Diving at King Cruiser, Phuket, Thailand

I'm not gonna lie! After the terrible visibility at Kho Doc Mai, I needed a pallet cleanser to fresh up the taste of Andaman underwater. We have reached our destination for the second dive of the day. The king cruiser is located between Kho Doc Mai and the famous Phi Phi Island of the beach movie. You can actually see it if the visibility is good. Anyway, we started to suit up in our lovely boat Jolly Roger with ultimate interference of the mothers and wives at the divers area. I guess there is no need to talk about the super respectful customers of Jolly Rogers anymore after the previous article. 

I wish to say that the visibility was great in King Cruiser but I was not. However, it was not supposed to be great anyways. So this time the disappointment is less than previous time. Nonetheless, King Cruiser was hiding much more for us! The place is great for the lion fish chasers. Lion fishes are thriving around the wreck. I have seen at least 8 as individual and in groups. So the wreck was not really a deep one. The rock bottom is around 30 meters and most of the must-see parts of the wreck is around  16-18 meters. So she lets see her for an almost hour long dive.

Apart from the all the crowds of fishes and the sneaking hunter lion fishes, there are a couple of places you should check when you dive King cruiser. First of all don't forget to take a pee! Well yeah! On the back of the boat you can see the toilets of the cruiser. The ceiling was opened and the toilets are visible. So fun time! 

The other hot spot of the site is the chimneys of the boat where a shrimp colony was thriving. They are not shy at all and you can have great picture over there too. The color of them were so crisp and the scenery was amazing!

The gate of the vehicle deck is almost completely destroyed. Thus you can go in and have a nice trip inside the parking site of the cruiser. If you have a good flash light, I believe you can see many beautiful things inside.

All and all, King Cruiser dive was a great experience and it is a location for all levels of divers. She gives beautiful shots and you can see many different rate sea creatures down there... or up above. We have accompanied by a giant jelly fish during our ascent. The combination of sharp sunlight and the jelly fish gave great pictures to make this beautiful place unforgettable. 

Diving in Tulamben, Bali, Indonesia

Bali has long been famous with its diving points. Following the fame, I also went to dive in Balinese coasts. As I have mentioned in the previous posts, I have arranged my dives beforehand with the dive center called Bali International Diving Professionals. The dive site is located at a fairly distant location from the main touristic locations where most of the hotels are. To give you a perspective about the distance, I can say that it takes two and a half hours of driving from the dive canter which is at Sanur. The major reason for the distance to take so long is that Bali has no decent highways although the island is pretty big (almost 10 times larger than Singapore). And also, two volcanoes located at the center of the island makes such an infrastructure hard to be constructed. So be prepared to wake up early and sleep in the van in order to dive in Tulamben.

When you get to the dive site, you park the car in a parking spot which is encircled by a restaurant where you have the lunch or munchies, café (Kopi house), change rooms and toilets. Well, apparently those are almost everything you have in the close neighborhood. After you change, you have a short walk to the beach which is 50-100 meters away. This is a rocky beach where you have several wooden benches under the trees to put your diving gear and bags. Normally all group of divers or dive schools settles around those benches and plan their dives. There is one kiosk where you can have refreshments but you may not need them if your dive center supplies drinking water line BIDP. There are also several kids wondering around to sell you t-shirts and stuff like that. Well, if you can have a good bargain, you may buy the stuff. Me, I have reduced the rice of a Tulamben t-shirt, which was nice actually, to 50000IDR. So I recommend you not to pay more that. There was another thing interesting for me that all of the diving gear and equipments were carried by local young girls and women. There is a constant flux of air bottles carried by those people from the parking to the beach. Normally, I am kinda used to see that your gear are carried by the guys of the dive center but I have seen that is done by the women first time. I guess that does not include the fare trade concept.

I dived to two points in Tulamben: USS Liberty shipwreck and Drop-off. The former is an American Army/Navy transport ship which has beached in 1942 after she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. She was moved away from the beach by a volcanic eruption in 1963 and then become a dive point. Her 120 body lies from 6 to 30 meters depth roughly parallel to the shore. I made two dives around the shipwreck. First one was from port side to the back and the second was other way around. We followed the pieces of the wreck which is mostly aligned on a straight line of the frame when we approached from either direction. I can say that the coral coverage was rare and scattered around the wreck especially as compared to surface of the ship. Volcanic sand and small rocks dominate the sea bottom. You can see anemones and the anemone fishes frequently. Around the larger pieces of rocks at the bottom covered with corals, you may encounter angel fishes, snappers and rarely groupers. When swimming around her, the scenery is mostly dominated with many types of colorful corals, anemones and snappers. The low visibility of the day I dived made it harder to see the fishes mastering camouflage. However, I was lucky enough to see a scorpion fish and a barracuda. On top of that, we, by chance, started the decent with a giant colony of tuna fishes and that was unbelievably nice moment that I wish you experience as well.

The visibility became much better when we dived to drop-off which is relatively  shallower dive point. The corals dominate much larger area and get pretty colorful here. That was much more tranquil and longer dive thanks to the depth, I highly recommend to check this out before leaving Tulamben. Moreover, the nice daylight penetrating well on this depths giving the diver to picture much nicer sceneries. The bottom is much rockier, thus the seeing fishes hiding around is much more possible then on the terrain a bit away from Liberty.

Finally, the dives I had in Tulamben beach was pretty nice in terms of experiencing a relatively shallow shipwreck and nice coral reefs of Indonesian water as starter dives in south east Asia. Therefore, it paid back the long way we had 2 times a day. Highly recommended to be experienced for all of you!....

Diving with Bali International Diving Professionals

I went to Bali with the sole aim of diving in its crystal clear waters and seeing the amazing underwater creators of Indonesia. I ain't professional divers with uncountable stars or master of open water realm. I dive for real fun but I need to cooperate with some people like many of you. On the other hand, I know well enough that diving is not a joke and you should go for trusted dive centers. I normally do research about the dive centers before I go to a place for that. But this time I was luckier than other times because a Dutch friend of mine, who have spent many years as a dive master at Gulf of Thailand, recommended me a dive center named Bali International Diving Professionals. I contacted them by email beforehand. I wanted to see not only their offers but also the options because my major aim was to dive for manta rays and mola molas. I must say that they were quite fast with the communication. I have my answer in the next day and it included both Manta Point and Crystal Bay which is known for mola mola encounters. There was also another bonus track: USS Liberty wreck! I am going to write on my experiences about those dive points locate at Tulamben and Nusa Penida. However, I would like to talk about the dive school now.

First the prices! Finally after exchange of some email for the arrangements, I decided to have 3 dives at Tulamben where the shipwreck is and 2 dives around Nusa Penida which is the island on southeast of Bali. They first gave me the price of 103 USD and 100 USD respectively. These prices excludes the equipment rent which is 20 USD/day but includes transfer for/to your hotel if it is located at Sanur, Kuta, Nusa Dua, Jimbaran areas. I was not that lucky to find a decent hotel at that region for a good price and unfortunately had to stay at Hotel Ecosfera in Echo beach, Canggu. That was not only a bad accommodation experience but also almost an hour away from the dive school where we have to pass by before the dives in very early in the morning. And on top of it I had to pay extra money. Before I got to the island, I am not gonna lie, I was a bit suspicious about this charge. But after you get to the place and understand the scales of the distances in Bali. I actually understand why they were asking extra. The distances are huge in Bali. Another good example would be the way to Tulamben dive point. It takes two and a half hour to get there from the dive center at Sanur. You can really sleep in the van before the dives and actually I think you should! The only good think about those trips is that the transfer, lunch, which was extremely good both at Tulamben and on the boat, and drinking water are all included in the price. Coming back to the price, after a bit of iteration to convince the lady I contacted for a lower price, I finally ended up 275 USD for 5 dives including the equipment and hotel transfer. Well it was not that much of a bargain to be frank but it was worth to have good dives. There was only one thing annoying about the monetary part that they have never warn me about the bank charges they reflect on the payment although I have explicitly said I will be paying with the credit card. They might have skipped this detail but finally I had to pay ~4.5% for the payment by AMEX. The fee is a little bit lower for MasterCard and VISA, like 3%. So I recommend you to be aware of it. 


For the technical part of the dives, they were quite ok. The ratio of diver to dive master is less than 4 which is pretty good. They group people according to the experiences so that you don't surface unnecessarily early. For the dives with large groups, like the ones I had in Nusa Penida, they had a couple of extra dives to check around. So overall they helped a lot to spot the creatures around like lobsters or scorpion fishes in the cracks or disguised. The only thing disappointed me for the dives, and I want to share with you guys, was end of one dive I had in Tulamben. I have not been diving for a while, and naturally I was consuming air badly. Thus I depleted my air quite fast for the first day. In the second dive, we were diving 3 people: me, dive master and another customer. As my bottle was at 50 bars, the other guy was a bit above 100. In this situation, the dive master took me 5 meters for 3 minutes of safety stop. And signed me to follow the bottom then surface and swim to the beach. So this was, honestly, not nice. I am not very familiar to the dive centers way of doing the business but I have mostly dived with university societies where no such thing can happen especially when you are diving in a completely now point. Other than that everything was cool with those guys. They were extremely cool and kind. The briefs before the dives were satisfactory. The equipment they offered were pretty new. So they can be used with no worries.

Overall, I recommend you to dive with those guy but I also recommend check out other dive school beforehand just to be sure that you don't have a price lower than 60 USD per dive including everything. Frankly speaking, this seemed to be a bit extreme after diving for 30 USD at Kata Beach Phuket.