Up up and Away

I was surprised myself but on Monday I managed to come to the Mount Batur after 3 hours of sleep. Normally, you're not allowed to go up without a guide but that seemed too expensive for me to have someone accompany me, so I just quietly joined a group and ended up going alone. The hike itself wasn't that exciting because there were about 2000 people marching up and it was a very slow, single-file ascent. It might have been a good idea to check the weather forecast beforehand because it was extremely cloudy that day and I hardly saw the sunrise, but sitting alone on a volcano in Bali at that time was still really cool.

Since I had no idea what the path looked like going up because it was dark, I ended up going down the wrong way - I guess that's why you should have a guide :D But after a little extra walk, I managed to get back to my scooter okay.

On Tuesday morning, 37 baby turtles hatched :)

On Tuesday evening, we all went to a reggae bar because one of the staff members from our program had a performance there, but we didn't stay long because we started working at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, carrying many sculptures from the beach to the sea. Carrying a 100kg sculpture on a bamboo stick on our shoulder about 20 times is not an easy task, my shoulders still hurt today, on Friday.

On Thursday, we went diving for the first time. With about 15 people, we went down and stacked the new sculptures on the old ones. It was really exciting to see corals already growing on the old sculptures and the many fish living there. It shows that the work we do is effective.

On Thursday evening, I did my first night dive and I think it was the coolest thing I've ever done. Armed only with a flashlight, we went into the pitch-dark sea. The underwater world is already stunning, but at night, it's something completely different. Different creatures come out of their hiding places. Not even 5 minutes after we got in, I was swimming with a shark. Not a white one, but still a 1.5m long reef shark that came as close as 1-2m! I would say my coolness factor doubled now that I can say I swam with a shark :D Other highlights of the dive were: huge crabs and snails in all shapes and colors, a lobster, a giant turtle, water snakes, and finally, an octopus :)

I'm writing this post from the airplane. I'm currently flying to the Komodo Islands with a friend from Austria to go diving there, and hopefully, we'll also encounter a few Komodo dragons along the way.