Bali Dive Sites: Tulamben Area – Palung-Palung

Tulamben Area Dive Sites – Palung-Palung

Palung-Palung, is covered in colourful soft corals and alive with butterflyfish, sea fans, swaying Garden eels, hunting day octopus, and large schools of fusiliers.
Golden Sweepers, Palung Palung Dive Site, Tulamben, Bali

Golden Sweepers, Tulamben, Bali

Palung-Palung Dive Site

Located between Tulamben’s Wall/Drop-Off and Batu Kelebit. Palung-Palung is accessed by a 10 minute jukung (local outrigger fishing boat) journey, The diving at Palung-Palung (meaning “bowls”) is from 5-30m.

These bowls/fingers are made up of overhangs, steep slopes and drop-offs on which you will find hard and soft corals. As with other areas around Tulamben, some of the sea fans (at 25-30m depth) are home to Denise pygmy seahorses.

What you can see at Palung-Palung Dive Site

Colourful soft corals cover the big chunks of lava lying in the bowls/’valleys’ and in the areas of gently sloping black sand are schools of fusiliers, Redtooth triggerfish and butterflyfishes adding to the scenery.

Look for the nudis, jawfish, shrimp/goby sets, hundreds of swaying Garden eels, Day octopus and Black saddle grouper.

Here you’ll quite often see some of Tulamben’s school of huge Bumphead parrotfish munching on the coral, White-tip and Black-tip reef sharks looking for their next meal, a variety of rays (including Manta and Eagle rays on occasion) as well as turtles – all great wide-angle subjects. Scalloped Hammerhead sharks have been reported here.

There’s usually a current at Palung-Palung so you’ll do a gentle drift dive while the jukung simply follows your bubbles and picks you up at the end of the dive – this makes the site suitable for all except the most inexperienced of divers. Also, as the current tends to be slower the deeper you go, it is a good location for the PADI Deep Diver Specialty course.

Temperatures at Palung-Palung stay around 27-30°C with visibility generally 25+m.