Hello again all!
I've spent the las couple of days exploring the local dive sites and getting to know some of the other interns. Sunday night is our weekly BBQ we ordered pizza and spent the evening hanging around the pool. I had my first taste of aarak a locally made alcohol from either palm, coconut or rice. In this case it was palm, it was pretty good and reminded me of the sweet tequilas you can get when you tour the distilleries in Mexico. I also had my first taste of Bintang a local beer that is found cheap and in abundance, it was surprisingly tasty even though I'm not a beer drinker.

After a day off spent mostly catching up on sleep that  my severely jet lagged brain needed I had a couple of days of fun dives to just enjoy and get familiar with some of the local and popular dive sites.

Another Divemaster intern has arrived name Ella, she hasn't started the internship yet because she still has to finish her rescue but I'll be helping her with that this week! Along with another certified Divemaster who was very familiar with he site we explored Padang Bai a very popular dive launching town and resort area for tourist especially new divers.

We did three dives, one at the moth of the harbour and 2 in blue lagoon, one running all the way south along the coast and the other only going only a short way down the coast. the first dive was pretty interesting, probably one of the greatest highlight was a very aggressive clownfish protecting its anemone. It started by attacking Simon  going for his mask it continued to pursue him even after he'd moved off. Next it start in on me going for my mask and after I teased it a little I moved on but it still continued to attack my fins well after I was about 5 feet from its anemone. The most surprising part was that the clownfish ventured so far and attacked the two of us even though we are much, much large than him. He was only about 10 centimeters long, but some of his fellow 'house-mates' were a centimeter or less, which really just made them so much cuter.

Unfortunately I didn't get many good pictures for the dives, the picture above is definitely the best one. There was a couple of these statues scattered in the blue lagoon site. In many dive sites there are structures that serve as artificial reefs or are structures that corals and other organisms can attach to and begin a reef. Some times they purposely sink boats or planes or other structures to serve as an interesting area to dive in. Such as this wreck which was sunk intentionally.

The Next day we drove to Tulamben which is the site of a very popular wreck called the Liberty Wreck.