Despite four trips to Tulamben in Indonesia for almost eight weeks of diving, this spot was not one I had dived till 2025. In fact, it is a new site, perhaps being used before 2024 but late that year it had an upgrade with brand new toilets, shower and etc built. I used Liberty Divers, click here to read about the town and dive operation. Potentially there are literally hundreds of dive sites located within a few kilometres of Tulamben.

Tukad Sayung is located to the north-west of Tulamben past another little town/village called Kubu. It is about 5.4 kilometres from Tulumben to Tukad Sayung. The dive site is located down a lane that leads to a salt farm, the dive site is located off it. It is about 600 metres south of Batu Ringgit. A GPS mark for the dive spot is 8° 14.459"S 115° 33.990"E (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site. Entry is near the pointer.

For this site you load all your gear into the shop's ute and then climb in the back yourself. You are driven to the site. There are some tables here, with plenty of shade from the sheds over them. There is also a nice, new toilet block, shower and some tubs to rinse your camera in after the dive.

The porters take your tank and BCD to the entry point which is a short walk to the right of the end of the paved area. You then walk with your fins and camera down the concrete steps and then a short distance to the right. Here you don your tank. Like the other sites, care needs to be taken when entering and exiting the water due to the size of the rocks.

The tables, shade and sign	Ron, Donna and myself with Mount Agung behind

Once you have descended, you will see that the rocky bottom runs out a little and after a minute's swim you come to black volcanic sand. This is a downwards slope and a ridge to the right. This goes to an unknown depth. There are a number of ridges running at right-angles to the beach with some valleys in between.

For one dive here you go down the first ridge and then turn to the right and go across a valley to another ridge which has lots of large barrel sponges and some coral outcrops. This is a really interesting section of the dive site and there are lots of other things like small gorgonias, hydroids, small sea whips and hundreds of featherstars in this area.

A barrel sponge on the southern side	John and a gorgonia and barrel sponge on the southern side

In this area we saw over six dives many nice nudibranchs, shrimps and a few species of moray eel. As well, we saw a huge barracuda up close and some smaller ones. Some of the nudibranchs had emperor shrimp on them and there were pink hairy shrimps on some of the barrel sponges as well as a couple of species of small crabs.

There are lots of these ones at Tulamben	A pair of quite beautiful nudibranchs
This is the first time I have seen this nudibranch I think	This is a very small nudibranch

We also saw some black and blue ribbon eels, some sea spiders and all the usual tropical species you would expect to see.

Our second dive on each day we dived here was to the left. We started at the same spot but after going down the same ridge, we turned to the left (north) at about 20 metres or so. After crossing the valley there is a similar scene to the southern side, with coral and barrel sponges. There are not as many barrels but there is a lot more coral.

A pair of nudibranchs with not one, but two emperor shrimps on them. The one on the back nudi is just visible	These are plentiful on hydroids but hard to find unless you look closely
We saw a few of these at this site as well as other Tulamben sites	A tiny pug head pipefish in a hard coral. This appears to be their habitat.

You work your way across and down a bit deeper to say 25 to 27 metres before zig-zagging back shallower. This side of the dive site is probably better that the southern side. We saw a tiny ornate ghost pipefish on all our dives (hiding next to a black featherstar), more nudibranchs, a yellow ribbon eel, a tiny cuttlefish, a tiny yellow-spotted boxfish and shallower a small green turtle with two remoras.

This tiny shrimp is on a sea whip	I saw a few of these very colourful shrimps, but this one was much bigger than the rest
A very strange tiny shrimp on a hard coral, I saw a couple	A shrimp on a hydroid

Another highlight of this dive site was a coral that had two tiny pug head pipefish in it. These are hard to find but on our 2025 trip we saw a few at different sites. However, the best thing was at 28 metres where there was a large pink gorgonia. This had three pygmy sea horses on it, one of which I found. The guides only learnt of this between our second and third trip to this location, so we only saw them once. I got some great photographs as you can see.

Back about 10 metres there is a solid coral reef which is excellent to explore. We came back very slowly along it to the exit point and spent our safety stop (10 minutes at least) looking all over the place. Other things seen were shrimp in bubble anemones, soft coral (candy) crabs and some really good nudibranchs.

A tiny yellow spotted boxfish	A huge spotted moray eel
A large barracuda	A small crab inside a barrel sponge

The only problem we had with this site was that on a few of the dives we had quite strong currents. These were down, up, south and north. There was no logic at all to the direction, just that it always happened on the first dive but the second dive was mostly without current. Note we also had currents at other sites, there was a new moon and I think the moon's orbit was almost at its southern most point, something that only happens every 16 years I think.

A great dive site. I ended up diving here three days for a total of six dives on my trip.