Scuba Diving and Bali!!!

It's been along time since the last post and it's hard to remember everything we have done. For starters we spent three days getting our SSI (SCUBA diving) Certification as Open Water Divers. It was wild. The first day we got familiarized with all the equipment, watched some instructional videos, and than headed to the pool where we first went underwater. Our instructor was a Brit named Clive who was super funny. I could ramble about how cool diving is forever, but I will just hit some highlights instead. On our first open water dive, at a reef off the shore of an Island near Nha Trang (whew), the mouthpiece came off my air piece and i sucked water at like 25 feet down. I had to switch to my backup air supply, blow out water, calm my nerves, and fix my mouthpiece. 10 minutes later, and still a little unnerved, the inflator button on my Buoyancy Control Device got stuck down and I began to rocket towards the surface. Bad deal. I responded properly by opening the emergency vents and signaling to Clive that I was about to die (not really) and he swam over and unstuck the button. After that I wasn't sure I liked diving. We were down for 40 minutes and I had 2 incidents and my goggles kept fogging up. I didn't; want to unfog them because it required closing your eyes and letting water in and I was kind of a mess mentally. I just kept breathing and praying that my talk would read 50 Bar so I could signal that I needed to go up and not be a total wimp for calling it early. The next dive was about an hour after we surfaced and it was much better. I got a hold of myself and had a blast looking at all the fish, coral, jellyfish, and starfish that were down there. About 5 minutes in we saw a 5-7 foot tall Jellyfish and Clive gave us the Danger signal and we swam away quickly. It was HUGE and still and eerie looking. The next day we made two more dives and they were wonderful. After getting over the weirdness of it all, there really is a whole big world down there and it's colorful and very alive. That afternoon we took our written tests (John and i both got 86%) and hopped an overnight bus to Saigon.
We arrived at way to early in the morning and walked around until we found a place to stay. We hadn;t intended on spend any time in Saigon, but our flight to Bali was early the next morning and we needed a shower and a place to put our bags so we got a room. That day we went to the War Remnants Museum (I think that's what it was called -not really sure at the moment). It was horrific and very anti-American. There was hundreds of grotesque pictures of deformed, maimed, and dead women and children. It was terrible and I had to leave early. In the evening we watched Soccer on TV and went to bed early.
Next morning we flew to Kuala Lumpu, Malaysia, and than to Denpasar (the biggest city on the island of Bali), Indonesia. We arrived late at night and stayed at a nasty hotel because everywhere else was full. Bali is unbelievable. It has 3.1 million people and they live on a volcanic island that is chalk full of beaches, volcanic peaks, thick jungle, and rice paddies. We SCUBA dived to the shipwreck of a US military ship from WWII (I think) called the Liberty, and saw 10X as much marine life as we did in Vietnam. It was wonderful. We stayed in a tiny town called Our "hotel" room actually was the top two floor of a cottage that was a stones throw from the water and had a big deck where we could watch the sunset. Along the road from us, and visible from our window, was the community playing field (actually it was just dirt, but they didn;t care) as well as a man's goat, chicken, and pig grazing areas. 5 miles from our room was a 10,000 foot volcano that rose right out of the ocean. Really scenic. We got great pictures, but the Internet here is too slow to upload any.
I'm not sure where in time this event occurred because it was nestled in between 5 hour chunks of sleeping, but I remember clearly that at some point John, Tyler, and I got out of bed in the middle of the night and met up with a man who had offered to take us fishing with him for 10USD. We got on his tiny boat and sailed out into the glassy Indian Ocean. We trolled for fish while watching the sun rise over a massive storm to the East of us. It was super cool. The boat was one of those ones that has a tiny canoe type body and arms that extended into the ocean which have long wooden beams on them for balance and buoyancy. The craft was powered by a tiny Honda engine that the man was clearly proud of owning.
On the evening of our last night in Amed we met up with a few local boys and had a cookout on the beach. We lit a fire with bamboo, brush, and coconut husks, and grilled 4 pounds of massive prawns , a 2 foot Barracuda, and 2 Mackerels on bamboo skewers. They brought rice and noodles and we feasted. To cap things off they brought a guitar, a ukulele, and a maraca and we all stayed up singing and eating.
After Amed we headed to a town near the middle of Bali. I don't know it's name, and don't really want to. The town was comprised of two sections, one up on the rim of the massive volcanic crater and one down inside. The crater itself was maybe 3 miles across, and along the Easter side there was a large lake. Directly out of the center of the massive crater rose a 5100 foot Volcano that we climbed at 4AM on our second day in town. The views were unbelievable and the Volcano was still smoking and the ground was hot in parts. In 2002 it blew and killed most the inhabitants of a village near it's base and the destruction was still very evident. When I get a chance I will post pictures - they are really unbelievable.
Time is running out on my Internet so I will wrap up quickly. We spent the next 2 nights in a city called Kuta and rented surfboards. We were awful and got really sunburned and had a blast. On our last evening there we watched Manchester United draw Arsenal 0-0 to secure the Premiership Title - Really disappointing because we were pulling for Liverpool. The morning of the 3rd day we caught a flight to Kuala Lumpur and spent 15 hours waiting for a train to take us to Butterworth. That brings us up to this moment. I am at an Internet cafe and John is watching our bags at the train station. I'm going to pay the lady 80 cents to have used her computer for almost an hour, buy some snakefruit from a street stall out front(mom you've got to see this stuff, it's the craziest fruit. It tastes like an apple/lemon/pear and has the texture of ... I just sat here for a whole 3 minutes trying to decide how to describe this thing and i can't. You should look it up on Google Images.) , and catch a train to Koh Somui, Thailand.
Thanks for reading. Sorry about not Posting Pictures. We are looking forward to getting back to Alaska, but are still having a wonderful time. Much love. Christopher Dunaway.