“Nusa Lembongan” – what a great name! It’s got to be up there with Timbuctoo and Tipperary; reason enough to pay a visit! But as chance would have it, it’s also an excellent spot for scuba diving (with the Mola Mola in season, as previously mentioned), and has a laid back backpacker vibe and friendly locals. So when Keith delivered this pitch to me and invited me to join him and Julia, it didn’t take much persuading. And then HannahMariya’s arm didn’t need to be twisted too hard either. So the four of us set off excitedly for a two day field trip from Ubud.

A recommendation for anyone visiting Nusa Lembongan: Big Fish Diving, based at the Secret Garden resort. (Why do I insist on continuing to use the word “resort”? It doesn’t feel right, and therefore I do so reluctantly, but I can never think of a more suitable alternative. It has no receptionist, swimming pool or all inclusive buffet, and it’s not built of white rendered concrete. However it’s definitely more than just a set of bungalows, as just “bungalows” omits the integral social areas and landscaped setting. “Complex” sounds too modern and metallic, “village” is downright pretentious, and “(eco)lodges” are definitely in jungles, not near beaches. I don’t know, sorry to have babbled on about this yet again. The door to the corridor between my brain and fingertips / keyboard should be kept shut sometimes… Although any suggestions would be very welcome…). Where was I? Yes, Secret Garden is an incredibly nice place, run, along with the dive operation, by British couple Tim and Reece. It’s not very secret, as it’s signposted on streets on both sides and everyone seems to know about it, however it does have a wonderful, secluded garden, with enticingly loungey chill-out areas in the middle and inward facing bungalows around the periphery. With big, comfortable beds, semi-outdoor en-suite bathrooms and raised porches complete with table, chairs and hammock. Friendly, not too expensive, and the diving is well run, with brand spanking new equipment, nice small dive groups and excellent knowledge of the local sites. I sound like a right advert, it occurs to me, but I promise they aren’t paying me a penny, and to get to the point, it was a cracking place and we had a really good time. But enough blabbering about bungalow furnishings and on to the main event, the diving…

On the first day of two, the diving wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had, but it was certainly far from the best. The highly regarded Crystal Bay site (supposedly one of Bali’s top four, out of what must be over a hundred) had superb visibility of over thirty metres, which unfortunately placed the other eighty divers down there all the more in focus. The corals were good, but it was just too busy, we didn’t see anything particularly memorable, and there wasn’t a sniff of the much hoped for Mola Mola. The second dive was at a much quieter site, which was far more enjoyable, but again, neither was it particularly memorable.

However, dive number eighteen of my fledgling underwater career, the first one, at Crystal Bay, was still a momentous occasion – I managed to pee underwater! After dive number seventeen, off Pulau Weh, my bladder ached for a whole day, after my mind had repeatedly declined its requests to empty itself before we got back to shore. But this time, at the third attempt, matter won over mind! In normal situations, of course, this barrier created by my mind would be considered a good thing, and indeed is to thank for the fact I haven’t peed myself since, as an excessively drunk teenager, I woke up in a bathroom at a house party with a sore head, next to a broken porcelain toilet seat, wearing a warm, wet pair of jeans. But diving is a different kettle of fish altogether. It’s not just the lack of access to a toilet, but it’s also good practice to make sure you’re well hydrated beforehand, and the activity itself actually increases the need to pee; the compression of the bladder by being deep underwater, I assume, although I find the process of squirming into the wetsuit alone a seriously midriff tightening exercise. Which is fine if you’re on a big boat and do have access to a toilet, and in such instances I could drink a single cup of coffee in the morning and not a drop of water, and still need to go before and after every dive. But when you’re in a small boat, without at toilet, your only option is to go in the water. In your wetsuit. It’s just not sociably acceptable to remove your wetsuit, stand (or crouch) at the side of the boat, and relieve yourself over the side. But still, despite this understanding of what is acceptable common practice, my mind just wouldn’t previously lift that barrier and open the floodgates. Until now! And I peed on the second dive too – didn’t even need to.

Day two, however, was a blinding success for the reasons diving is meant to be – breathtaking fish and coral viewing. For the first dive, we zipped down the coast to Manta Bay, so called with good reason, on the trail of the magnificent manta rays. And we struck gold to the tune of five sightings (with possible duplicates), the best a four metre wide beauty that glided past us, dipped a shoulder, arced around again, and swept back and forth past us a few more times, open mouthed, drawing in his plankton breakfast just a few yards away. Their gently flapping wings, streaming tails and graceful movements are a sight to behold, truly like nothing else below the surface of the sea. My favourite creature of the deep, without question.

And on our second dive, we had the most tremendous fish and coral variety I’ve ever seen, in crystal clear waters, with over thirty metres of visibility, and entirely to ourselves. Whilst Pulau Weh edged it two weeks earlier for sheer volume of big fish, this one came out on top for diversity of colours and forms, and the numbers were greater, albeit with generally smaller fish. I think we were all trying to breathe like meditation gurus to try and squeeze every last second of dive time out of our tanks. And so, combined with dive one’s manta rays, it was certainly my best overall day diving to date.

And when we weren’t diving, we were eating, relaxing or having fun. I should belatedly put in an extended mention about Keith and Julia at this point, actually. I’m lying, it’s not accidentally belated, it’s just that they rode off on mopeds for the day a few minutes ago and my bus leaves for Padang Bai before they get back, so I’m safe from any future face to face interrogation! Anyway, despite my transition from one social group to another between Kuta and Ubud, moving me from an average age of about twenty to one of about forty (both statistics including myself!), this has by no means seen me exchanging kite surfing to the frantic beats of the Chemical Brothers with a beer in one hand for evening games of bridge with hot chocolate and a woolly jumper. Keith and Julia like to have fun. Keith travels with a “just do it” attitude that Nike would be proud of (and, now I think of it, he did actually try kite surfing in Vietnam, albeit perhaps not simultaneously drinking and dancing), and a face that defaults to a smile. He also sounds like, and carries the facial expressions of, Steve Carell, incidentally. I mentioned this once, back in Penang, and I don’t think he was overly taken by the idea (although did acknowledge I wasn’t the first to suggest this). But he should be! Carell is one of those people who, like Will Ferrell, Johnny Vegas and Dylan Moran, just to name a few, can be funny without really saying or doing anything. Undoubtedly a good thing, and a trait I’d certainly embrace. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere with this, it’s just an observation. And Julia has more energy than a kangaroo on hot coals, so even if Keith wanted to just sit around for a couple of days, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t let him! Together, they carry a lust for life, and contentment with it, that’s been unparalleled in my year away. Which has been great, because it rubs off!

My decision to spend my first few days in Ubud mainly sleeping and eating, therefore, was in no way forced. While I was sitting in a café uploading pictures and emailing people with a mango lassi and piece of cake, they were out finding new places to explore, learning new yoga postures or ukulele chords, and planning their next moves. So the point I’m getting to in an unnecessarily long-winded way is that when I eventually decided I was sufficiently rested and no longer wanted to sit on my backside all day, there was plenty of fun to be had! The diving to begin with, of course, but we also explored the beach-fringed west and north coasts of Lembongan on foot, and hired mopeds to complete a whistle-stop tour of the rest of the island in the space of about three hours after our second day diving, dodging potholes in the dark to make the final couple of kilometres home.

And during my last couple of days in Ubud, sandwiching the Lembongan excursion, I did significantly more than I’d managed in my first five, mostly in the company of Keith and Julia. They took me out to an organic farm and restaurant in the middle of the rice paddies, which I finally say first hand, I checked out the hilarious monkey forest not far from our bungalows, where a large troupe long-tailed macaques put on a hugely entertaining display of stealing, eating, fighting, playing, swimming, getting intimate and picking fleas out of each other, and in the evenings we supped on some Bintangs and enjoyed some fantastic live music. The first band was particularly memorable for a superb cover of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, and the second was a blues band (both were Indonesian, incidentally) with vocal and instrumental skills that wouldn’t have been out of place in New Orleans. And HannahMariyah also enjoyed most of the above too, which I think has left her with about a week’s work to catch up on!

Good times, and Keith and Julia’s offer of a bed in Bend, Oregon, with some deep powder snowboarding, live music and good local ales thrown in, is probably the most tempting proposition I’ve had yet to set foot in the US of A.

But time to move on! With less than a week left in Bali, and in Indonesia in fact, there are a couple more dive sites I want to explore before I leave for the diving devoid destinations of India and England (well, you can probably dive in England, but the water’s not thirty degrees and full of tropical fish back home, so it’s not quite as tempting), and I'm off to Padang Bai to find them.