Snorkelling off Candi Dasa, Candi Dasa, Bali

Taken on: 19th March, 2011. Copyright: All Rights Reserved - See travelfishery's page of Flickr

Read more about Candi Dasa

Candi Dasa (pronounced chandi dasa) is a town with a bit of a sad past. As with the rest of Bali, it was first discovered by mainstream tourism in the 1970s and quickly became a destination for those wishing to lounge on the beach beneath coconut palms. This continued until the late 1980s when mining of the coral reef offshore allowed the power of the Lombok strait to erode the very thing people visited Candi Dasa for: the beaches.

The mining stopped (presumably because there was no more coral left) and officials ordered the building of breakwaters to stop the ocean's relentless eating away of the coastline. The hope is that in a few years sand will return and Candi Dasa will have beaches once more; there is even talk of trucking sand in, but after the previous disasters, one can only wonder how this might turn out. The one upside of the breakwaters is that it makes for very calm safe waters to paddle in — one of the reasons why it is so popular with ... Read our complete Candi Dasa travel guide

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