Nusa Penida is a cliff-walled island off the southeast coast of Bali, where the headland called Kelingking curls 180 metres above a white cove in the shape of a crouching dinosaur. The photograph is taken from the top; to reach the sand you go down the dinosaur's back. A timber-and-rope staircase is pinned to the ridge, and the scramble is slow, steep and hard on the knees, with the drop underneath you the whole way. At the bottom is a near-empty crescent of white sand, kept empty by surf too strong to swim. The climb back is the hard part, in full heat. That is the pattern here. Diamond Beach, over on the east coast, has its own staircase hand-cut into the rock, dropping to a curve of sand guarded by a triangular sea stack.
At Broken Beach the roof of a sea cave fell in long ago, leaving a stone arch and a round walled lagoon that the ocean pours into with every wave. A path circles the rim, and next door the tide-fed pool at Angel's Billabong lies calm between sets. The grassy clifftops at Atuh look down on a scatter of jagged islets offshore, and at first light the whole thing goes soft and gold. Mainland Balinese kept away for generations, treating this as an island of exile ruled by a demon lord and blamed for plague. The rest of the island is underwater. At Manta Point, on the wild south coast, you drop into the current and reef mantas circle a cleaning station all year, gliding past within arm's reach, mouths open to feed. The same currents make most of the diving drift diving, carrying you along walls of hard coral and clouds of orange anthias, with reef sharks and turtles passing. One visitor here comes the other way. A cold upwelling between July and October pulls the mola mola, the disc-shaped ocean sunfish, up from water deeper than any diver goes. It hangs almost still over the reef while small fish pick it clean.