By Annabel Thomas
For The Bali Times
SEMINYAK, Bali ~ These days, anyone who dives beyond their own shores (or is lucky enough to live here) knows the Indo-Pacific is the world’s richest marine bio-geographical region. It is much less well-known that, within this vast region, the triangle from Bali to West Papua to the southern Philippines contains the world’s most diverse tropical marine fauna.
Bali’s diving came to international attention in the 1980s with Menjangan Island, famous for wall diving with great visibility, being the first well-known location. Then came the USAT Liberty shipwreck, the world’s easiest shipwreck, at Tulamben on the northeast coast, followed by the offshore islands of Nusa Penida and Nusa Lembongan.
However, seven years ago I dived Amuk Bay (with Padangbai on the south, Candidasa on the north) and … it was magnificent!
I found prolific marine life set against dramatic backdrops of chiseled black walls, making these, in my opinion, Bali’s most breathtaking sites. The (at times torrential) rich current which sweeps east Bali accounts for the remarkable health and diversity of both corals and smaller marine life, while the cold (note: cold!) upwelling from the deep basin 100 kilometers south of Bali gives superb visibility and brings the vast numbers of fish, abundant sharks and other pelagics for which the area is famous.
Several reputable south Bali dive companies now offer diving out of Padang Bai, with pick-up times being Kuta: 7am, Sanur: 7:30am, Candidasa: 8:30am. It is often possible to do three dives although – as conditions are unpredictable – you need to go with the flow and allow your divemaster to decide about sites and whether a third dive is possible. Keep it safe and enjoyable. The unpredictable conditions, with up and down currents, necessitate using an experienced divemaster. I would never dive these sites without one – and I mean a divemaster experienced at these sites, not simply an experienced divemaster.
As the sites are small and the boat picks you up where you surface, geographically you can’t get lost, but even a mild drift means your dive ends way before bottom time or air dictates.
If possible I do Biaha, a crescent-shaped rock 30 minutes north of Padang Bai, for the day’s first dive. A beautiful and healthy reef surrounds Biaha, but note the northern rocky slope has some tricky currents. The rugged black wall in the south, with the breaking waves above, is absolutely beautiful and at times it is almost as if the fish are superfluous - but not quite! Your dive can cover almost the entire circumference of Biaha or just a small part, depending on your interests, currents and conditions.
The easiest entry point is on the less-exposed inside of the crescent, near a cave in which Whitetip Reef Sharks sleep. The protected area outside the cave has interesting corals with commensal shrimp and crabs, Anglerfish, Leaf Scorpionfish, octopoi, Cuttlefish and Nudibranches.
Closer to Padang Bai, located outside Candidasa, are two quite different diving locations - Tepekong and Mimpang. Although they are only 500 meters apart, the conditions are usually completely different, meaning if one is undiveable, the other may be fine and then, after your surface interval, the first may have become quite calm.
Mimpang (Batu Tiga) is a ridge of submerged rocks with the three largest breaking the surface. The topography is diverse: sloping reefs, craggy rocks and walls - all with good cover of soft corals, stony, staghorn and table corals, sponges and gorgonians. There are big schools of fishes, many Bluespotted Rays, Napoleon Wrasses, Moray Eels, Trumpetfishes and Triggerfishes as well as innumerable reef fish.
September to November, on the white sand slope (7-10 meters) before the reef, you can find Mola-Mola (the weird and wonderfully looking Oceanic Sunfish) being cleaned.
“Shark Point” is the deeper south wall and is great for shark-sightings due to strong (usually predictable) currents.
Tepekong, basically a 300-meter-long rock, is famous for The Canyon (southwest Tepekong, max 40 meters) and offers some of Bali’s most spectacular diving. However, the steep walls, cold water and strong currents make this a site for experienced divers only. Visibility is usually very good.
If conditions allow you to enter The Canyon, and there is no current (a rare occurrence), you can clearly see the dramatic beauty of these stunning, craggy black stone walls. But if there is the usual swirling current, while you can still feel the drama of the site, your view is somewhat obstructed by huge schools of Sweetlips, Bumphead Parrotfishes, Unicornfishes, Batfishes, Groupers, sharks (usually Whitetips) and other pelagics which may include tuna and Mola-Mola. These waters are rich with nutrients that attract smaller fish – and therefore larger fish too.
East Tepekong, with its hard, soft and table corals, offers reef and wall diving with excellent marine life that can include occasional turtles, tunas and many kinds of Triggerfish.
Finally there is Gili Selang, which lies on Bali’s eastern point. Like all exposed sites, Selang can have ripping currents and is therefore rarely dived. However, while Selang itself is very small, the diving extends to the far side of the relatively sheltered bay to the north and so you can do multiple dives without covering the same area; and, as the soft and hard corals are rich and healthy in the shallows, you can do long dives here.
Further down the slope the coral is low-growing due to the currents but is still healthy, with lots of eels lurking in the holes. Here you can expect to see turtles, Whitetips, Bumphead Parrotfish, Nudibranches, Lionfish and abundant schooling reef fish.
On the southeast corner of the island, the currents can get extremely strong, and it is not always possible to dive here. If conditions are right, you may be rewarded with an encounter with pelagics.
I wish I had space to tell you more about these sites - my advice: try them yourself. You may think you know Bali’s diving but trust me, until you’ve dived east Bali, you haven’t seen the best.
So wonderful, in fact, that I opened a scuba-diving company here.
The writer is a director of AquaMarine Diving. www.aquamarinediving.com
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Thailand’s forests were once teeming with ghosts but as the trees have been gradually cleared to make way for farms, towns and factories, the spirits have also moved on. For people like Ornta Laokam, who for decades made his living as his father and grandfather had before him - by catching ghosts and freeing the living from their torments - modernization has turned his career into a relic of bygone times. AFP Bangkok correspondent Thanaporn Promyamyai talks with Ornta about how he is hoping, against the odds, to find someone willing to learn his magical skills before he dies, and they die with him
PHU KHIEO, Thailand ~ Sitting in a small thatched hut overlooking rice paddies and sugar cane fields, Ornta Laokam remembers when Thailand’s landscape was still blanketed with thick forests that were teaming with ghosts.
Now 77, he was born when this was still the Kingdom of Siam, when rivers and canals were the main arteries of transportation, and the countryside was covered more by thick jungle than by rice paddies.
Among the trees surrounding his hometown in Surin, near the Cambodian border, Ornta’s grandfather and father taught him to see the spirits living in the plants and rivers, and even in the fertile soil itself.
Most of the spirits are benign, he says, some are even angels, but the malevolent few who tormented the living needed to be caught — and this what he always wanted to do.
“I began seeking this knowledge when I was 17 years old,” he recalls.
His father and grandfather passed on their mystical secrets, and when they could guide him no more, he followed a friend across the border to Cambodia, where he stayed in a small village and learned from a spiritual guide even more ancient spells for driving away ghosts.
Ornta remembers struggling with Khmer to learn the words that exorcise an evil spirit, and even save a human life.
But the most important part of being able to chase away ghosts, he says, is to live according to the five precepts of Buddhism: no killing, no stealing, no adultery, no lying and no alcohol.
This is the only way, he says, that he can keep his own soul pure when he goes out to wrestle with demons.
After his studies, he returned to Thailand and settled into a somewhat routine life as a carpenter and odd-job man in the northeastern region of Issan.
It was 10 years after he returned that he had his first chance to test his skills, when a man came to his house and begged him to chase away a ghost that was haunting his wife.
“I can’t remember much about it; it was a long time ago,” he says. “I just remember that my first client was a woman who was haunted by a ghost from the jungle. But ever since then, I have been well-known for being a ghostbuster.”
- Spirits are everywhere
After meeting his wife 50 years ago, he moved to this village, Phu Khieo, far from the Cambodian border in the middle of Issan. At that time, there were plenty of ghosts to chase.
Thais believe that spirits were everywhere in nature, and also in boats and houses.
Even outside the steel-and-glass skyscrapers amid the concrete jungle of downtown Bangkok, Thais erect small houses where they make offerings to the spirits who protect the buildings.
These are generally good spirits, and although the city does have some haunted houses, urban ghosts are usually old souls too powerful to be forced out, or the spirits of people who died suddenly or tragically.
After the tsunami ripped across the Indian Ocean in December 2004, Buddhist monks spent more than a year performing cleansing ceremonies to help the spirits of the dead ease their way into the next life.
Even Bangkok’s new international airport had a ghost named Poo Ming, who workers said would appear, before the main terminal building opened in September, crying and speaking in tongues.
Poo Ming was believed to be the guardian of the land on which Suvarnabhumi Airport was built. The airport’s operators brought in monks to appease him, and built a spirit house where offerings could be made to him.
These benign and protective spirits are not the ghosts that Ornta does battle with. His speciality, especially in his younger days, has been dealing with the angry jungle spirits that torment villagers in rural Thailand.
Sometimes ghosts have even been known to haunt the spirit of former ghostbusters, those whose minds were weak and corrupted by the dark secrets of the trade, Ornta says. He explains that when these weak ghostbusters die, their souls take over and assume the power to haunt anyone.
It all combined to keep him so busy ghostbusting that he did all but give up has day job.
“There was so much demand, I gave up most of my other work and decided to focus more on chasing ghosts,” he says.
“I wanted to help people, and I can earn merit by helping people who suffer from these spirits,” Ornta says, alluding to his Buddhist belief that good deeds in one life help ensure a favorable reincarnation next time around.
- The possessed will look you straight in the eye
The first thing Ornta does when he performs an exorcism is to make sure that his subject is not suffering from an illness such as malaria that might make him or her delusional.
“People who are haunted by ghosts have strong eyes. They will look you straight in the eye and not avoid eye contact. People with malaria wouldn’t do this,” he says.
Then he holds a small ceremony, reciting spells over his subject and tapping their body with a bamboo stick. Ornta fills his own mouth with holy water, which he then sprays over the body of the person being exorcised.
To keep the bad spirits from returning, Ornta then ties brightly colored holy sashes around the victim’s body while chanting protective spells.
For garden-variety ghosts, the entire ceremony takes only 10 minutes. But he says that a strong ghost can take up to half an hour to chase away.
“But my most difficult job took three days,” Ornta says, telling the story of a man who was possessed by a jungle spirit that just refused to leave.
Ornta had to repeat his spells for three whole days to complete the exorcism, while the man sat quietly with only his sharp eyes telling Ornta that the spirit was still in control of his body.
In his heyday, Ornta traveled extensively around Thailand’s northeast and could earn up to 500 baht (US$12) for his services.
“I used to travel to all the nearby provinces. I’ve driven away around 300 or 400 spirits,” he says.
His interventions weren’t always successful, he said.
“Sometimes we meet with strong spirits who say they want to take away someone’s life. These spirits can possess the owner until the body dies,” Ornta says.
As time went on, Thais began relying less on the jungle. Farms and factories grew, especially over the last two decades, and modernity and globalization began changing even remote corners of the kingdom.
People moved away from villages and into towns, and the demand for Ornta’s services dropped away.
“As more development came, ghosts were fewer and fewer,” he says. “It’s probably because people cut down so many trees, so the ghosts had to evacuate and move deeper into the jungle to live.”
Ornta had to diversify his income, so he took up farming and now grows cucumbers, corn and beans as his main livelihood.
“Now I start my day in the morning by watering and picking the vegetables to sell at the market,” says the ghostbuster.
- The spirits moved deeper into the jungle
Farming is not as profitable as chasing ghosts, so he supplements his income and uses his mystical skills to make sashes for trees and spirit houses that people use to protect the good spirits near their homes.
But his skills in chasing away demons are still sometimes called upon.
Son Mongkolkhiew, a 59-year-old farmer, turned to Ornta last year when, she says, she was being relentlessly haunted by a ghost.
It all began as she was returning from a Buddhist temple one day and saw a woman she didn’t recognize pushing a bicycle near a rice paddy a few meters from Son’s home.
When Son turned back to have another look, the woman was gone. But Son felt a heavy weight as she pedaled her own bicycle back home. Not long after, the pains began - she had trouble breathing and felt a strange and constant pressure on her neck.
She wrapped a holy sash around her neck and felt a little better, but there was still a nagging pressure on her back and neck, she says.
“I went to a few hospitals,” Son says. “The doctors did everything - x-rays, scans and ultrasounds - but they couldn’t find anything wrong.”
Finally, after a year of suffering with the mysterious pain, she went to see Ornta, who recited his spells over her.
“I felt better and better, and was back to normal within a week,” she says. “I could have died if I didn’t go to see him.”
Despite the intermittent demand for his services, it is still too low to interest Ornta’s four daughters in following in their father’s footsteps. He’s hoping, improbably, that one of his grandchildren might want to learn his skills.
“Even though there are fewer ghosts, I still believe this knowledge is useful,” he says. “I believe it will not die.”
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Still on the same evening, gorgeous gal about town Irma Lengkong held a fantastic birthday bash at Baccio for a super fun crowd of champagne-swilling revelers. The packed-out bash saw the very heady crowd fall under the erotic spell of saucy male dancers (thanks from all the girls on that one, darling!), feathered entertainers and a seductive bar-stomping fashion show with some of the leggiest models ever seen on the island. Canapés and cocktails flowed as the birthday girl was celebrated in true style. Seen fuelled up and burning up the dance floor to celebrate her 40 years of fabulosity were the Ritz-Carlton’s Ron Pietruszka and Troy Clarry with wives Lyn and Tomoko, Melissa Lynton, Kadek Wiranatha, Amalia Romero, Lisa Ferraro, Valerie Joho, Jane Barblett, Dipika Peckham, Marie-Claire Kelsall, Chris and Shigeko Gentry and Graham and Mala James and Rod and Enrica Taylor.