I read somewhere that anticipation helps us derive greater joy from our vacations. I don’t know if that’s true, or if it’s just clickbait some travel writer dreamed up to feed the content mill. What I do know is that I’ve been dreaming about today’s adventure ever since we booked our trip to Bali.
Whenever our travels take us anywhere near an ocean, Christina and I always ask the same question: how’s the snorkeling?
In Bali, the snorkeling is excellent. The water is clear, the conditions are usually calm, and the sea life is beautiful. But there’s one spot in Bali, about one hundred feet off the beach at Tulamben, that offers something unique for snorkelers: a shipwreck.
Usually, shipwrecks are too deep for a snorkeler to see. They’re popular attractions for scuba divers, but unlike Christina, I don’t dive. I’ve tried diving, and somehow I managed to experience agoraphobia and claustrophobia—at the same time! So, no diving for me. Which means no shipwrecks for me either, or so I thought. Because as it turns out, the wreckage of the USAT Liberty is perfect for snorkelers.
A little backstory. The USAT Liberty was a transport ship. It entered service at the tail end of World War One, transporting horses from the U.S. to France. After the war, USAT Liberty got into some shit. In 1929, it collided with a French tug called Dogue. The tug sank, killing two crew members. In 1933, USAT Liberty collided with the cargo ship Ohioan near the Port of New York. The Ohioan didn’t sink, but its crew was forced to beach the ship.
About a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the USAT Liberty was in the Pacific, tasked with transporting railway parts and rubber from Australia to the Philippines. About ten miles southwest of the Lombok Strait, the USAT Liberty encountered a Japanese submarine. But instead of colliding with the Japanese sub—USAT Liberty’s go-to move—the transport ship was struck by a Japanese torpedo.
The torpedo attack didn’t sink USAT Liberty, but it did force the transport ship out of the war and, eventually, into the tourism business. With the help of two other ships, the USS Paul Jones and the Dutch destroyer Van Ghent, the USAT Liberty made it to Bali, where its crew beached her at Tulamben. Some of the supplies were saved, but the USAT Liberty was a total loss.
The story might’ve ended there, and snorkelers like me might’ve been denied a chance to see a shipwreck, but twenty-one years later nature intervened. In 1963, a volcano called Mount Agung erupted, and the resulting lava flow pushed the USAT Liberty into the sea.
After two collisions, one torpedo attack, and two decades of rusting on the beach, USAT Liberty finally achieved its shipwreck destiny, and I got to see something I never thought I’d see!
We spent about an hour exploring the wreck. Without going below snorkel-depth, it was easy to make out the ship’s features, along with some of its cargo. I was fascinated by my first—and possibly only-shipwreck. But the more I explored, the more I noticed the fish, the coral, and the other sea life that has reclaimed the remains of the USAT Liberty.
A long time ago, the ship was built as an instrument of war, but today it is the foundation for a small community of life. I don’t know if that duality makes the USAT Liberty beautiful, or ugly. But seeing so much life thrive on a vessel of death, I couldn’t help but think that we are so very small, that our war to end all wars, and its sequel, and all the other destruction we bring upon ourselves is, in the grand scheme of things, a drop of water in the ocean of time.