Advertisement
Not a good start to the trip but I hate Bali. Apologies to anybody who likes it but I loathed the place. I arrived after midnight after not having had any sleep in something like 26 hours. I still don't know how it happened because I was in zombie-mode but even before I'd left the airport I'd been scammed into
somehow giving AU$25 to a guy for nicking off with my bag; needless to say I was extremely annoyed with myself but what's done is done. I found a cheap hotel in some alleyway in Kuta and because I still couldn't sleep (different time-zones and all that) I decided to take a wander round the streets in the dark. That's when I discovered the motorbike-riding prostitues. I was of course the only person stupid enough to be out in the street at 3am in the morning so they fixed their attentions on me like piranhas smelling blood. It was like a very cheaply-made porn version of the chase scene in Mad Max II. I managed to escape back to the hotel, but one particularly persistant individual sat outside yelling at me to come back out until the hotel night person went
out and told her to clear off. Once the sun came up, even though I was still in the land of the living dead, I found my way to Sanur to see if I could get across to Nusa Penida, an island off the coast where Bali mynahs have been reintroduced to the wild, but discovered that the boats from there didn't allow enough time for a day-trip, so I changed tack and headed by bus to Ubud where I unsuccessfully tried to find the field that someone had said I could find Java sparrows at and where a couple of dogs tried unsuccessfully to bite me. I then visited the Monkey Forest, more by accident than through any plan, which was pretty much the only "highlight" of my first day, even if one big male macaque did pickpocket me and then threw his stolen booty off a bridge when I tried to grab it back, before charging me with teeth bared to show me who was boss. I did find a little rice field just nearby where I saw some nice birds such as streaked weaver and Javan munia. So I saw a lot of macaques, a couple of
the famous Kuta Beach, abode of the damned
I got some strange looks on the beach in my jungle gear! squirrels and a few birds, but everything else was going wrong - transport, money, rip-offs, dogs, drunken Australians, you name it, it was just one of those days! - and I had a splitting headache from not having had any sleep for almost 48 hours and hardly any food, coupled with walking around in the tropical heat all day. I won't go into everything because it would go on for paragraphs and I'd sound like a right whiney tosser, but basically everything that could go wrong did go wrong and by the end of the day I'd had enough.
To save myself from just throwing it all in and going back to New Zealand to spend the next five months watching tv, on just my second day in Indonesia I fled to Baluran National Park in eastern Java.Getting there entailed a tortuous three hours crammed into an Indonesian-sized space on an overcrowded local bus, and then a short ferry ride to Ketapang. I had then been anticipating another bus ride followed by a 15km walk to Bekol, the accommodation within the National Park, but I came across a tourist office right outside the ferry terminal and instead managed to
get a ride in a car all the way there for 150,000 rupiah (about NZ$26, which is all right as it saved me the walk).
Baluran is quite a nice place. Most people I'm told just go there on day trips for a couple of hours duration, but the rooms are really cheap, albeit with no electricty so no relief from the million-degree heat. You need to take in all your own food and water so your stay is limited by how much you can carry. Due to lack of variety in the local shops I was subsisting almost entirely on dried noodles and tins of cat food (actually tins of corned beef, but it was much the same thing). Bekol is surrounded by savannah, although scrub has encroached upon it so much that its very hard to see any of the wildlife and what is there all seems very wary. The banteng (a type of wild cattle) were absent, apparently all up in the hills at this time of year, but there were lots of rusa deer and the ubiquitous crab-eating macaques. Green junglefowl crowed constantly from the scrub and there were green peafowl all over the show
as well, although they were too skittish to get any photos of. I was surprised how readily they took flight when flushed from the sides of the roads; I would have expected them to run for cover but they always shot up into the air and flapped unconvincingly away across the bush. Other nice creatures I happened across included Oriental pied hornbills, tokay geckoes, and Javan langurs which are quite bizarre-looking with a big boofy hairstyle surrounding a very human-like face. Outside my room on the first night a common palm civet came visiting. I've only seen civets asleep in zoos before so it was very interesting seeing how it slithered across the ground and up into the trees like a great furry snake; much bigger than I would have thought too.
Now I'm aiming for Sumba. It looks very easy on paper - catch a plane to Waikelo, take a bus to Waikabubak and get a National Park permit, then another bus to Lewa where I look for birds - but I can guarantee its not going to be anywhere near as simple in practice.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.355s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 29; qc: 126; dbt: 0.1993s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
Nic
non-member comment
I would laugh, but that would be mean. ;)