Scuba Diver Senior Travel Editor Don Silcock presents an overview of the diving opportunities around the ‘Island of the Gods’ PHOTOGRAPHS BY DON SILCOCK
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he late Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru once famously described it as the ‘morning of the world’, but more often it is referred to simply as the ‘island of the gods’… However you describe it, one thing is very clear – the Indonesian island of Bali is many things to many people! To the Balinese, their home is blessed with rich soil, abundant water, beautiful scenery and a rich culture that supports, sustains and nourishes them, while, for the average tourist, it is a friendly and interesting place, overlaid with a teeming and rather chaotic flow of humanity that is hard to even take in at first, never mind to understand… For the travelling diver though, particularly for Australians who are so near, it offers a wonderful and exotic location to experience the incredible diving that the rich waters of the Indo-Pacific have to offer. With one of the best-known wrecks in the world, excellent critter sites, some beautiful reefs and big animals like the oceanic sunfish, Bali truly has something for everybody! But why is this island, which is just one of the thousands that form the nation of Indonesia, so special? The answer to that question is in the waters that touch certain parts of Bali…
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IT IS ALL ABOUT THE WATER…
It is said that if the nearly 18,000 islands of the huge Indonesian archipelago did not exist, there would only be 23 hours in each day. How so, you may ask… well, take a look at Indonesia on Google Earth and you can see those islands are spread out along the Equator over a total distance that takes some seven hours to fly over - Indonesia is a really big country! To the north-east of the archipelago is the Pacific Ocean, while to the south-west is the Indian Ocean, and as the Earth rotates, an incredibly complex mix of oceanic currents, underwater topography, weather and physical geography combine to create a unique phenomenon called the Indonesian Throughflow. It really is extremely complicated, but the Readers Digest explanation of it all is that those complex factors result in an average sea-water level in the north-east that is some 1.5 inches higher than the average in the south-west. That difference creates the largest volume of moving water in the world, which surges down through the Indonesian archipelago, bringing with it rich nutrients from the deep basins in the north-east while distributing the eggs and larvae of the region. In the process those 18,000 islands act as a huge hydraulic brake that slows down the Earth’s rotation and means we have 24 hours in each day.
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