We landed on the black sand beaches of Amed, North East Bali to visit a friend of Hugo's; Nico, who works at Fun Divers School. Although we were in Bali, it felt more like France - the majority of tourists in the area were French and everywhere we looked adverts and signs were displayed en francais! Amed is unusual in that the beaches are black sanded, a little different from the iconic image of Bali we had imagined. As much as we had loved eating local food the past couple of weeks we jumped at the opportunity to eat fresh salads and anything other than rice for breakfast/lunch/dinner.

We rented a motorbike and headed for the hills. Mt Agung was highly active that day and from the mountains we had a great view of the volcano smoking. The countryside was different to anywhere we'd been before as Bali is mainly Hindu and traditional houses and buildings scattered the land. Flowers and incense were burning on temples and men wore traditional balinese headdress and sarong. We visited the Gates of Heaven at Pura Lempuyang temple, a stunning "split gate" style of Hindu Balinese architecture that represents the boundary between the outer world and the outer realm of the temple.

That evening we had a complete French night, we went out altogether at a French bistro where Nico knew the head chef. I had one of the tastiest meals I'd eaten since leaving home - cavier d'aubergine on grilles toasts to start, with freshly caught barracuda sauce beurre blanc et gratin dauphinois. Accompanied by a glass of vin rouge & folllowed by a lemon tart. It was delicious!

As Nico was a dive instructor he agreed to finish off my open water diving license with me, which was left unfinished since the perhentian islands in Malaysia due to ear problems. I had a refresher dive in the morning to complete all my skills and in the afternoon I completed my last dive to finish. It was an unbelievable dive to finish on, at the USAT liberty shipwreck. The ship had sank in the early 1900's and nature had completely taken over, with coral and fish making the shipwreck their home. There were a couple of sections we could dive inside to see the interior of the ship, it was amazing to see how nature had adapted to the ways. We came across a scorpion fish who had camouflaged himself in such a way that he looked just like the metal surface of the ship.