41040 km

AMED

You can't just go to Bali and not check out the black beaches! Indonesia is a big line of volcanoes, well basically a fault line. All that stuff our Mother Earth spits out from its depths in a form of hot lava very often very often hardens to a porous black rock that crumbles fairly easy into black sand and that's how you get a black beach. And what a fantastic colour that is for a beach. You couldn't guess the depth of the water no matter how hard you try, neither the consistence of the floor. The water itself has the hues of the purest water I've ever seen. Might just be the darkness you look into underneath your suspended feet. Don't know and hard to describe, but quite amazing. Despite that

Apart from taking in the amazing surrounding of the imminent volcanic mountain and lush vegetation, there is always that mass of water in the sea that's so deep blue in the right light that is difficult to find an equivalent in nature. Perhaps the deep blue of the heavy clouds before a majestic storm. Just more vivid, fuller and charged with power of an erupting volcano. Snorkelling in these waters is just about the best thing you can do. Majka and I were both glued to the underwater landscape. Well I was for sure taken to the extent that I often forgot to head up to the surface for a breath. More so that there is an underwater 'temple' as locals refer to it, which is more of a shrine, still an unexpected pattern of man made structures that renders the views a bit more surreal. Similarly out of this world are the uninterrupted long chains of 'spider' fishing boats sitting on the black sand near the shore, actually right on the beach. These chains of white and colourful boats are often as long as the beach itself and those are very long only giving space to rocky overhangs and cliffs, just so that the difficult terrain can give space to another stretch of black beach. So it goes for miles and miles with an occasional fishing village or even smaller settlement that seems to count more of the oddly shaped fishing boats than souls. Despite that, out of all the places we've visited, this is that place where we came across my first ever Hungarian restaurant. That is outside of Hungary of course, where majority of restaurants are, you know, Hungarian. I've ordered a Gulash and have surrendered to the disappointment I was expecting. Wrong! My meal came with home made bread, and fried potato which is odd, but other than that it was a decent Gulash with tender pieces of beef, loads of onion, delicious paprika and a hint of red wine in the taste. Definitely the best I had since we're on the road.

Funny thing is that we have only spend here a couple of days and left in a hope that our Australian Visa's will be with us by the time we reach the airport. However they didn't so all that rush was for nothing and after all I have ended up rebooking our flights and instead of Australia we were heading to the island of Nusa Lembongan. Oh well, shit happens. This kind of shit didn't hurt too much and it actually turned out pretty OK. But about that later...