Liveaboard diving is a totally immersed diving experience. A boat is filled with people who love diving and the routine is dive, eat, sleep, dive, eat, sleep…for days. We wake at 6:30, dive at 7:00, eat breakfast, dive at 10:30, eat lunch, dive at 14:30, snack, dive at 18:30 (in the dark, with torches), eat dinner, sleep and do it all over again. Liveaboard diving gives wonderful new meaning to “same shit, different day”.

Choosing my liveaboard dive trip was an adventure in itself. Bunaken? Raja Ampat? Komodo? Which operator? Do they have dates that work? Are they full already? How much do they cost? After much internet trawling, sending emails and making calls, I decided upon diving Komodo with Blue Dragon. I often use travelfish.org when I travel in Asia and posted a quick note to check out other travellers’ knowledge. That was when I learned Blue Dragon 2, the newer vessel, had sunk six months ago.

I was gutted. What to do? Do I go diving with a company whose boat sank, or do I book with someone else? I sent Emil an email saying I had just learned of the sinking and wanted to ask him some questions about safety on board and the gear I would hire. At this point I was so glad of all the things I’ve learned in the last two years from my friends at Chelsea and Fulham Sub Aqua Club. I was glad of my Sports Diver training and that I knew which questions to ask. I was glad that I know how to take care of my kit and myself underwater and don’t need to be lifted and laid like I used to, with tropical commercial diving and boat boys who did everything for me. Thank you BSAC (and Dave Bennett), for teaching me how to be a diver.

After my conversation with Emil, where I learned Blue Dragon 2 went down in a seven-knot gale and everyone got to safety, my instincts were to book. So I did.

We boarded on Sunday after an early flight from Bali, sorted our kit, had tasty food, began to get to know each other, and did our check out dive with teeming fish on one of the most beautiful coral walls I’ve seen since Fiji. “It’s nothing special, just the check out dive,” Gusty, the dive manager, said. My expectations of diving Komodo ratcheted up several notches.

Next morning, I dived with manta rays for the first time. I watched two mantas at cleaning stations swoop and dive for ten minutes as cleaner fish fluttered like adoring birds across their wings, flipping up and returning to feast on nasties as the manta glided gracefully in its fishy bath. Swimming with eight manta rays before breakfast is the best Monday morning I have ever had. A couple of days later, as we dived Makassar reef again, I saw 21 manta rays and the closest I got was about a metre from its wing tip as one manta swooped past. I was lucky to see black manta rays, very rare, and began making up stories about how they had been using the manta force for ill and turned black on their undersides. I think there may be a story to develop there…

In south Komodo, we got in a bit of muck diving – my first experience of rummaging through rubble and sand to find odd underwater critters. My favourite moments from these dives were watching a bob-tailed squid squirt ink, change colour and dart to safety, and a delightful juvenile sweetlips, about the size of my pinky nail, shake its ass like a latin dancer in a pink polka dot dress.

One of my favourite dives was a three-knot drift dive where we were carried by the current across a spectacular coral reef that unfolded like a Pixar movie. I surrendered to the current, spread my arms, pretended to be a manta ray and flew across the top of brightly coloured soft corals and beautiful hard corals.

On my last dive, I found a huge anemone and had a long chat with Nemo, bidding him a fond farewell and telling him I’d be back before long. He sends his love to my blog readers.

There was no diving for the last 20 hours on board as most divers were booked on an early flight back to Bali. This is when we went to see the famous Komodo dragons on a one hour hike through the forest. My nitrogen laden muscles struggled to pull me round the hike and that was when I decided Labuan Bajo would be a time of rest and relaxation as opposed to mountain climbing and exploring. Later that afternoon we were scheduled to go and see the bat cave. Gina, Mimi and I lounged on our deckchairs and agreed we were going to skip it – my legs couldn’t take another hike that afternoon. Then, as the sun set, off in the distance, tens of thousands of bats began streaming out of a cave on a nearby island. From our deck chairs, we watched the most beautiful sunset and bats’ waxy wings fly over the boat’s rigging as the sky turned sunset pink to orange to deep red to blue to inky black. I watched the stars appear and imagined a seamstress in the sky stitching sequins onto a goddess’s ball gown one by one. I had a lopsided, dreamy grin on my face and if it hadn’t been for the call to dinner I might still be in bliss on that deck chair now.

Blue Dragon is a budget/backpacker standard liveaboard. The dive gear was serviceable, but not new. There were a few cockroaches on board (but just little ones, and I stopped noticing them after the first day). The standards are not western, but this is Indonesia, and they were safe. The boat had everything we needed for a comfortable liveaboard dive trip, including good showers to rinse the salt after each dive. The only time I ever had to wait for a shower was when Yao was in there singing his heart out.

I was bowled over by the crew. They poured their hearts into making our trip wonderful. On the first evening, I asked if my berth could be sprayed for bugs. He was in there for 15 minutes cleaning my room and spraying every nook and cranny, leaving it utterly spotless and bug-free. On our last night, back in port at Labuan Bajo, we hit land for ATMs and a bar. When we got back to the boat, a bit peckish, they rustled us up a snack of noodles and egg to deal with our late night munchies. Risky, the chef, and his team kept a boatload of hungry divers very happy with tasty fare.

My fellow divers really made the trip – Jouni, my Finnish dive buddy, Gina and Mimi from LA, and the rest of the gang from Malaysia and Hong Kong. Thank you all for making it such a brilliant trip – it was so great to meet you and share tremendous diving.

I have adored diving Indonesia – 22 dives and a whole lot of joy. As I sit here in Labuan Bajo, nursing an ear infection, remembering those dives puts a dreamy smile on my face. I can’t wait until my next Indonesian dive trip. Who’ll join me to dive Raja Ampat next year?

A minibus from Ubud to Padang Bai then a speedboat to Gili Trawangan and I was in a different world. I waded ashore, wiggled my wet toes in the sand and knew I’d found my home for the next few days.

Gili Trawangan is where the backpackers went about 20 years ago when Bali got popular. Now speedboats offload holidaymakers every day and it’s getting busier by the year. The main beach is being developed in all directions yet somehow it remains small enough. There are no cars or motorbikes on Gili T so the fastest methods of transport are bicycle or pony cart. In my village homestay, about 100m back from the beach, I was woken each morning by the mosque’s call to prayer and Yusup delivering breakfast to my terrace. After only a few days I would walk along the beach path and bump into people I knew. On my last day on Gili T, I stayed indoors with a bout of travellers’ tummy and was greeted later that evening with, “Hey, where ya been? We missed you”.

Gili T can easily capture your heart. It’s a great place to dive (lots of people learn here), to snorkel, to chill on the beach, to party, and to lose yourself with a smattering of mind altering magic mushrooms on your pizza at Rudy’s. For me, it was all about the diving, my dive buddies, sunset yoga and a few Bintangs in the evening.

I dived six times with Big Bubble – they were brilliant. I met reef sharks, turtles, witnessed Jamil the dive guide battling a female Titan triggerfish after we swam too close to her nest, and was held spellbound by male and female pharaoh cuttlefish swimming together, changing colour as electrical charges pulsed through their bodies. One of my favourite moments was watching a black and white banded sea snake weave its way to the surface as sunbeams shot through the water. And on land one evening, I had tears in my eyes as I watched a turtle lay her eggs on the quieter northern section of Gili T’s beach.

I had great dive buddies. Joe, a professional poker player, was brilliant company. We dived, chatted over great food and beer, and he introduced me to Gili T’s sunset yoga class. I laughed when Travis the banker, my other dive buddy, introduced himself to Joe and said, “Poker, trading, same thing really.” The Big Bubble dive crowd were great and we all adored Wayan, our favourite divemaster. It is such a cliché to develop a crush on your divemaster, but in my defence, Travis, the 6-foot, macho Canadian banker wanted to marry Wayan and I feel sure Joe would have let him win at poker.

I settled into a gorgeous routine of diving, eating, yoga, drinking beer and chatting with friends on Gili T. But after a few days it was time to head to Komodo and my liveaboard dive trip. Turns out diving on Gili T was just the warm up act…

About a week before I headed off, Lydia played backpack weight manager and whittled me down to two novels, a journal and a guidebook – still about 1.5 kilos of paper. As I passed WHSmith in Heathrow’s Terminal 4 departure lounge the “Buy one, get one half price” sign hooked and reeled me like a helpless fish. I barely even wriggled. I’ve wanted Ian McEwan’s Solar for ages and the new Lisa Jewell would be a quick and absorbing read – perfect for long haul. No matter how good I get at travelling light, I can’t seem to stop carrying too many books. I’m long overdue a switch to e-reader and this trip has forced the issue.

As we descended into Denpasar airport I turned the last page of Lisa Jewell’s latest, relieved that I could dump it on the plane and leave one book lighter. I struck up a conversation with the girl in the next seat, who was headed to the beach at Seminyak, and found it the perfect new home.

Flicking through my guidebook, I debated the relative merits of Bali’s beaches with my neighbour and excess book owner. I decided upon Legian. It’s a hop, skip and jump from the airport. It has a beach I can relax on to work out where I go next and while I’m unlikely to love it, at least it’s not Kuta.

I left the air conditioned arrival hall at Denpasar airport to a chorus of, “Taxi, you need taxi?”. But I’d read my (heavy) guidebook. I knew these were the rip off merchants. So I walked past them to the window for fixed price prepaid airport taxis and congratulated myself for avoiding rip off on arrival. Later, when I realised that the fixed price taxi driver had actually taken me to Legian Road in Kuta, I laughed and cursed the cheeky git.

Kuta is sort of like Magaluf, if you live in Australia. It’s a bit nicer than Magaluf and I did have a lovely day there – lunch, hit the beach, planned the next stop of my trip, watched the sunset, made some new friends, walked for hours and booked my bus to Ubud next morning. Kuta’s just not very me.

Next morning I headed to Ubud, Bali’s artistic and cultural centre. I found a gorgeous little guesthouse on Monkey Forest Road and this was where I acclimatised to Bali and found my travelling groove. I wandered through art galleries and temples, saw dance shows, browsed unique shops and lingered in cosmopolitan cafes. The highlight of my time in Ubud was a cycling eco tour. We were driven up a volcano, put on bikes and hurled downhill for 25km through villages, paddy fields, coffee plantations and stunning scenery. My favourite stop was at the coffee plantation where we watched them make “cat shit coffee”. A strange creature called a Luwak roams the forest eating coffee beans and pooping them out intact. They are collected from the forest floor as, having been through the Luwak’s digestive tract, they have a unique flavour. Each animal generates only 300g a year so it’s expensive shit. A cup of Luwak coffee in London will set you back about £40. The Luwaks are delighted. They used to get killed and eaten. Now everyone treats their poo like gold.

We wheeled downhill for 25km and then a few of us tackled the optional 10km uphill to our lunch stop. I didn’t expect to make it in the heat but was reassured as our bus was coming behind to pick up casualties. I was the only girl to make it all 10km uphill, racing in just behind the boys with a huge smile on my face and thirsty for a decent cup of cat shit coffee.

After cycling, I went to the (cheeky) Monkey Forest Sanctuary, home to 300 Macaques who taunt paying tourists daily. There’s a link in the comments below to a video of a woman being relieved of her hair clip – her husband is more concerned about getting a photo than getting the monkey off her head. Despite their unpredictability and cheek, they are adorable. I’m glad I took Kirsty and Ian’s advice and didn’t go in waving food. Food-less tourists are dull. It’s the ones with bags of bananas who get molested.

There were some things in Ubud that didn’t really work for me. Outside Bali Buddha a wall of posters peddle a multitude of ways to achieve happiness, personal fulfilment and get rid of all the bad things in your life. I read through them and my west of Scotland bullshit detectors were in overdrive. “So, if I pay £x, you’ll remove all the bad things in my life with your psychic crystal quantum energy theta healing tarot reading while you do a barefoot ecstasy dance around my wallet?” Harumph. I’m not averse to a bit of spiritual exploration. I’ve done quite a lot of it and think it has real value. However, being presented with a wall of people proclaiming to have the “answer” pissed me off. No one has “the answer”. I think we all find our own versions of our own answers that serve us at whatever point in life we’re at. I read a booklet given out by tourist information that was packed with ex-pat westerners’ advertising copy for their alternative businesses in Ubud. I’m sure people do find answers in Ubud. I just found it all a bit much.

It really served me though. It served me to find my own travelling groove. I was in Ubud, a place of real beauty, that is universally loved, and it wasn’t resonating with me. So I tried harder, I tried to give myself a shake and appreciate it. And there were some things that I loved. In the end, I realised that Ubud just doesn’t resonate with me and remembered that the way I love to travel is to find what I love, not what everyone else loves, or thinks I should love. To quote a card Adrian gave me when I took off last time, to dance to the beat of my own drum.

So that’s what I did. I beat my own drum and headed for Gili Trawangan and diving and I found a little slice of paradise.