On our motorbike tour around Bali, we stopped in a tiny town called Tulamben to scuba dive the USS Liberty. The USS Liberty was a US transport ship that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1942, and beached on the island of Bali. It eventually sank in 1963 after a volcanic eruption, and has become a popular dive site as it's now home to a large variety of marine life. The ship now lays on its side with some sections as shallow as 7 meters below the surface. The best part is that the wreck is easily accessible directly from the shore.
We shopped around for dive prices and surprisingly found the best deal at the resort right next to the wreck: Puri Madha Bungalows. Their dive shop made us an excellent offer - 25$/person/dive including a guide, underwater camera, and all gear rental. Since neither of us had dived recently, they included free time for us to refresh our skills in the pool prior to doing the 2 wreck dives.
After all these years underwater, the USS Liberty is now collapsed in several areas and completely covered in coral. In most areas, you can barely make out that it's a huge ship! Occasionally you still happen upon some distinctive ship-like features jutting out from the sea floor... that was really cool to see.
We aren't exactly avid divers or marine biologists, so we don't know many names of what we saw… but we definitely saw a lot of really cool stuff compared to most of our dives in the past :).
We even saw a black tip reef shark...
and a big school of jack fish..
Whether you've never dived before or are an experienced diver, this is a site that we definitely recommend!
