Diving on Bali - there are two words which are enough to make divers eyes glitter - sunfish and manta. To make it even better, you can see both in the same day! Most of the diving companies leave from Sanur, going for about and hour to the Nusa Lembogan island.
The first site is Crystal Bay, which is whre the sunfish can be seen. Deep water is being pushed up on the ledge here and so sunfish (normally deep-sea fish) come close to surface here to get cleaned up. We were very lucky - sunfish appeared from the deep blue as soon as we reached the right spot and then it went all the way to 30ft, hang around for about 10 minutes and went back. Awesome sight.
The second dive-site was Manta Point. As you can probably guess, this is where you see mantas. The reason for them to come here is that plankton (their food) gets trapped in this little bay and so they come here for the easy snack. It's very shallow, so snorkelers can see them easily as well. We've seen at least dozen of different mantas and they all look as if they were just flying through the water. Absolutely amazing.
Wreck of MV Liberty was one more dive I wanted to do at Bali. It's said to be one of the "must do" sites in Asia. We went to Tulamben from which you can get onto the wreck easily from the beach. Since we arrived in the afternoon, we decided to start with a night-dive. It was just us and a guide, who seemed to be very happy when we told him we were interrested in the "small stuff". As soon as we jumped in the water, he started pointing at a little patch of fan coral. I looked at it, but didn't see anything, so I took one picture to be polite and went on. His first words once we got out of the water were "how did you like the ghost pipefish on the first coral?". Doh! Funny thing is, I can actually see them on the photo I took, but it's out of focus of course... I felt really stupid at that moment. Anyway, the whole dive was awesome - the guy was amazing muck-diver, finding the craziest little crabs and fish, typically just couple of milimeters bit. Next day we went to do a regular dive so that we get to see the wreck itsellf as well. It's a nice site, lots of fish, but crazy crowded with divers.