In May 2024 I spent a bit over two weeks diving in Tulamben before moving south to Amed for another week's diving. Both these places are on the north-eastern coast of Bali. While at Tulamben you virtually only do shore dives, most of the dives at Amed are boat dives. Some of these were back up towards Tulamben and some were even to the wreck of the USAT Liberty (which we declined to go on).

The main Amed dive sites are very close to the town and its nearby villages, just off the shore in reality. I stayed at the Hotel Uyah and used their associated dive shop Amed Dive Center which is on the premises.

Pyramids is a dive site that I actually also did in 2014 with my then wife. It is about 1000 metres east from the start of hotel. An approximate GPS mark for the start of this dive is S8° 20.04' E115° 39.18' (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site Hotel Uyah is at left

The run there and back is only a few minutes. This dive starts by dropping into five metres and finishes wherever you end up surfacing. We went east and ended up at the start of our second dive site called Little Wall. The site is only a hundred or so metres off the shore. Once on the bottom we headed north getting a little deeper to about 18 metres where there are a bunch of four pyramids. These (and most of the ones here) are made up of hollow concrete blocks which have been placed in the shapes of pyramids and roped together.

The first group of artificial reefs, pyramids, although one has fallen over and sunk into the sand	Another of the groups of pyramids

We head east from here and get a bit deeper to 22 metres or so. We soon come across another four more sets which each have at least five pyramids. All of them have hard corals growing on them and some have soft corals, gorgonias and huge sponges. There are lots of fish living inside the pyramids as well as around and over them. We see butterflyfish, Moorish idols, sergeant majors and more.

Another group of pyramids	This one has lots of gorgonias

Some of the sergeant majors were fanning and guarding eggs. There are also anemones and clownfish. Along the way we see three turtles, two of which are small. There are also two yellow-lined triggerfish which I am very wary of as I was attacked by one about two weeks earlier. We also see a clown triggerfish, my favourite fish.

Clown triggerfish	An anemone and some clownfish

There were not many nudibranchs, but the ones I did see were not the common ones seen here. I also saw some larger fish as well as all the usual tropical species.

We end up heading south-east. Eventually we end up mostly heading south as we get shallower.

One of the small turtles	Another small turtle

After 45 minutes we moved to the 10 to 12 metre area and then up to five metres where we did our safety stop. The boat comes over and collects us, we are off Jukung Point and have travelled about 250 metres. This was a very good dive. The visibility was at least 25 metres and the water temperature was about 28°C.

John the surface at the start of a dive with the dive boat

All photographs from a GoPro 5.