Food

First order of business was to organise our clothes to be washed. I had been recommended a place by my massage lady so we dropped off our clothes (opposite Orchid Massage, down a little road and to the right) for the princely sum of $1.50/kg - to be picked up later in the day.

Back at the hotel for breakfast the Crepe dude made me a huge crepe because I waited so long (he also cooks pancakes and waffles) - it was delicious and worth the wait.

Then our second day of diving began, after the 30 min drive to the boat, and 30 min trip to our first dive site.

While I was suiting up for our first dive, the strap on my right fin/flipper broke! Our friendly divemaster, Harman, swapped with me and wore mine tied with string which was very friendly of him. At the same time Bens mask strap came completely undone so he was also in a panic trying to fix that. But once we both got our respective issues sorted we were good to go. Today we had 2 others in our dive group, a German guy and his son.

At Alik reef we saw a wide range of corals - from bright blue to yellow with lots and lots of fish living everywhere. If you looked up you saw many different fish families and if you looked down you saw even more fish families. The visibility was just amazing and it seemed like you could see forever. It felt a bit like you were in Finding Nemo as there were just so many different schools of fish surrounding you, just going about their business.

We saw lots of blue fishies everywhere - big ones, small ones, medium sized one - a pipe fish as well and also about 400 other divers because the site was so good. After 41 minutes at 20m our dive was done. A pretty cruisy dive with amazing sea life.

We went to Gili Air for lunch again, but first went in search of a replacement fin strap. After visiting 3 dive "shops" we decided that I was out of luck and we just decided to have some lunch.

We decided on Scalliwags, which looked fancier but ended up being cheaper than lunch the day before. As our lunch the day before took so long, we played it safe and quick with sandwiches. I had a BLT and Ben had a steak sandwich.

Both were out within 5 min of ordering so today's lunch was a far more chilled out affair.

Back on the boat we went to our last dive site for the day, Gili Air Wall. This area was once a reef but had been decimated by dynamite fishing, with very small bits of reef coming back to life. There weren't as many fish, but we stumbled across a huge resting turtle which was awesome, 2 lion fish, a crayfish trying to hide in a crevice and Ben saw a miniature clown fish that was the size of the fingernail on his little finger. So all in all a pretty great dive. Once against, around 45min at 18-20m.

Back to the hotel where I dropped Ben off, I went to get a massage and pick up our laundry. Unfortunately only one of these tasks were achieved as the massage place I wanted to go to was full! So I decided to put that off until tomorrow, and instead picked up our $4.50 worth of clean laundry. If this service was available at home I would totally do this every week!

I joined Ben by the pool for some slushies aka "Frozens" and after a while we headed back to our room - not before finding a huge snail.

We had decided on Coco Loco, another beach restaurant near the hotel, but when we got there nothing really appealed, so we went back to de Quake.

We had a really nice guy serving us throughout the night called Wawan, who was friendly and happy to help us with anything we needed. 2 Beef Rendangs later and a few ice teas and we were both pretty happy.

I was looking forward to having the same dessert as before - Black sticky rice - but they had run out! Disaster! We settled on a Banana no bake cheesecake instead, which turned out to be a pretty tasty replacement.

Back at the hotel for an early night of packing and watching National Geographic as tomorrow we head to Singapore(just transiting) on our way to Hong Kong.