Hi,
you might want to do some nice wall diving at the nationaal marine park in
the north. "Minjangan" it's near permuteran where there is an interesting
project using electricity to rebuild the reef. Actually you don't even need
a company to get out to the island of minjangan as the park service has
boats and they rent equipement.
have a nice trip,
Stephen

These are all good areas for diving, with Tulamben & Nusa Penida in
particular having a variety of different dive sites. You could spend
days at either of these areas.

A little off-shore to Padang Bai are the islands of Gili Mimpang,
Tepekong & Biaha. They are good places for shark encounters but I have
been there a couple of times and had very fierce currents.

There is a local diving club (http://www.kapalselam.org/) who
sometimes run trips there. Anyway they can give you more detailed
advice than I can about the sites in Bali. They have been very helpful
to me on a number of occasions.

Miika,

My Bali diving experience is EXTREMELY limited.  In fact, limited
to the dives in my report in April this year:

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I48515889

But we did dive the Nusa Penida area, and there was a Mika in our
group, but no Miika.

The Batu Aba, where we were fortunate to have a close encounter
with a mola mola (Sunfish) is a MUST dive if I ever go back there
again.

-- Bob.

Tulamben is great, have spent two weeks there.  Dived with tauch
terminal.  Most people will dive the Liberty, drop off and coral garden,
these are all in the main bay.  I would recommend however getting a boat
just round the corner to Batu Kelabit as well, good chance of seeing
large pelagics.  A bit further round is emerald which is in front of a
Japanese hotel of the same name.  It is worth a dive but not as good as
Kelabit.  There a wrecks of a few old cars there as well.  Further North
(1/2 hour on a juking) is Kubu, this is fairly newly discovered and the
coral beats anything in Tulamben - there was some garbage floating
around however.  The wreck is one of the best in Asia though and worth
several dives and at least one night dive.  Lots of little critters such
as ghost pipefish and pygmy seahorses.  The main bay has a lot of ribbon
eels which are very photogenic (electic blue with long yellow stripe the
length of it body and big flared nostrils.  They really stand out
against the black volcanic sand.

Padang Bai is also good if very cold (20C rather than 28-30 at
Tulamben).  This is due to deep water upwelling from Lombok straigh
which again means good chance of sighting bigger things.  Padang Bai
itself is beautiful but get loads of people trying to sell you stuff off
the boat (but not too pushy).  Can get very serious currents around some
of the sites e.g. Tepekong.

Penida is also good, again high currents, almost all are drift dives.
Also saw a sunfish there.  Best way to dive these is to drift along the
edge of the wall and look out into the blue while being careful to stay
close enough not to get swept out.

Cheers

Simon

The best place I have found for dive site descriptions is
www.divetheworldindonesia.com has lots of good info about Bali and
elsewhere too.

Cheers

Gav