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Published: December 16th 2007
Lovely
This is just a magnificent photoToday we did the tourist traps. After yesterday’s unsuccessful attempt at buying boardshorts, we started the walk down Legian Street again…but we got a headstart by jumping into a taxi and going a few kms first before walking. Initially we just planned to go to the WaterBom park but we spotted a slew of surf shops on the way down there so we got out a bit early.
We wandered into RipCurl and at first, they weren’t sure if they had board shorts for girls! But then they understood what we wanted and we found a rack of suitable stuff for Loz. Loz was happy and a purchase was made. We wandered down the street a few more blocks looking and browsing - but it was really same-ol-same-old.
We were still quite a way from the WaterBom park which we wanted to get to. Not for the park itself…but the mall across the road with the Krispy Kreme shop I had spotted earlier in the trip. Just for once I wanted to shop in pure unadulterated air conditioned comfort. We jumped in yet another taxi and headed on over.
The Mall I’ve never been
in a shopping mall where they scan you at the entrance with metal detector wands and inspect your bags. This is security gone mad! But the mall was air conditioned and you have to protect that goodness! Lauren wanted a pair of Crocs (the thong style) - they had them in almost every imaginable color! Even right down to Loz-size. We had our personal Croc consultant for the duration of our purchase too.
Krispy Kremes were acquired and devoured. There were all the usual western style restaurants and masses of interesting stores and probably the largest single collection of all the possible nick-nacks and tourist trinkets you could possibly buy that covers most of what is available all around the island. Even though the prices are about double what you’d pay in a small shop somewhere - it’s very handy to have them all in one simple place without too much double-up and seeing stall after stall of the same thing.
Pirate Movies I also found the mother of all pirate movie, game, dvd, tv series, PC software shops. They had a massive collection of everything you could ever imagine and then some. 10,000RP per disc (or
A$1.50)…tempting…but bit torrent is cheaper yet. Carrying DVD’s around these days is “so yesterday”…portable hard drives are now all the rage.
Tanah Lot Tour The one tour that Jane really, really, really wanted to do while in Bali was to go see Tanah Lot Temple. This is probably the most clichéd photo splashed across Bali brochures around the world. The trendy touristy way to do this is as a sunset tour, so we departed from our villa at around 2pm. Sui Meng, who works for our friend Cathy in KL Malaysia wanted to come along too. We had plenty of space in our 7-seater van, so she was quite welcome.
First port of call was another temple. Not the Tanah Lot Temple but a significant temple owned by the Royal Family. We paid our entry fee of 3,000RP each and wandered into the grounds. We started off on the Entry Lawn area (duh!) and slowly made our way to the inner gardens that surrounded the main temple enclosure. The inner temple itself was closed to the public but we were able to walk around the perimeter wall. Here Jane met a guide who offered to tell us
all about the history of the temple. He parroted on for about 15 minutes - the only thing I remember about his talk was that the temple actually contained a lot of “satellite” temples that represented other major temples around the island to allow people to put through a “long distance prayer” if you like - for back when motor transport and reasonable roads didn’t exist (they don’t really have any “good” roads now, that’s for sure!). At the end of the walk around the wall, the guide expected a 10,000RP payment - Jane had assumed he was doing it out of the goodness of his heart, nothing is free in this place - I gave him a 20,000 note. He then pointed out that I could climb the bell tower - maybe he only tells people that if he gets an acceptable donation, otherwise they miss out on the bonus view.
Leaving the temple, we were quite thirsty so we looked across the road for a drink. Once we’d spotted a stall, the whole other side of the road became animated! For about a 100m in each direction down the opposite side of the road were stalls selling
Front Gate
Stone people climbing the stone gate drinks and chips. The really weird thing was that each stall had arranged their cans of drink and packets of chips in an identical fashion, at a glance it looked like the same stall repeated about 40 times side by side…you gotta differentiate people! I imagine the stall in a direct line with the front gate of the temple got the most business in this case.
Monkey Forest Next stop was a monkey forest. At first I though…nah…we’re not going via Ubud again just to see that freaking monkey forest. Fortunately, no, this was a different forest. Same monkeys, different food…this time the driver paid an entrance fee to get into the carpark, then we paid a fee to get into the forest - but that included a guide, but we had to pay for the peanuts (no bananas).
These monkeys were supposedly not aggressive unlike the monkey forest in Ubud. They were persistent though! They’ve learned that to get fed, all they have to do is reach up and grab a couple of fistfuls of clothing and not let go until a peanut is handed to them - or a thong is shown to them. Our
Temple Towers
We've got these in Australia...they're called power sub-stations guide was lightening quick with her thong (I’m not talking about lingerie here people…footwear! Footwear!). If a monkey jumped up or was getting a little too confident, she’d have her thong off in a flash and show it to the monkey and he’d disappear (man that would be funny if I was talking about a G-String!)
We really didn’t walk through a forest, but we could see a lot of trees, but didn’t actually go into them as such. After circumnavigating a temple ground - we pretty much ended back at the market stalls. One of the benefits of being a guide is that you then get to invite your guests back to your stall and sell them things - you can only set up a stall if you guide people around. Unfortunately, our guide wasn’t really well stocked with the good stuff. Jane wanted a sarong…our guide wanted 300,000RP…I thought 150,000RP was more realistic but still overkill, but she had been a good guide and taught Jane how to tie a sarong on properly. We settled on about 250,000RP in the end.
Tanah Lot The one notable thing I’d read about this place is that the
hawkers are a little more subdued that the Kintamane hawkers…not much though, however they did stop hounding you temporarily when you said “No thankyou”. But there were so many of them it was almost a constant stream in the end. I ended up buying a bunch of pencils off one kid so I could wave them at the next kid who tried to sell me some pencils - see if I could sell them back and make a profit! Postcards? A definite no to the postcards…I’d done all my postcards as soon as we got here and I still reckon I’m a good chance to beat them back home.
The entrance to the “mess” is not really obvious. You buy your entry ticket at one booth, then you are supposed to then show it to another bloke about 20m away who then punches a hole in your ticket (keeps them employed I’m guessing) - I didn’t know this, so we thought we go check out the market stalls first before heading to the temple - thing is - we tried heading in the out way. There’s this booming voice trying to guide us in the right direction, but as
Wooden Bells
The larger "male" bell is left and smaller "female" bell is right I couldn’t see who was speaking and because he was talking through a microphone with multiple speakers around the place - I had no idea where he was and where I should be looking. I saw one bunch of “uniformed” guys looking at me, so I headed towards them…”no no no, over here” - I’m looking at the guys, none has a microphone nor lips moving, ok I’m heading in the wrong direction still - so confusing. I finally found Mr Microphone hiding behind a pot plant sitting down - too lazy to come and get me. Oh well, must have provided some amusement for somebody.
In the market stalls…all was as expected, same stuff repeated ad nauseum all the way down to the gateway to the temple area.
The temple itself stands on a rock about 50m out to sea which can be walked to without getting your feet wet at low tide. The temple was closed to the public as usual, but you don’t come here to go to the temple, you come here to watch the sunset with the dramatic temple cutting a riveting silhouette on the skyline.
There are two places you can
view the temple from - the surrounding beach/rock area, or up on the Sunset Terraces. The beach area is quite interesting but most people head up to the Sunset Terrace for the great photos. There are quite a few “areas” to sit at. We found that the optimal place to sit based on where the sun was likely to sit was on the plastic green seats - which unfortunately were just a shade to the left of the place with the wooden chairs and tables. The main difference was that the wooden furniture place also served nice looking food. All we could get on the green plastic chairs was a basic range of drinks and tapioca chips (nice to nibble on, but don’t really fill you). Anyway, end of the story was the sun set and lots of photos of varying artistic merit were taken. Some real gems were taken by taking the photo through the lens of my sunglasses.
And Back Again… The trip back to the villas from Tanah Lot was very quick, only about 40 minutes. We planned to go out with Wayne and Cathy for a nice meal. When we got to the villas,
Wayne was in a way too jovial disposition - clearly off his tree. They gang had been at the pub all afternoon playing drinking games - Wayne had lost…badly! The others were sort of OK, but dinner out was clearly out of the question. So we ordered pizzas to be delivered. Without too much thought put into it, we made a random selection of 5 pizzas and most had seafood on them - Wayne is highly allergic to seafood so was pretty much restricted to one pizza to choose from and even that had a stray anchovy on it, but fortunately he didn’t eat it.
A couple had to quickly munch their pizza and dash off to the airport. Wayne then went to bed as he had totally lost the plot at this stage. The next day he couldn’t remember anything! He’d forgotten that he had arranged to meet some people at a restaurant (they rang up wondering where everyone was…oops), he wondered where we had gotten to (he didn’t remember turning up to share the pizzas), he’d managed to spill a full bottle of beer across the coffee table and luckily miss my laptop computer which was fortunately
sitting on top of a pizza box at the time. I still was not going anywhere near alcohol at this point myself - I don’t know how these guys were doing it.
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