Menjangan & West Bali

Diving the island is a national park day trip. Boats leave from Labuhan Lalang on the mainland side of West Bali National Park, cross in about half an hour, and work two or three dives with the surface interval spent aboard or on the beach; park fees are settled before boarding and a ranger usually comes along. Small wooden boats, short hops between sites and an unhurried pace get most groups back to the jetty by early afternoon. The island is uninhabited apart from a shrine, and the deer it is named for still live on it.

The wall starts close to the surface and drops in stages, so the same stretch of reef can be dived deep along its face or shallow across its lip, and almost every dive finishes on the top shelf in a few metres of water. Sites differ in the shape of the rock rather than in the conditions above it: some sections are unbroken vertical face with overhangs and crevices, others break into steps, sand chutes and rubble where the slope eases off. The wreck on the north-west side is dived as part of that same wall, and its identity has never actually been established — a wooden trading vessel of the colonial period is as far as the evidence goes.

The mainland shore is the other half of the area and a different kind of diving. Pemuteran's bay is entered straight off the beach over gentle sand and coral, which makes it the local training and night-diving ground as well as the home of a long-running coral restoration project. Further along the coast, near the Java ferry port at Gilimanuk, the black sand of Secret Bay is a shallow, silty and noticeably cooler macro site that photographers travel for specifically. A morning on the wall pairs with an afternoon kneeling in sand.

The area suits mixed groups more than specialists: divers straight out of a course, people returning after years away, snorkellers who can follow the same reef from the surface, and photographers who want wide-angle and macro in the same day. The catch is where it sits. Bali's north-west corner is a long way from the airport and the southern resorts, so it works far better as a two- or three-night stop than as a day trip squeezed out of Kuta or Ubud.