Bali: The Last Adventure

After a day of recovery in Kuta, I met Cera at the airport and thus started 7 days of crazy fun! We relaxed in Kuta for one night and the next day picked up a Jeep Suzuki and went to explore Bali by car. To rent a car in Bali you only need to provide your passport number, the name of the hotel you stayed at the night before and your intended return date. That's it. No insurance policy, no license check, no nothing. It was easy. And for only $15USD a day too! I let Cera do all the driving. I don't like driving at home, let alone in a stick-shift, in a foreign country where they drive on the other side of the road, and while it isn't the nightmare chaos of India, it's not exactly Western structure either. There was a falling apart road map in the glove compartment and between that and my limited prior knowledge of Bali we managed to make it out of the city in one piece! Once out on the coastal highway, the going was easy, the views of the ocean fantastic and the music on the radio, well it was the latest club music! We had a good drive to your first town, Padang Bai, a small fishing town. After checking in, we went to find Blue Lagoon, and hopefully go snorkeling. We took the wrong turn at the fork in the road, but we found a cool water shrine on the cliff. :) After attempting to walking through the bush over to the lagoon, we admitted defeat and went back to the road. We found the lagoon, but the tide was way out and the water was too choppy to snorkel, so we clambered over the rocks, searched for shells and urchins and coral and anything else interesting. That evening we had lunch at a food stall set up in front of the bus station. We sat down and looked around expectantly. They guy behind the counter said, “What do you want?” “What do you have”?” “Chicken or catfish” Cera and I exchange a look, “We'll take the catfish!” 10 minutes later we had our meal: whole, fresh, fried catfish in a sweet chili sauce with rice and a few veggies. It was delightful. I wonder what the shop-owners thought of these two white girls eating at the local food stand. For desert we headed over to the neighbouring stand and ordered two pancake like concoctions sprinkled with chocolate pieces and drizzled with sweet milk. The whole ensemble (dinner and dessert) cost less that $10 for the two of us. :) The following morning we went back to Blue Lagoon, at proper high tide. The beach was transformed. When the tide comes in, it comes ALL the way in, and the bay was full of small bobbing boats, their passengers exploring the surrounding coal vie scuba or diving gear. We had a fantastic time looking down at the coral we'd been walking on the previous evening. There were so many different types of fish and coral! It was beautiful!! After we'd had our fill we packed up and headed into town for lunch. As we were waiting for our meal, three mahi-mahi were delivered to the eatery and the proprietor and his helper cut them up, sitting on the side of the road. It was fascinating to watch. The fish were spectacular shades of blue, green and grey. And the contrast of their bright red blood made quite the picture. We spent the rest of the day driving up, up, up the volcano, to the crater lake. Cera did and amazing job navigating the narrow, windy, sharp curved road. We did have to stop a few times to give both our hearts a breather though. :P Some of those lorries come barrelling around the corner, half in your lane and it scares the living day-lights outta you. One of our stops was along the crater rim, to take photos of the lake below. There was a gang of ladies there, waiting to pounce on the tourists and try their hardest to get them to buy something. Cera bought some postcards and a frangipani clip from one lady, causing all the rest to INSIST that she had to buy something from them too! We escaped into the jeep and rode away as fast as possible. :P Not too much further on down the road, we were stopped by ladies standing in the middle of the road, waving their arms, waiting for unsuspecting tourists to stop and enquire about what was going on. We rolled down the window and one lady shoved a bag of flower offerings and intense sticks into the vehicle, she attached a few decorations onto the window shield, gave us further offerings for the dashboard, stuck rice on our forehead and tied a ceremonial hat on our head. She then said a blessing for both us and the vehicle, wishing us husbands, kids and safe travels. After all of this, she demanded payment of $20. We gave her $10 and sped away. Besides a few stares and thumbs up at our newly acquired decoration, we arrived at the hotel without further incident. :) The excitement of the day was not over yet though. Soon after arriving, Cera wanted to rinse the sand off her toes, to prevent infection. She set her foot on the sink, and it came crashing off the wall making a stupendous clatter!! We both stood in shock for a few seconds before going to inform the owner. They very calmly observed the damage and moved us to a new room. We set off for town before we could inflict cause any more catastrophes in our room! We thought we'd take a nice stroll into town for dinner and make it back before total darkness. We walked and admired the scenery and marvelled at the volcano and were followed by a cute puppy and stopped to take photos and avoided being run over by the ginormous lorries and walked some more. Eventually though, dusk was falling quickly and we still had no idea how far away 'town' was. We decided it would be better to turn back now and get the jeep than continue on and risk having to walk home in the dark. We made the right choice! Town was still quite a ways further on, and our food took AGES to arrive, so by the time we left it was pitch dark outside, and we were cold and tired, not in the mood to walk back. Good thing we had the jeep. :) In the morning we decided to make an attempt at climbing the volcano. The guide book said the locals would try and convince you of the necessity of a guide, but that you could do the climb on your own and there was a parking area only 45min-1hr. from the top. We set off. The locals were very helpful in pointing us in the right direction, but not as far as the parking lot. As the book had said, they insisted we needed a guide and refused to show us the way unless we hired one of them. We declined and decided to have a different adventure: Can we drive around the mountain? What else are you to do when you have your own set of wheels?! :D We were the only car on the road (besides lorries and motos) and so we got quite a few stares and thumbs up. Two white girls driving a jeep in the middle of rural Bali! The road wound all the way around the mountain, through young forests, lava beds, and small villages and we saw a few mining excavations. That explains all the lorries. The last 5km UP the crater rim were the best, steep, narrow, hair-pin turns and switchbacks that were no longer than 2 lorries. We managed to pull up behind a lorry and so didn't have to worry about running into anyone on their way down. :) The road to Ubud passed by with only one small incident, we were stopped at a police check. The requested to see Cera's international drivers license (which she'd left in Mumbai, not thinking she'd be driving in Bali). We succeeded in evading any sticking situations with the payment of a small 'fine,' $20. Ubud was shoppers paradise for Cera, as I thought it might be. It is the handicrafts capital of Bali. I did a bit of shopping myself and afterwards we enjoyed a lovely dinner at a Cuban restaurant, complete with a band playing Latino music! We spent the next day taking photos of the ever amusing monkeys in the Monkey Forest (one of them STOLE my water bottle! I had to get a park warden to use his slingshot to get it back) and adventuring up a small river, wading up to our waists before deciding we should probably turn back and head for Kuta. The drive to Kuta was a long, hot, traffic-ridden afternoon. Somehow we entered Kuta from the north (as I'd planned) but then ended up around the air port (south of Kuta) without ever seeing Kuta. I have no idea what happened and at one point our destination was only a few hundred meters away, but due to one way roads it took us another 30min. to get there. :P We dropped the car off, met up with Rosie and went to watch one final sunset over Kuta Beach. That evening, Rosie and I decided to go out one last time together. It wasn't the same without the other two (Beth and Sierra) who'd been with us for the last two nights our in Kuta. Nevertheless, we had a good night out and Rosie managed to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch her plane home. Cera and I woke at a more reasonable hour and went to find a shop that had caught her eye. She ended up buying one of the baskets they had, requiring us to go search for a piece of luggage big enough to hold said basket! You know you've been a proper tourist when you have to buy luggage to take all the stuff you've acquired on your holiday home! That afternoon, after I'd sent Cera on her way, I was walking along the beach and realized I was on my own for the first time in 5.5 months, without any plans to meet up with friends at any point in the future. It was a rather lonely thought, but I tried not to dwell on it for too long. I spent my last day and a half in Kuta meandering through town, reading on the beach, eating pastries and watching films. A nice break from all the crazy travels I'd been doing recently. Next stop: Borneo!