Last October our son Josh turned fifteen, and somewhere between the cake and the washing-up his dad and I made a promise I’d later have second thoughts about. We told him he could plan our summer holiday, all of it, from the flights to what we did every morning, as long as the whole thing came in under £4,312, which was what was left in the holiday pot after the boiler went. I do payroll for a group of primary schools around Swindon, so I’m used to numbers that don’t forgive you. I assumed he’d lose interest within a fortnight. He didn’t. On a Sunday afternoon in November he put his laptop on the kitchen table next to the fruit bowl and turned it round to face me.
Two tabs, both for Indonesia. He’d labelled one Bali and the other Komodo.
Josh had done his junior open water course the previous spring, over two freezing weekends at Vobster Quay in Somerset, and he’d come home from the second one talking about coral he’d never seen. He’d worked out that the diving in Bali shifts a great deal depending on which coast you’re on and what time you get in the water. Bali’s underwater identity changes almost hour by hour, and Neptunescubadiving.com enters the scuba diving Bali Indonesia picture at the point where volcanic slopes, blue-water drop-offs and unpredictable marine encounters begin to overlap. I thought that was a lot for a fifteen-year-old to care about, and I was wrong. Every site on his spreadsheet had something written in a column headed “conditions”.
Two Tabs on a Laptop
The Komodo tab was the one he wanted. It had photos of manta rays the size of our car and a list of dive sites around Labuan Bajo with names he mispronounced for a week. There was also a long paragraph about the dragons, most of it in capitals. Komodo scuba diving is known for its currents, and that was a big part of the appeal for him, because he liked the idea of being carried along a reef by the sea itself. Two of the three operator websites he’d found rated those sites for advanced divers.
The Bali tab was tidier and far less exciting. He’d split it between the east coast villages of Amed and Tulamben, where you walk into the sea from a pebble beach, and Nusa Penida, a boat ride south, where the mantas gather. A guesthouse in Amed came in at 612,000 rupiah a night. Every dive on the list had its minimum age written next to it in red. Most of the scuba diving Bali Indonesia advice he’d found online pointed families towards the busy south of the island, and he’d ignored it. For three evenings running he argued for Komodo, politely and at length, while I did the washing-up and said very little. Then on a Wednesday at twenty to eleven at night he came downstairs in his socks and said he’d changed his mind.
(His dad, for the record, had been hoping for the dragons.)
Why Komodo Lost
He talked me through it the next morning, standing at the toaster in his school uniform. It took about four minutes. And he’d clearly rehearsed it, because he counted the reasons off on his fingers.
- He had nine logged dives, all of them in a cold quarry, and the Komodo operators he’d emailed wanted more than that before they’d take him on the stronger drift sites.
- It meant a second internal flight.
- His dad goes green on the Isle of Wight ferry.
I asked whether he was disappointed and he shrugged, which with Josh can mean anything. But he renamed the Komodo tab “next time” instead of deleting it.
The Bit I Got Wrong
Josh’s spreadsheet had a row near the bottom that said “passports, 6 months”, and in February he asked me twice whether I’d checked his. I said I would. I didn’t, partly because I was in the middle of year-end at work and partly because I’d renewed it myself a few years earlier and assumed it had plenty of time left. On a Tuesday evening in April I finally got the passports out of the drawer under the microwave, the one with the takeaway menus and the spare fuses, and found his had run out in the middle of November. Indonesia wants six months left on the day you arrive. We were landing in August. I booked a fast-track appointment that cost me a day’s leave and a 5:15 alarm for the drive to Peterborough, and Josh, to his enormous credit, didn’t say a word about it the whole way there. The new passport arrived nine days later.
What Bali Gave Him
We stayed in Amed for eight nights, and I’d go back tomorrow. Josh dived most mornings with a local guide called Ketut, who took him on the Liberty wreck at Tulamben twice, once at eight and once at seven, because Josh wanted to see what the earlier light did to it. His dad and I snorkelled above them. I don’t dive, and I’m not sure I ever will, though watching him drift along the side of that ship at about ten metres made me look up the beginner courses that evening.
He came home convinced that the Liberty is the best scuba diving in Bali, and after one trip I’m in no position to argue. A few things surprised both of us.
- How much the water changed between an early dive and a late one on the same site.
- That the guesthouse owner’s daughter, who was about Josh’s age, spent every evening teaching him card games he’d never heard of and beat him at all of them.
The whole trip came in at £4,089, and he spent what was left on a second-hand dive computer from a man in Frome.
If Your Teenager Wants to Try This
I’d recommend it. I learnt a few things the hard way, though, and one of them nearly cost us the trip.
- Give them a real budget and don’t top it up.
- Read the spreadsheet properly, especially anything near the bottom.
- Let them write to dive operators themselves, since the replies they get will tell them more about their own readiness than anything you say.
- Check minimum ages and logged-dive requirements before anyone falls in love with a destination.
- Keep the passports somewhere other than the takeaway drawer.
For families weighing Bali scuba diving against somewhere more demanding, I think the fair test is whether your child’s experience matches the water, and a fifteen-year-old with nine quarry dives probably belongs on the gentler coast for now. Josh has started a new tab. It’s labelled “2027 Komodo”; it already has a column for conditions, and I haven’t told him yet whether we’re paying for it.
