Bali Bliss...and a day in Malaysia!

After being back in the English speaking world in NZ and Sydney, we eased our way into Asia by spending a week in beautiful Bali. We flew in on a Friday night, arrived, hopped in a taxi, and headed to Kuta. After accomplishing the necessities-lodging, food, drink, we headed to the beach for a quick look. It looked amazing!...however, since it was dark, we couldn't see how filthy it actually was, eh. The next morning, after setting up diving and plans to get out of Kuta, we went back to Kuta to see it in daylight. Although the shore was literally covered in dead fish and trash. That didn't stop us though, we rented surf boards and paddled out to the surf. Unfortunately the water did not get any cleaner, it actually was difficult to avoid being covered in garbage if and when we got up on the surf board! Yuck.
The next morning, we drove 2 1/2 hours up the island to do a wreck dive called Tulamben. The ship was an old US Cargo ship that was sunk by the Japanese in WWII. Our dive team was Toriann, Luke, 2 Austrians and myself, plus 2 dive masters. The water was warm, the fish were plentiful and AMAZING, and it was really cool to explore the sunken ship. Highlights of the dive were the great barracuda (apparently a friendly one), lots of Nemos, a sting ray, weird ribbon looking slugs, and the multitude of coral. After the dive, we headed back to Kuta and made plans to get out to a nicer, less touristy beach the next day. There are so many places that sounded amazing, but we decided due to our time restraints we would go to Nusa Lembongan, a small island about 1 hour away.
We took a small boat to Lembongan and when we arrived, we were picked up on the back of motor bikes to our guest house. We decided we liked the motor bikes so much, we rented them for the next 2 days to explore the island. We hopped on, Toriann and Luke taking the lead and me on the back, and rode to Sunset and Dream beach. Both beaches were absolutely stunning, definitely on the top 10 most beautiful beaches ever list!!! It was a good call to leave Kuta to discover these seemingly untouched beaches.
The rest of our time on NL was great and we had to leave much too soon. Toriann did another great dive, while I just enjoyed scooting around and exploring the beaches. She took a boat out to Manta Point and Crystal Bay where she saw several Manta rays swim by and one in particular circled around them for several minutes during their dive. She also saw a small shark, colorful coral, a trigger fish which seemed to attack them as well as a variety of other colorful fish we normally only see at the aquarium. After her dive we spent our last afternoon body surfing on the killer waves that were rolling in do to the rain storm. We met a man doing the same that lived on the island, and he informed us the waves would be even better tomorrow...I think he probably meant that there was going to be a small monsoon because when we made the short walk to catch our ferry boat back to Bali, it was POURING and us and everything we owned got drenched. Our ferry ended up being canceled, but we caught the 'speed' boat over to the mainland, and it was probably one of the only times in my life that I actually would have loved to be wearing a life jacket. Unfortunately, there was not a life jacket in sight...eh! But we made it, safe and sound, and spent the rest of our afternoon in Kuta before running to the airport to fly out to Malaysia!
We caught the 9:30 flight to Kaula Lumpur...which meant we arrived at 1:30 am!! It always seems like a good idea to book these crazy flights, but then when you are doing it, its like what were we thinking!! However, we found some comfy benches and actually got some good sleep. When we woke up, we took the very nice subway into the city, found a hostel near Chinatown, and headed out to see the sights! We certainly made the most of our day in KL, and we ate in Chinatown, visited the Central Market, went into (not up) the Petronas Twin Towers, and the National Mosque. When the afternoon rains came, we headed back to the hostel and met a guy from the US named Cameron, who had plans to meet some locals that evening. He invited us along and we met up with 2 guys from KL who were kind enough to take us out for tea and hookah. We had a great time and felt like our 1 day in KL was complete. After a short nights sleep, we headed back to the airport to fly to our 3rd country in 3 days-Cambodia!