My wife doesn’t snorkel anymore. She really loves it, but the last couple of times, she’s suffered from vertigo, which is not a good condition to be overcome by in the water. As she was fine with staying at the beach and shell-hunting for the day, I booked myself on this tour via Viator. It had four stops for snorkeling and included lunch on Nusa Penida with a quick overland stop at Kelingking Beach for a picture. The tour cost around $100 for the full day including everything except transport to and from the dock. You can absolutely book cheaper tours, especially if you wait until you’re in Bali, but I wanted to have something planned out that met my requirements.

I ended up booking the additional transportation option for 300k IDR (around $18) each way from the Andaz. I found out from one of the fellow tour participants that I could have used Grab even though the tour company said Grab was not allowed to drop off or pick up from the dock area. Oh well.

I was picked up on time around 6:45am (after a quick Andaz breakfast) and it only took about 20 minutes to get to the dock area at Serangan, which was just south of Sanur. Most tours to Nusa Penida leave from the Sanur ferry port which is about 20 minutes in the other direction. Those tours just basically ferry you over to the island and you snorkel from the beach among several stops on an overland tour before you take the ferry back to Sanur. I wanted a tour that focused on snorkeling so this one was a better fit for me.

There were about 12 people on the boat from all over the world, including a couple of Americans. The boat motored over to Nusa Penida fairly quickly and we snorkeled in two different spots, one off Nusa Penida and another off Nusa Lembongan. I had brought this cheap underwater camera that my wife won at a holiday party and well, you get what you pay for. It ended up not working so I didn’t get any underwater pics. The ones sent by the tour company afterwards were mostly just of the other people on the tour so you will just have to take my word for it that the snorkeling was good (although not quite Hawaii good).

After that, we docked on Nusa Penida and were driven in several vehicles up the hill to a restaurant which had mediocre food, but amazing views.

I got the tour guide to take a picture of me with the gates and he used a trick with another phone to get the mirror effect.

From there, we headed about 40 minutes on a very bumpy road over to Kelingking Beach which is on the opposite side of Nusa Penida. Once there, we only had about 20 minutes, so there was no way to hike down to the beach which takes at least 30 minutes each way. It’s famously known as T-Rex Beach because of the shape of the cliffs. You can see the trail down to the beach on the left. They are building an elevator (yes, an elevator) down to the beach which should be ready in a year or so and will guarantee that the traffic to and from this spot will get even worse.

We all grabbed a few more pictures than headed back to our vehicles for the 40 minute ride back to the boat. It rained most of the way back, although this was the only rain I saw on our whole trip. It apparently rained a bit at the Andaz that same afternoon according to my wife.

Once we got back to the boat, we hit two more snorkeling spots. The first was alongside a cliff wall, but it was a bit chilly with the rain so I didn’t spend too long in the water. The second was Manta Point, which was amazing. We saw four huge manta rays swimming just below us for quite some time. As I mentioned, the tour guides sent me some pictures and videos after the tour, but for some reason they did not include any pictures of the manta rays, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

We headed back to Bali after that and it took about 30 minutes. We arrived back at the port around 5pm and my ride from the company was waiting to take me back to the Andaz. It was a great tour and well worth the cost to get some extra snorkeling and less time in a car bouncing around Nusa Penida.

Up Next: Getting from Sanur to Ubud via Shopping, a Waterfall and Monkeys

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