Canggu

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On Monday I hopped onto my scooter, which was loaded down with my surfboard, my giant backpack on my back and my little backpack on my front and drove off for Canggu. Now might be the time to say a little something about driving in Bali. It is MADNESS. Like most of Southeast Asia the majority of people get around on scooters. There are limited traffic signs and everyone in the pack of scooters is bobbing and weaving and jockeying for position. The traffic in Kuta is also notoriously bad. While at first glance it seems like total chaos driving in Bali eventually resolves itself into nothing that resembles order but becomes at least manageable. What is really shocking is how few people wear helmets. I don't even mean the locals although it terrifies me each time I see an infant or small child riding on a scooter without any sort of protection at all. I mean the people who should know better who drive around the island as though they are immune to crashes (which happen ALL THE TIME) and don't need a helmet. Wrong. I just don't understand why you would risk a serious brain injury in a place where the chances you could get a good neurosurgeon to operate on you approach zero. I don't think anything will really come of the existing helmet laws though until you have a non-corrupt police force enforcing them. At this point as a Westerner I can pretty much expect to be stopped at least once, or to have to pretend I don't see a police officer trying to stop me, and if I am stopped to pay 50,000 rupiah for whatever "offense" I've committed that will just go to line the pockets of the police officer. But so far it hasn't happened yet. Maybe my dark skin is coming to my aid?

Anyways....to give myself a leg up on getting to Kuta I bought myself a Bali maps app for my phone and memorized the turns necessary to take me at least to Canggu. From there I was going to have to rely on the map that I had been e-mailed from the hostel itself. The first part went reall well. I got as far as Canggu without any mistakes. But then it got weird. The map the hostel gives you just shows everything as straight lines. Drive down this straight road until you get to this turn, then turn and drive down the next road that is completely straight...etc. None of the roads are straight or even approaching straight. So I had really no hope of making it on the first try. I drove past the Canggu club, down the local high street, past a sign for the Bali Equestrian Center (!) and a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym (!!) and kept on going until I gave up and stopped at a local convenience store to ask for directions. The lady was kind enough to draw me a map and with that and the map the hostel gave me I was able to get there on the second try. The street even has a sign! Which is marked by a giant swastika. Which are everywhere here. I guess all those times people said that the Nazis had just corrupted a hindu symbol was more accurate than I ever imagined.

The hostel is amazing. It's this small building with a small rice paddy on one side and a cow field on the other. Inside the open living room/kitchen opens to the outdoors with one wall completely missing that opens onto the small plunge pool. Above it rises a patio with a small table and umbrella. Inside is two connected rooms with seven beds. Two bunkbeds and then the day I got there they built a THREE level bunk bed. The third level is so high that it has its own staircase. The place is set up for surfers so there are multiple outdoor showers as well and plenty of drying racks and surfboard racks. When I got there I met Jackie an Australian girl, Alex an English boy and Andy, an Austrian. Alex and Jackie were driving up to Ubud that day for a short trip but I went with them to grab lunch before they left. I'm glad I did because they were able to show me how to get to the best local surfing break (Old Man's aka Canggu aka Batu Belig). The map in the hostel had just said "go up the road to the two story house and turn left through the rice paddies." I don't know when they wrote the directions but there are A LOT of two story houses between the hostel and that turn. The rice paddy part was accurate though. When lunch was over and they were on their way I decided to check out the beach so I would be able to find it in the future. The drive through the rice paddies is crazy. The "road" is this raised brick pathway through the sunken fields. The path is exactly big eough for two cars to pass each other with no room to spare and only in some places. This doesn't stop cars from driving on it even for a second. Plus the road is covered in gravel so you are constantly at risk of sliding off INTO the rice paddies. The beach looked alright but it was low tide so there wasn't too much going on. It is a reef break with a gigantic rock that sits right at the edge to the far right and there are a couple of cafes on the edge of the parking lot as well.

I decided if I wasn't going to surf I was going to check out the Equestrian center I had passed so many signs for. The place is brand new and super fancy. They are a five-star facility with a huge covered indoor and an even bigger outdoor. I got talked into signing up for a private evaluation lesson that afternoon around sunset with the chief instructor and bought myself a pair of breeches (which I needed anyway!). To kill time until the lesson I took the scooter into Seminyak and bought groceries, stocked up on waters and then found myself a pharmacy so I could buy (super expensive) antihistamines to take care of my bug bites and also to deal with the fact that my face had decided it was going to break out worse than I have ever seen before in my life. While I was there I also invested in some local mosquito repellant cream. That afternoon I had such a wonderfully lovely lesson on a stallion named Trabass who also has the distinction of being if not the largest horse on Bali, then one of the top three. He was a darling. And I don't know if this was just the soft-sell so that I would sign up for more lessons but the instructor was SO NICE TO ME. I haven't had a lesson in at least three years although I have been riding regularly and it was just so great to hear nice things about my riding. I apparently have soft steady hands! A great seat! and Ride him so well! and on and on. It was also a challenging lesson and I left saying that I would love to either sign up for some group lessons or schedule some semi-privates if she knew of anyone looking for a partner. I actually didn't hear back from them for most of the week so I finally e-mailed asking what was up and got a response that they were under the impression that I wanted more privates. I know for a fact that isn't true but they offered me a semi-private the next day so I took it and again had just a marvelous time that left me wrung out but so satisfied. I've also been asked to be in their show which is a freestyle dressage show a couple of days before I leave the country and I've said I would consider it so we'll see how it goes!

That first night we went to a local warung (restaurant) called Warung Cantik up on the main road where you can eat dinner for 7,000 rupiah (70 cents). We also went there for the next three nights as well to be honest. On the third night we sat in the back and discovered that the family living there also owns a gigantic python that they keep in a cage. The python must be at least 2 meters long if not more and they let me touch it! They also own the most adorable tiny little puppy who I really hope is not intended as snake food.

Then, after the first day, the days all rather blur together. People have been coming and going. Some stay longer than they intended like Andy, who did eventually leave, some come back, like Alex and Jackie, some come and decide it isn't for them, like the three Argentinian girls who booked for two nights and left after one. It's a bit of a whirlwhind. Lukas the German came and went while I've been here. Greg the German came and still hasn't left and Dan the Englishman came and will most definitely be outstaying me. Plus Jorde the Spanish guy who just showed up one day on the offchance there was a spare bed. And then most recently a couple of girls! Who I will now be abandoning, Elena and Alex from Holland and Australia who have come for the week. The one surprising thing has been all these people who book at a place called "Surfing Dorms" that either don't surf or are just trying to learn. Of all the people I've just mentioned only Andy and Jorde are at a non-beginner level.

Lately I have been waking up around 7 ish and starting my day by going out for a surf for anywhere from 1-3 hours in the morning at Old Man's. The break is a reef break that is about 50-100m (hard to estimate) off shore and is known as a good one for beginners, which I would kind of dispute if I was a beginner. Yes, the waves can be gentle, but at least once a day if not multiple times a session a head high to overhead set of waves washes through and cleans up the inside surfers. I started out intimidated by the crowds, which can be crazy thick, but as I got more comfortable with the board I rented and the way the break works I've moved with confidence into the pack. It's really just like Hawaii (and everywhere else I guess), if you sit on the peak and wait patiently for the right waves it will pay off. The only problem then is slaloming through the crowds and getting dropped in on. Lately the swell has been dropping so the lulls have been long, at least one of my recent sessions I caught one wave at the beginning of my session and waited an hour for the next one.

Then after my surf session I sometimes grab breakfast or a juice at the cafe on the beach and go back to the hostel to ice my foot which is, of course, still sometimes swollen and stiff. I'm down to having one bad wave where I really hurt once a session which isn't too bad overall. Then in the afternoons I've been napping and running various errands. I've been into Kuta a couple of times, once because my plan was to sit on the beach and read, but I was there on a super gusty windy day and so even though I stuck it out for an hour it was pretty miserable. I was covered in sand on the left side of my body by the time I finished and the sand hadn't been gentle as it had flung itself at me. Once I went in to run errands like extending my scooter and buying some more books to read and changing money. Also I've been doing a LOT of napping. In the past couple of days maybe not as much, but before when I first got here I was napping most of the afternoon away. I did spend one afternoon trying to figure out how to extend my visa myself but gave it up as a bad job and just paid someone through the hostel $60 to extend it for me. It turns out that to extend your visa takes a total of three days, costs $25 dollars, plust I would have had to pay a local to sponsor me since I didn't know anyone here really. You go the first day to fill in the papers. Go back the next to pay. And come back a third to pick up the visa. I just figured it was worth it to pay the extra money to have it done for me. I had it picked up at the hostel and then today it was returned to me, along with a request that I pay 50,000 extra because it was so quick. Ummmmm no? No. Sorry, you get to ask for more money for doing something quickly at the beginning. But you don't get told someone wants something by Tuesday, take your money, do your job, return the passport and THEN ask for more money because you got it done when it was requested (the mistake was definitely returning the passport).

I know I'm really kind of rambling but it's hard to say what I did each day so I'm just relating the things that I know I've done while I've been here. At one point Alex came back from Ubud and so we went for a walk the same way you drive to the beach to take pictures of the neighborhood and the rice paddies and then walked down to the beach and circled around by walking along the beach back to the hostel. Along the way we watched the sunset and saw the TINIEST PUPPY IN THE WHOLE WORLD and some people with a fishing haul separating out the shrimp and the fishes and the rubbish into different piles on the beach.

I also have two weird stories that both involve scooters. One was at night, we had all gone out for dinner and were coming back late at night. It was around 10pm and I was ahead of everyone else because I was soooo tired and just wanted to go to sleep. As I made the turn onto our unlit street my headlight picked out a blonde haird white lady around middle age walking in the street to the right, I accelerated to go around her and she FLUNG herself in front of me and started freaaaaaakkkkking out at me. Yelling "slow! Hati! Hati! I have BABY IN THERE (pointing to the house) and MY DOG IS HERE (pointing to the black dog running free on an unlit black top road at night). I honestly couldn't even respond so I just stayed silent. She was wearing her arm in a sling so I'm kind of assuming she had just had some sort of traumatic scooter related accident. But accosting strangers in the middle of the night isn't going to do anything to change the entire driving culture in the country of Indonesia (and Southeast Asia in general). If it wasn't for her crazy googly eyes I would have tried to point that out along with the fact that I assume her baby at 10pm is safe and sound in bed and so at no risk on my driving out on the road and that if she wants to keep her entirely black dog safe at night on these equally black and unlit roads she could put it on a damn leash. Instead I just kept quiet and drove around her back to the hostel. The second story doesn't paint me in nearly as flattering a light. The other day I was parked at the beach and I come back up from surfing and despite the fact that there are like 30 available parking spaces someone has parked their vespa directly behind my scooter (which is touching the curb) so that the wheels are kissing and it is impossible for me to leave. I took the vespa and rolled it into one of the empty spaces to the side of my scooter and started to put away my board. I few minutes later the vespa toppled over to the side. No one was hurt so someone just picked it up and I went to shower and grab my keys. When I got back the girl who was driving the vespa was standing there playing with one of the brake levers which was bent out of shape. One of the french ladies in her group was saying "oh well you need to talk to HER about fixing that" and referring to me. I was like, nope, sorry, but you had HUNDREDS of free spaces to choose from and for some reason you parked so that I had no choice but to move your bike. I'm sorry I'm not paying for that. And then I left. I mean I do feel kind of bad, but first of all, I've had to replace my clutch when my friend dropped my ninja and it cost all of seven dollars. If she pays more than five I'll eat my hat. Second, it was at least half her fault. People double park here all the time but you do so knowing that if the person you parked behind comes back they WILL move your vehicle and she had every other option to park and chose to park behind me which I think means she accepted the risk of damage from it being moved. Also, realistically what was going to happen. No one has insurance. So I was supposed to give her some random amount of money without knowing the repair cost or devote my day to getting it fixed? Not gonna happen.

My nights here in Canggu have also followed a pretty similar pattern. The hostel has over 100 movies of varying quality (I mean the quality of the movies not the quality of the playback) and so most nights we've been going out for dinner together and then heading to the hostel to drink a couple of beers or eat some cookies or both and wathcing one or two movies before heading to bed. A couple of nights we did go out in Kuta though. The first was Halloween. We went to a bar which was pretty empty for a couple of beers and to listen to the really good guitar player/singer that was doing covers of English songs and then to SkyGarden for dancing where I ran into people from the hostel I stayed at in Kuta. I wasn't home that night until a little after 5am. The next time we went out was Saturday night. We started at the bar directly next to the one we had been at on Wednesday which was more of a divey metal head bar with cheap drinks which we enjoyed sitting on the stoop outside while these Balinese guys took pictures of and with us. Then it was back to SkyGarden where we sampled each of the levels and their various music/dance scenes but headed home at a more reasonable hour around 2 or 2:30.

Now that I've been here for over a week I must say I'm really ready to move on. The sty that brought me here is gone (and has been since last Tuesday morning thank GOD), my skin has cleared up and is back to its usual flawless self and my surfing has improved and I'm ready for the sparsely populated breaks I've been promised further west. Tomorrow I'll be waking up mad early to avoid the crazy traffic and starting on the way to Medewi where I'm planning to stay until the next swell dies down (I think it's meant to peak on Sunday). I'll be leaving my big bag at the hostel here in Canggu so no matter what I'll be swinging back through here to pick it up and for another riding lesson at some point in the next week or two.

xoxo from Bali

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