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One of the quirks of the Australian immigration service is that if you want to stay longer than your initial visa, they want you to spend some of your money in a different country for a while rather than just letting you pay a fee to them. Seems a bit stupid to us but that’s how we ended up in Bali for a week.
We’ve always had an image of Bali as a sort of Benidorm for Aussies, cheap beer and t-shirts, and its never really been on our list of must-see destinations. It is however the easiest place to get to from Australia, especially from Darwin, only a two and a half hour flight away. We flew with Garuda Indonesia, an airline with such a dodgy safety record that its actually banned from flying over European airspace. But hey, its cheap. We’d also arranged to meet up with Steve, Martine and Kayden who had put us up in Mandurah a few weeks ago. They’d stayed in the hotel before and flew in from Perth the day after us.
Arriving in Denpasar and being driven the twenty minutes or so to Kuta and the hotel we were booked into,
our first impressions were exactly how we expected. Bar after bar, broken up with t-shirt and fake sunglass shops. We could have been back in Goa, or indeed any seaside resort anywhere hot. After we’d been there a while we decided that it seemed like how Goa might be in maybe ten years time. Busier, cleaner and with a little less character. In most parts of Goa that we’d been to, although very touristy there was still plenty of local life going on. Here there seemed to be none.
That said, people were very friendly, some apparently genuinely so. There was plenty of hassle off the hawkers, but nowhere near as persistent as in India. Their patter was eerily similar, like they’d been to some international school of street sellers. Allwike Mike! (Alright mate!) And looking back, there were no beggars apart from a few cute kids trying their luck.
Don’t want to sound too much like that we were on a downer! We stayed at Champlung Mas hotel in Legian, pretty much part of Kuta now. The hotel was lovely and the staff were very friendly. The pool had a swim up bar and was open 24
hours. For a few days chilling out and relaxing it was just what we needed after driving something like 17,000km in the last four months. It was great to see Steve and Martine again and we couldn’t believe how 20 month old Kayden had grown since we saw him a few weeks ago. He spent most of the week lapping up the attention of the massage girls, being led by the hand round the hotel and getting constant cuddles. Kayden that is, not Steve!
Now, a couple of times we left Kuta and saw more of the island. It’s a shame that some people don’t take the time to do that because outside the town Bali is lovely. There are several active volcanoes around and we went up to a restaurant in Kintamani looking over Mount Batur for lunch. Balinese people seem to really like children and even young guys that you might think wouldn’t be too interested seem to really enjoy playing with them. The waiters at the restaurant spent probably nearly two hours playing with Kayden and making paper airplanes for him that once launched get caught in the wind flying for miles. On the way to
Kintamani we stopped off at the Monkey Forest in Ubad which is a large Hindu temple complex with about 300 Balinese macaques mugging tourists for food. We found that as long as you didn’t try to feed them they were pretty well behaved and pretty much ignored us.
Martine, Claire and myself also did a boat trip to nearby Lembongan Island, about two hours away. It was a really good day although we all came away with sunburn. We stopped to snorkel before lunch and although the water wasn’t as clear as it might have been, there were tons of fish and some quite nice coral.
So, all in all, we had a really good time in Bali. Kuta itself was nothing special but as somewhere to chill for a few days served its purpose well enough. The rest of the island though we only just scratched at, but we’d love to return. There were temples everywhere that seemed quite different to those we’d seen in India, next time it would be good to explore them a bit.
It was sad to leave the others behind when we left. They might be coming over to the UK
Be Carepully!
Bali English.....Binglish??! later in the year when we might be home so hopefully we’ll see them then. Otherwise I’m sure we’ll see them sometime in the future.
Now we’re back in Australia making our way down the Stuart Highway. Today we’re in Tennant Creek about 1000km south of Darwin, more in our next blog.
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carla
non-member comment
all i can say is
IM JEALOUS!! xxxxxx looking forward to the next blog. lotsa love Carla. xoxoxox