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Published: April 13th 2009
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Bali, Indonesia (1 - 12 Mai 2009)
After yet another long-haul flight, I was arriving in Bali's Denpasar airport on Wednesday evening. Whilst immigration took me almost 2 hours, the taxi ride to my hotel (Dayu Beach Inn) in Kuta was very short, and because of the heat and humidity I immediately took a first swim in the pool. Very refreshing!
The first couple of days I stayed in Kuta, exploring the beaches around (quite nice), the Indonesian food (yummie!) and the local nightlife (wild).
On Sunday, I rented a Vespa (from 1977) and headed off to Lovina in the northern part of the island. The ride as such was great, even though the traffic here is mad and one has to be very careful on the roads. Approaching the volcanic hills, the temperature drop dramatically and I almost got a bit chilly on my scooter... However, just as I started to feel the first raindrops, my Vespa decided to refuse its service, and I ended up rolling downhill to a first mechanic garage, where they unsuccessfully worked on the engine for more than an hour), before rolling even further down to another garage who, after another two
Kuta, Bali
Dayu Beach Inn hours of work, was able to replace one spool and another spare part so the engine would run again. Ouffff!!! So once more (at least the rain shower was over) I headed uphill, and in the dark of the night arrived in Singaraja and shortly after in Lovina, where I checked into the Elsa II hotel, a recommendation of one of the local guys of my hotel in Kuta. Since there was absolutely nothing going on in the one little street of the village, i found myself in a bar together with 65-year old Lez from England, a crazy guy recently retiring ad spending his life travelling the world. After a couple of beers we decided to meet up again the other night for some more drinks...
The other day I was checking out the neighbourhood with my scooter before heading down to Lovina beach where I met Amanda, a nice US American from Kentucky. Finishing the day at the beach with a Balinese massage, we both headed into the village to have some dinner and drinks. And of course, Lez was also around, and so we all ended up in one of the bars where they had a
Bali
On my way to Lovina live band.
On Tuesday, Amanda and I had to get up very early to go on the 6 o'clock dolphin watch tour. It was great to see hundreds of these mammals, and the refreshing snorkelling afterwards was just great to really wake up. We then decided to take a Vespa ride to the waterfall in Gitgit in the mountains, and so we headed off to there. Unfortunately, the sun was covered by clouds, so the view was not so spectacular. Anyway, it was a good trip before heading once more to the beach for some relaxing before - again - having dinner and meeting up with Lez and some more crazy people... We even had Bitterballen & Kroketten, Dutch specialities, in one of the local bars - lecker!!!
The next day I took the Vespa back to Kuta where I would meet up with Severine (FRA), a former colleague from my P&G office in GVA. Unfortunately I lost Amanda who was travelling by bus, and it was a shame we didn't exchange contact details before. However, the backup plan was to meet at Kuta beach the other day in case we got lost. Anyway, just before Kuta my
Vespa decided to break down again, so I had to take the cab back to the rental shop, where I got a refund for the repairs I had done some days earlier. Severine arrived around midnight, and after dropping off her baggage at the hotel we went for some food, drinks and dancing (Apache Reggae Bar) downtown.
On Thursday we basically spent the day hanging around in Kuta, doing some shopping and relaxing at the beach. Wandering around I found Amanda again, and so we spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and later on, back at the hotel pool, exchanging pictures and contact details before all going out for food and drinks. Another great evening.
For Friday, Severine and I had organized a car to go to Ubud in the mountains, however, we first went for 2 hours of surfing in the morning. Unfortunately, the waves were not very high, so we only managed to stand up on the board a couple of times. I will definitely try it again before leaving Bali! Amanda was at the beach as well, so after saying good-bye to her (she was leaving back to Beijing, where she works), Severine and
Bali
Vespa breack down I grabbed our car at the hotel and drove to Ubud, a lovely village in the mountains full of temples and art galleries, surrounded by rice fields and volcanic hills. By chance there was a 4-days Hindu celebration, so all the temples were covered in beautiful colours and the people were all dressed up in traditional Balinese clothes - fantastic.
The next day, after a cooling bath in the swimming pool, we drove to Mount Batur, a lake in a huge volcano crateer. Really impressive! On the edge of the volcano were lots of temples, and again because of that hindu festival there were lots of colourful people on the road and in the temples. Of course we needed to buy a zarong and a hipp scarve in order to access the temples, but it was fun dressing up. In the evening, back in Ubud, we once more went for traditional Indonesian food
On Sunday finally, we went to a local art gallery and purchased some oil and acrylic paintings. Really cool stuff! And on the way back to Kuta we stopped at a local art market where we bought even more paintings... I hope I'll find enough
space in my apartment to hang to expose them all... Severine did some last-minute shopping before heading to the airport and catching her flight back to Europe whilst I spend the rest of the evening at the bar of the next door hotel with some locals I had met at my first day of arrival.
I will spend some more days here in Kuta & then head over to Lombok and the Gili Islands where I will spend the remaining days of my holidays in Indonesia!
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