Snorkeling Amed

It's hard to tell from the surface, but there is some amazing snorkeling in Amed, Bali.  I wish Tim and I decided to give ourselves our Christmas present early so I would have it to document this snorkeling outing, but such is life.  You'll have to trust us that we saw some seriously cool shit.

Jenny and Tim, snorkeling past each other like ships in the night:

The stuff out there was pretty awesome: brightly colored giant clams and Christmas tree worms, trumpet fish, angelfish, table coral, brain coral, beautiful pink, ribbony Spanish Dancer eggs (dudes, check out the Spanish Dancer in action here)...

The craziest thing we saw, however, was some nature in action in the most disturbing way.  At one point I caught sight of a blue-spotted stringray and gestured for Eileen to come over to check it out.  As we were marveling at it, we noticed that its tail was missing, replaced by a fleshy wound.  At the same time as we noticed, all the fish in the vicinity noticed, too, and they immediately took advantage of the ray's weakness.  They ganged up on him, biting at his wound aggressively and repeatedly.  Finally, one of the larger fish got a hold on the stingray and dragged him under a piece of coral as the ray struggled and struggled, but the gang of fish was too much for him.  Eileen and I just stared (our mouths would have been agape if they hadn't been holding our snorkels in place), totally disturbed and yet not really wanting to intervene, knowing the ray's demise was inevitable. Nature is a bitch, folks.

And finally, jukung fishing boats in action (and inaction), similar to the one in which Tim and I took a cruise to see the sunset over Mt. Agung: