Amed

The fishing boats go out in the dark. I woke at four-thirty in the morning in Amed — not intentionally, but because the outboard motors on the jukung outriggers have a particular pitch that travels through walls — and lay listening to the fleet departing, one engine after another, the sound building then receding as the boats moved northeast into the Lombok Strait. By the time I walked down to the beach at five-fifteen, they were specks of light on the water and the black sand was empty and cold under my feet and the eastern sky was beginning to separate into bands of colour over Lombok’s volcanoes across the strait.

Amed is a string of small fishing communities — Amed, Jemeluk, Bunutan, Lipah, Selang — strung along perhaps fourteen kilometres of northeast Bali coastline. The road connecting them twists through dry hills that look unlike anywhere else on the island, the vegetation sparse and scrubby compared to the lush rice-paddy south, the coast rocky and precipitous, the sea a colour that does not seem fully real in photographs. The area stayed quiet long after the south of Bali became overrun, partly because the roads to get here were difficult and partly because there was no infrastructure to receive tourists. Now there are guesthouses and dive shops and restaurants, but the fishing still runs underneath all of it, the boats still going out before dawn regardless of what the tourism economy is doing.

The underwater world here is what draws most visitors. Jemeluk Bay has a coral reef that begins almost at the shoreline, accessible with just a mask and fins from the beach, and the visibility on a calm morning runs to twenty-five metres easily. I am not a diver but I snorkelled every morning for three days and saw enough — parrotfish, surgeonfish, the strange slow drift of a sea turtle navigating the coral heads — to understand why the divers keep coming back. The USAT Liberty, a WWII cargo ship sunk by a Japanese torpedo in 1942, lies just offshore from Tulamben twenty minutes down the coast. It is the most accessible wreck dive in Asia, resting in shallow water so close to shore that shore divers can swim straight down to it, the hull overgrown with sea fans and coral and populated by an improbable density of fish.

The salt gardens behind the beach at Amed and Jemeluk are something I had not expected to find beautiful. Small family plots where seawater is channelled into shallow evaporation beds and left to crystallise in the sun — the process unchanged for centuries, the salt collected by hand and sold to the market in Amlapura. Walking past them in the late morning, the light catching the white crust on the dark soil, the smell of brine strong and clean, felt like stumbling onto a scene that had nothing to do with tourism and everything to do with how this coast has always fed itself.

The food is simpler here than in Ubud or Seminyak, and better for it. Every restaurant serves whatever came off the boats that morning — grilled fish with sambal matah, the raw Balinese condiment of shallots and lemongrass and chilli, squid with lime and turmeric, the occasional whole crab brought to the table still steaming. I ate at the same plastic table on the same beachfront for three evenings running, watching the boats return as the light failed, the fish going directly from sea to kitchen to plate with a directness that felt like the whole point.

When to go: April through October is the best period, with calm seas and excellent diving and snorkelling visibility. The dry season northeast wind keeps the coast clear and the water still. Avoid December through February when the swell picks up and surface chop reduces underwater visibility. The Tulamben wreck can be dived year-round but is at its clearest and most crowd-free in the early morning at any time of year.