Amed is not a single beach but a loosely connected string of fishing villages — Amed, Jemeluk, Bunutan, Lipah, and Selang — strung along a 14-kilometre stretch of Karangasem's northeast coast. The landscape here is elemental and unhurried: black volcanic sand beaches backed by dry scrub hills and coconut palms, with traditional jukung outrigger fishing boats pulled up on the shore each morning. The coastline's relative remoteness from the south has preserved both its fishing culture and its coral reefs. The water is noticeably clearer than Bali's south and west coasts, sheltered from the Indian Ocean swells and fed by upwellings from the deep Lombok Strait. The house reef at Jemeluk drops quickly into a wall of hard coral and is excellent for snorkelling directly from shore. Just 14 kilometres west lies Tulamben, site of the USAT Liberty — an American cargo ship torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1942 and nudged onto the beach by the 1963 Agung eruption. The wreck lies at 5–30 metres and is one of the most dived wrecks in the world: accessible to beginners at its shallowest and offering impressive photographic opportunities of lionfish, bumphead parrotfish, and rare pygmy seahorses in its deeper passages.