Indo

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From Siem Reap we caught a bus to Bangkok where we spent a few days before flying to Bali. We stayed on the Khao San Road, and having just been in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia we were definitely back in the land of the 'Golden Arches' with avengeance! The street was swarming with Western tourists and neon lights. Bars and stalls lined the street, selling t-shirts, jewelery, pirate DVDs and CDs, hair braiding, pad thai and souvenirs. Perhaps because of its notoriety as a "crazy" place, Khao San (and as it turned out, Bangkok in general) seemed to us to be a bit tame - not hectic and intoxicatingly exotic, more seedy and overly westernised. We went to see Wat Pho with its colossal Reclining Buddha - a 45m long gilded statue, the Grand Palace (which was indeed grand), and Wat Phra Kaeo where the holiest of holy 'Emerald Buddha' is housed (we were shocked to find that the statue is such a laughably tiny size - set high up on a pedestal at the back of the temple, you struggle to make it out as it's only 66cm tall!)

We arrived at Denpassar airport in the evening and caught a taxi to Kuta (which is nearer to the airport than Denpassar is!) It was dark by this time and the first accommodation we tried was full. The taxi driver wouldn't take us to a second stop without an extra charge so we walked down to another place - also full! We tried another couple, no longer worried about the price so much as finding somewhere to sleep. Eventually we found a vacancy and paid over the odds for a tired room in a place with a swimming pool! Welcome to Bali - high season! We'd grown complacent through all our travels so far - that you can turn up and there will always be somewhere in your price range with a room - not in Bali (or Lombok as we found later on!)

We went for a look around Kuta - awash with bars and surf shops. We went down to the beach and even in the dark it was easy to see the size of the crashing waves. Too late for a proper meal, we shared some nachos and tried the Indonesian beer - Bintang!

The next morning we were out first thing to try and find some cheaper accommodation - it turned out that we weren't really being overcharged, just everywhere is quite expensive compared to what we had got used to and most places are indeed full (presumably booked out in advance by the hoards of Aussies!) We did find somewhere cheaper though (12 pounds a night) - not exactly glamorous, but it was fine. We had breakfast before carrying our bags to the new accommodation. Then we headed to the beach - it's a huge expanse of sand and though the sea is too rough to do anything other than be beaten by the waves, it's fun to watch the many surfers trying to tame them. We took a break from the midday sunbathing and went for lunch at a warung (small local restaurant) before heading back down for a beachy afternoon. Rather than thinning out in the evening, the beach buzzed with life at dusk as we watched one of the famous 'Kuta sunsets'. Then we went to eat in a lovely open air restaurant set around a water garden where there is a great Balinese chef. The sate was gorgeous and the other dishes were differently spiced than anything we'd eaten elsewhere in Asia!

We had another day on Kuta Beach and then the next morning caught a shuttle bus to Ubud. After checking into our surprisingly fancy accommodation, we went for a wander through the village to the ramshackle market selling lots of arts and crafts including huge canvas paintings. Along the streets were scattered little boxes made from palm leaves, filled with things like incense, flowers and rice, sometimes a sweety!We'd noticed them in Kuta as well, but assumed that they were to do with some sort of religious festival, though it turned out that they are offerings made every day by Balinese Hindus. We saw a little temple courtyard and it was absolutely littered with offerings, and ladies were bringing stacks of extra ones and blessing them with sprinkles of holy water. You wonder whether they get cleared away, as you see ones trampled in shop doorways or run over by cars! We had lunch at a warung before walking down the main street to the Monkey Forest (which, as you might guess, is a forest where a lot of monkeys live!) There are loads of them and the roam wild. Tourists are encouraged to buy bananas for them at the entrance - we were glad we didn't as they are scary blighters and steal bananas from people's bags and pockets and can be pretty aggressive! In the middle of the forest in a Hindu Temple (also ruled by monkeys!) and to enter you have to put on a green sarong - not to cover up exposed flesh, just because of the rules of Bali Hinduism. In the evening, we went to watch a traditional Balinese dance - the Legong Dance at the Ubud Palace. We sat around the edge of a candlelit courtyard at the palace, which was an amazing venue. The dancing is introduced and then accompanied by traditional Gamelan music which was really impressive - a group of about 25 men playing bronze xylophones, gongs and drums, playing tunefully but at a frenzied pace and making an almighty, almost disorientating noise. The Legong Dance actually consisted of 6 dances, all performed in elaborate costumes and mainly made up of controlled, angular movements of the arms, wrists, fingers, neck and eyes!

We were up at 2.30am to be picked up and driven to the foot of Mt. Batur, where we met our guide and set off on the climb with our headtorches. For an unknown reason, we got a guide to ourselves rather than being in a group of 4, though another local man made the climb with us, trying to flog us bottles of coke. The path was quite gentle at first and would be an easy walk if it was not pitch black, though it grew steeper and more challenging with some sections rock and others scree. We stopped brief for our guide to give an offering that he'd brought up with him at a shrine by the side of the path and again for a quick rest to see the distant trail of torchlights below (we'd been among the first to set off and so had the huge full moon and silent countryside to ourselves!) Soon we'd reached the top, where there is a wooden shack with benches where we sat and waited for the dawn. The shack began to fill up and they started to sell cups of tea and noodle soup. It didn't look promising - we were sitting in the clouds, despite it being the dry season and the perfect time to climb the volcano, we had "just bad luck!" according to our guide. So, with the sunrise unlikely to be much of a spectacle, we climbed to another slightly higher peak and saw it come light, looking blankly at thick white cloud! Our guide took us for a walk now that we could see, to the edge of the crater and we peered in to see steam rising. The cloud suddenly cleared so we ran to a peak and were finally able to see the view, still with the remaining glow of a pink sunrise, over the enormous Batur crater to Gunung Agung, the highest point on Bali. We made our decent, chatting all the way to our lovely guide, who was really a local farmer but had incredible English, learned from guiding tourists for 20 years. He told us that he did the lottery and that he'd like to visit England - "One day, I'd like to be the tourist", he said. On the way back to Ubud we stopped at a coffee plantation where we saw them roasting the beans by hand and then sat in the bright morning sunshine sampling various blends. Back in Ubud, we were in time to have breakfast at the guesthouse served on our veranda, then went for a walk through some rice fields, stopping for lunch in a warung set within them with lovely food and amazing views over the rice terraces. We would have walked further but were a little put off by a big black snake crossing our path and, being in King Cobra country, decided to head back!

The next day we caught a shuttle bus to Lovina on the north coast, where we checked into a really cheap (5 pounds a night) but really pleasant B+B run by a hippyish old man, Harris, and his German wife. After having lunch somewhere they recommended, and a look around the village, we headed down to the black sandy beach for a sunbathe and a swim. In the late afternoon, the sea filled with locals of all ages swimming and playing, and we went for a swim as the sun set, before eating lots of cheap fresh fish for dinner. Lovina was a relaxing place with a fraction of the tourists in Kuta or Ubud, and we spent another beachy day there before taking a shuttle to Padang Bai on the east coast. It's the main port for boats to Lombok and people were being rounded up from the buses and herded towards ferries and speedboats, but we'd decided to stay a couple of nights there instead. Most of our two days in Padang Bai was spent at Blue Lagoon beach over the headland from the little village, where we swam, snorkeled and sunbathed. The day we moved on to Lombok was a little less relaxing - we waited first thing for the bus that we were told would pick us up and take us on the ferry. It was late arriving and when it came it was in fact 2 motorbikes and a man driving each shouting "Hurry hurry!" We struggled onto the back of one each, with our huge rucksacks and another backpack and then sped off down the little back alleys to the ferry where we were rushed aboard up the ramp with the lorries. The ferry was only a short walk from our guesthouse and it didn't leave for quite a while, so we were pretty annoyed at having been hustled onto the backs of motorbikes at great speed, and that with no bus on board we had no idea what to do when we reached Lombok...

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