Puri Jati (PJ) - Faces in the Sand...

The north coast of Bali is about as far as you can travel, both geographically & culturally, from the tourist triangle of the southeast corner of this famed Island of the Gods.

Gone are the luxurious resort complexes and fancy restaurants of Seminyak & Nusa Dua, as is the new age spirituality of Ubud and the hills to the north of Denpasar.

Up on the north coast is where the Balinese live as they have done for hundreds of years – in their tight knit village communities and earning their living from the land and the sea.

There are pockets of tourism on the north coast and a lot of it is focused around scuba diving, such as the small town of Tulamben & it’s famous Liberty wreck and nearby Seraya with it’s great muck diving. Going further west along the north coast is the town of Lovina, which once aspired to be a key tourist location but never quite made the grade. As you pass through Lovina and head towards Gilimanuk & the nearby Menjangan Island, after about 10km you will enter a small town called Seririt.

There is nothing much to distinguish Seririt from the many other similar towns & villages in Bali, unless of course you are a diver and know that very near there is one of the best muck diving sites east of Lembeh!

The site is called Puri Jati, but everybody refers to it as PJ, and you need to look for the Zen Resort sign on the right hand side of the road.

Turning here and following the road up the hill past the resort and down into the valley below you will see a classic Balinese scene of vivid green rice paddies which stretch right up to the edge of a black volcanic sand beach.

First discovered about five years ago by the highly respected, Bali based, Japanese UW photographer Taka Tonuzuka.

Stories of what you can see at PJ filter through the diving community on a regular basis. As a regular visitor to Bali I have dived most of the main locations on the island but had only managed one dive at PJ about two years ago and just had to go back to really understand what there is to see at this almost legendary site.

My initial impression on arrival at PJ was one of surprise. Two years previously there was just the beach and we got changed out of the back of the car, which meant that all our camera & dive gear quickly took on a lamington like look with a thick coating of dark sand...

Now there is a shaded & concreted area with gear benches, camera & dive gear rinse tanks, showers and a toilet block under construction!

Nearby there is a small warung and the first job to do on arrival is to place your lunch order. (Try the grilled fish, rice and spicy sambal, it’s fresh and it’s excellent!)

Once geared up, entry to the site is as simple as walking down the beach into the water, putting on your fins and then swimming straight out. For about 200m from the beach the underwater seascape is a gently sloping dark volcanic sand incline, then when the depth reaches about 12m there are some dune like ripples in the sand and the gentle slope becomes a fairly steep drop-off that descends into the depths of the Bali Sea.

Initially the visibility is less that 1m due to the wave action on the shallow beach, but it improves rapidly once you head out to the drop-off where it’s typically about 15m. The average visibility on the gentle slope, where all the critters are, is about 10m. However, until your eyes attune to the environment it’s very easy to keep swimming until you reach the drop-off, wondering where are all the critters you have heard so much about! The answer is really quite simple – they are below you in the sand!

The sloping sand is host to an amazing array of creatures, who seem to be able to either blend in completely with the soft dark sand, or appear & disappear into it at will. So well adapted to their environment are some of these critters that it’s quite easy to find yourself looking directly at them without realizing they are actually there – such as about 15 minutes into the first dive, when my dive guide Angky spotted the first face in the sand.

All I could see was dark sand till an eye movement made me realize that I was looking at the distinctive eye stalks and face of a partially buried mimic octopus.

Once I knew what I was looking at I was able to zoom in with my camera and really take a close look. Then, when Angky gently inserted his critter stick into the sand to the side of, but well away from the mimic, it responded by slowly emerging from it’s hiding place and providing us with a magnificent selection of its many guises!

From then on there was no looking back and between Angky & I we spotted blue-ringed octopus, a selection of frogfish, robust & ornate ghost pipefish, snake eels, crocodile fish and Ambon scorpion fish to name but a few – the place is a veritable critter wonderland!

Altogether I spent four days at PJ, doing 4 to 5 dives each day, until I could more or less tell where I was at any point in time without making the short journey to the surface to check for directions – quite a feat considering on the first day the whole site appeared flat and almost completely featureless. Being a shallow site of generally less than 10m, dive time can be quite long and it was usually hunger (or bladder pressure…) that made me head back to the beach! On a couple of occasions I spent over 2 hours underwater and my average dive time was well in excess of 60 minutes.

Over the four days I began to notice changes in activity at different times of the day – not long enough to understand the mechanisms that created the changes, but certainly enough to realize that changes were happening. The six hour period from about nine in the morning to around three in the afternoon seemed to be the most active and provide the best chance of seeing the largest variety of critters.

Before nine, and after three, was definitely more subdued but paradoxically the time I got the best images of the harder to find creatures such as the mimic and wonderpus octopi. The most subdued time was on the final morning when the site had clearly been net-fished the night before – the grooves in the sand from the lead weights on the nets as they were dragged in were still clearly visible. The fishing was apparently carried out by people from the neighboring village who resent the relative prosperity the critters at Puri Jati have delivered to Uma Anyar.

Why Are The Critters There?

There are three basic requirements for a critter “hot spot” to develop – first the area needs to be sheltered from bad weather and strong wave action. Secondly, there needs to be a source of fresh water run-off, rich with organic debris. Finally, and most importantly, the spot must be flushed regularly by deep-water upwellings that bring cold-water, rich with the detritus of the sea.

Puri Jati’s location in a sheltered bay provides it with protection from all but the strongest winds whilst the large stream flowing into the bay, just to the right of the new gearing up area, carries with it a rich flow of run-off from the rice paddy fields.

The Indonesian Throughflow satisfies the third criteria - this phenomenal flow of water from the Pacific Ocean, to the northwest of Indonesia, into the Indian Ocean to the south of the archipelago really is the key to understanding why the Indo-Pacific area is such a rich & diverse marine environment.

Monsoonal weather patterns & oceanic currents combine to create higher water levels & temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which together with it’s lower salinity, result in a flow of water so large that traditional measurements were not big enough and the Sverdrop had to be developed (one million cubic meters of water per second). As this huge volume of water passes over the deep Makassar & Bali Basins, to the north of the island, it creates counter-currents & upwellings of cold water rich with phosphorus & nitrogen from the decayed debris on the ocean floor.

Virtually everything that dies in the sea ends up on the bottom, where it decays and forms a layer this organic debris, rich in nutrients. The complex underwater topography of Indonesia, together with the Throughflow phenomena, means that these upwellings will touch certain areas and miss others.

Where an upwelling coincides with the other two precursors, the end-result is the perfect conditions for a critter hot-spot to happen and this is what has happened at PJ…

Just How Good Is Puri Jati?

The four days I spent at Puri Jati were part of a 12 day muck/critter diving safari on the north coast of Bali and the objective of the trip was to dive & photograph all the principal sites in the north and I dived Secret Bay, Menjangen Island, Puri Jati, Tulamben, Seraya and Ahmed.
 
Without doubt the diving at Puri Jati produced the best images of the trip and it was by far the most diverse area in term of the number of different critters.

The north coast trip was in December 2007 and, as I write this article, I have just returned from 8 days spent diving the Lembeh Strait in northeast Sulawesi. I will document my experience at Lembeh in a future article, but simply stated it was the very best critter diving I have ever done.

That said, if Lembeh is 10/10, I would rate the Twilight Zone in Ambon as 8 and Puri Jati as 7.5

PJ Photo Gallery

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