive and it was fun, I did underwater scuba limbo and then get my nose onto the tip of a snorkel in the sand. On my multilevel dive I saw blue spotted rays and a shark. My navigation dive was the one I was most worried about as I have difficulty using a compass and I associate it with maths. Usually Blathnaid or Terry acts as the navigator. But I did all the skills right first time, which rocked. I did the night dive off the beach at a project run by all the dive shops called bio-rocks. They are large structures mad out of like a wire and a small electrical current is passed through it to encourage reef regrowth. It was mad. After a while the visibility dropped and, of course, my anxiety level became raised and so did I. thankfully we were no deeper than 18 meters and at the time we were at about 10 meters. I was a bit annoyed with myself but I passed the course so that was good.

In the mean time terry did more fun dives and saw a manta ray, then he decided to do a technical diving course using nitrox so that he could do a deep dive to see a military wreck that still had its cache of weapons. Apparently it was brilliant and well worth it. There were depth charges and large rounds scattered around the place. The best part is its at 45 meters so its not recreational diving anymore for him.
Otherwise we did a bit of snorkeling, sunbathing, swimming and of course drinking. The island was great, beautiful and relaxing and full friendly people.