Last Updated on October 8, 2026 by Jeff Tomas
I taught high school chemistry in Dayton, Ohio, for thirty-one years, and when I retired, my wife Noi and I moved to her home village outside Chiang Rai, where the nearest beach is a plane ride away, and the nearest coral reef is farther than that. I’m sixty-four. I’d never put my face in salt water on purpose.
My friend Gary, a retired pipefitter from Michigan who drinks at the same bar on Jetyod Road every Thursday, had been nagging me for two years about the coral in Indonesia. In May I finally gave in, partly to make him stop. We flew from Chiang Rai to Don Mueang and on to Denpasar on a Tuesday, and I spent most of the second flight wondering whether I’d make a fool of myself.
Noi came too, though she’d made it clear before we left that she’d be staying on the boat.
I’d assumed, like a lot of people my age, that the good stuff underwater belonged to divers with tanks and certificates. The guide who met us at our guesthouse in Pemuteran, on Bali’s quiet northwest coast, set me straight on the first evening.
Not every memorable underwater encounter requires a tank, and Neptunescubadiving.com helps place Bali Indonesia snorkeling within the same marine landscape of coral gardens, sheltered bays, and wildlife-rich coastal waters. She said most of what I’d want to see lived in the top fifteen feet of the bay. I wrote that down in the small notebook I carry everywhere.
Why I Skipped the Tank
Gary dives. I talked it over with my doctor at Overbrook Hospital before we went, mostly because of my blood pressure, and she thought guided snorkeling in calm water was a sensible first step for someone like me.
- No certification course eating half the trip.
- I could stop and float whenever I got tired, which mattered more than I’d ever admit to Gary.
- Noi could see me from the boat.
I booked the trips through the first dive center Bali friends in our Chiang Rai expat group had used themselves, a small place on the beach road with a hand-painted sign and two wooden boats.
The Mask I Shouldn’t Have Bought
Before we left, I’d ordered a full-face snorkel mask on Lazada for 689 baht, the kind that covers your whole face so you can breathe through your nose, because it looked easier than the old tube-and-goggles setup. On the first morning, at about a quarter past eight, I wore it into the bay in front of the dive center.
Within ten minutes I was short of breath and a little dizzy. I came up pulling at the strap. Komang, our guide, reached me in about four strokes and walked me back to the sand, where she took the thing off my face. She told me she’d seen several older guests struggle in cheap full-face masks, because some of them don’t clear your exhaled air the way a proper snorkel does.
I don’t know enough to say whether that’s true of all of them. But I wasn’t going to argue with her. She handed me one of the center’s regular masks and made me practice breathing through the snorkel in knee-deep water for twenty minutes before we went any further out. The full-face mask came home in the bottom of my suitcase and hasn’t left the closet since.
(Noi, for the record, watched all of this from a beach chair with a bag of dried mango she’d brought from the market in Chiang Rai.)
Menjangan, on the Second Try
Two days later Komang took us out to Menjangan Island, inside West Bali National Park, about forty minutes by boat from the harbor. This was the day I’d come for. The reef there runs along the top of a wall that drops away into deep blue water, and you float at the edge with coral directly below you and nothing but dark water beyond it.
I counted eleven kinds of fish I could name and plenty I couldn’t. A turtle passed under me close enough that I could see barnacles on its shell. Noi stayed on the boat as promised and photographed me waving from the water—thirty-odd times.
I’ve done a fair amount of traveling since I retired, and I’d put that morning of Bali, Indonesia, snorkeling near the top of the list.
Two younger divers on our boat, a couple from Perth, had just finished a week of liveaboard scuba diving in Indonesia out of Labuan Bajo. They spent the ride back describing manta rays wider than a pickup truck. I’m not sure that’s for me. And I still asked which boat they’d used and wrote the name in my notebook.
What Sixty-Four Meant in the Water
Some things were harder than I expected, and one was easier.
- I tired faster than the young people and needed a rest every half hour or so.
- The flotation vest Komang gave me made the difference on the first day, since my legs sank every time I stopped kicking.
- Climbing back up the boat ladder was harder than the snorkeling.
- Reading glasses don’t work under a mask.
- Nobody on that boat cared how old I was.
Most of what makes Bali snorkeling work for someone my age comes down to calm water and a patient guide. I’d been wrong to think you needed to be young or fit for it, and I told Gary as much over a Leo at the bar the Thursday after we got home.
Before You Book
Gary’s now pushing me toward scuba diving courses in Bali, Indonesia for next year. I haven’t decided. Komang said the dive center runs a try-dive in the same Pemuteran bay, so if I do it, that’s where I’ll go.
- Talk to your own doctor first, especially if you take medication for your heart or blood pressure.
- Leave the full-face mask at home and use whatever the guide hands you.
Pemuteran is a long drive from the airport, close to five hours for us after an evening landing, so book a night near Denpasar if your flight gets in late.
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