Fishing village to divers’ town. In the early part of World War II, the 411-foot US Army cargo ship Liberty was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Damaged, she was towed toward a shipyard in nearby Bali, but never made it. Getting ready to sink, she was beached at a sleepy little fishing village named Tulamben on the northeastern coast of Bali so the cargo could be salvaged. Nearly twenty years later, earthquakes associated with an eruption of the nearby large Bali volcano Mt. Agung shook the ship off the beach, sinking her parallel to shore, with the shallowest portion only about 3m down and the deepest about 30m (~100 feet). Tulamben is kind of out of the way—it takes a three hour van ride to get there from the airport in the south of the island—and the ship had been largely stripped of fittings and valuables in the years it was on the beach, so for a while there wasn’t much to attract divers. But by the late 1970s, it had been discovered that the wreck now sported innumerable colorful soft corals and gorgonians, and was home to a multitude of fish. It’s an easy dive once you get into the water across the rounded lava cobblestone beach; you could skip a rock from the beach and land it on the wreck. Before long, the area began attracting divers from south Bali, then from the world, and Tulamben began to change from a fishing town to a diving town. Downtown Tulamben is still small; it’s about a 15 minute leisurely walk from one end to the other. But now most of it is made up of dive resorts and dive shops. We stay in town at the Oceanview Dive Resort. Straight out from the resort is the bow of the Liberty wreck. Most other dive sites around Tulamben are a short 5 to 15 minute van ride away, including (going east) Paradise reef, the River (and Dropoff), Pura Segara, Cantik Point, Melasti, Kuanji Skerif, Seraya, Batuniti, Sidem and Bulakan, and going west, Baturinggit and Tianyar. Below, the towering Mt. Agung volcano rises behind the Oceanview Dive Resort.
Lenticular clouds occasionally cap Mt. Agung.
Sunrise overlooking the pool at Oceanview Resort where dive classes are given.
Sunrise at the resort.
Early morning fishermen in their colorful jukung return not long after sunrise.
Part of the catch of the day being sold, probably by fishermen family members, along the main road.
A few of the dive operations in the Tulamben main drag.
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