In 2024 I travelled to Tulamben for the fourth time and spent just over two weeks diving the north-eastern coast of Bali. I used Liberty Dive Resort, click here to read about the town and dive operations. This was a new site that I had not previously dived in my trips in 2011, 2014 and 2023. There are literally hundreds of potential dive sites located within a few kilometres of Tulamben but only a dozen or so are able to be visited.

Agung is located about 3.3 kilometres to the south-east of Tulamben (by road) and next to the Blue Dive Resort. An approximate GPS mark for the dive spot is S8° 17.566" E115° 36.566" (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site Entry is shown at right. Big Tree is top left next to the word yana

After heading south-east out of town, you travel along the main road and then down about 3.1 kilometres from town you turn left onto a side track towards the ocean. This is straight after the dive resort. There are a couple of large shade shelters, some tables/seats, a toilet, shower and camera wash tank.

One dive I did here we actually started from another dive site, Big Tree (click here to read about that site) which is about 200 metres down the beach to the left. That was done as a second dive after first diving Big Tree. We actually started about halfway between both sites and went to Agung before ending back at Big Tree.

Donut nudibranch - Doto greenamyeri	Another donut, you can see the hydroid they live on

Once geared up, you enter water over the black sand beach. It was an easy entry and exit, in fact the only dive we did from the actual site was a night dive and it was easy then too. The attraction of this site are donut nudibranchs. These live on hydroids and are fairly common here. See the above photographs.

A clownfish	A very cute small anglerfish
A very strange decorator crab with tiny anemones attached	A mantis shrimp swimming out in the open

On each of my two dives here I went to around 25 metres down a ridge. There is one from the shed area and another about halfway back to Big Tree. In the shallows there are some anemones and clownfish, but I did not see any shrimp in the anemones. We also saw a very cute white anglerfish. There were some pipefish, a swimming mantis shrimp and I found a nice yellow leaf fish.

A leaf fish	A moray eel
Shrimp in an anemone	Another amazing nudibranch, there are at least three here

On the night dive, I found an amazing decorator crab. It was very small and had tiny anemones on its appendages. There were also spindle cowries, squat lobsters, seawhip gobies and lots of different nudibranchs. In the shallows there were a few garden eels, but as usual, it was very difficult to get a proper photograph of any of them.

On the night dive there were dozens of lionfish in the shallower area, as well as quite a few juvenile species of fish. There were a few juvenile sweetlips there too.

This is a very good dive site and it is well a number of dives, including a night dive or two. So much to see! Well worth doing it if you have the time.

MORE NUDIBRANCHS

Some more photographs, this time of nudibranchs.