We woke up at 6:00 after a patchy sleep. We headed to breakfast at 7:00am, the earliest we could. We sat at bar stools facing out over the water. Jives had coffee and an omelette. All the options had meat, so I had a boiled egg and some toast. We headed back to our room and got into our snorkel gear.

We headed down to the water at the back of our hotel, and then just slightly to the left (north) where we went into the water. We immediately saw fish everywhere! The water had lots of rocks, but also quite a bit of coral. We swam slowly towards the wreck of the USS Liberty ship. Following some divers we found the bow of the boat. I was worried about it being difficult to find the wreck on our own, but on our first swim out to the wreck we had no problem finding it.

If you look for boats and other snorkelers you are sure to find it easily. The boat was a navy cargo ship during world war two (also during world war one briefly where it was named the SS Scuba ironically). The USS Liberty was torpedoed by a Japanese Submarine between Bali and Lombok on a journey from Australia to the Philippines in 1942, and pulled ashore to offload the supplies (rubber and rail supplies). In 1963 Mount Agung erupted and pushed the USS Liberty back into the water nearly 100 feet or 40 metres where it rests on its starboard side. The shallowest part of the ship is submerged a mere 4m, so it was really interesting to be able to see the ship so well from a snorkeler’s perspective. The deepest portion of the ship rests 30 metres from the surface.

We then followed the boat down the stern to the hold which was really cool! You could see all the way down the side of the hold to the bottom of the ocean floor. The boat was covered in corals and swarming with fish, like a metropolis of ocean life. I saw a puffer fish and so many colourful fish I couldn’t possibly name, as well as an eel garden! The eel garden looked like seaweed but perfectly in unison and very creepy. We snorkelled for two hours which was surprisingly easy since we were so buoyant in the salty water, and treading water was not difficult even at a depth of 30 metres. 

We headed back in after 2 hours of snorkelling and went for a quick trip to the shop to get some supplies. We then had lunch at the hotel. Jives ordered the Nasi Goreng (fried rice with egg) with salty tuna and spicy peppers, I had the tofu and tempe with spicy chilli sauce and rice. We sat out on the edge of the top balcony of the restaurant with the ocean breeze in our hair.