Advertisement
11 May - Canberra - Sydney - Perth - Bali
Long travel day today. In to a taxi at 330am to get the 415am bus to Sydney. Managed to sleep most of the way, fairly empty bus. Then it was time to check in for flight to Perth, thankfully with bags checked through to Denpasar. Breakfast stop and a bit of time to chill at Sydney before the Perth flight. Excitement of that flight was Richard Branson being on board - well, most people seemed excited to see him anyway.
He was sitting up in business class but ducked his head briefly to see us plebs in economy. Quite impressed with the Virgin flight to Perth. Own little screen to choose movies and TV shows from, plus they served alcohol, drinks and food. I didn't have any wine though! Stuck to soft drinks and water. Four and a half hours later I was in Perth.
Knowing I had an five hours to spare, I hopped a shuttle into the city and spent about two hours wandering around window shopping, plus bought a memory card for the new camera since mine arrived Friday when I was at work and
they returned it to the post office rather than leaving it at the front door. Doh. Then it was back to the airport, this time to the fairly boring international terminal. Grabbed some food to kill some time before finding a power point to charge my almost dead phone.
Onto the flight to find I had an entire row of three seats to myself, but also discovering no TV screen to entertain myself with. So after dinner, the obligatory glass of wine and a few chapters of the book it was time to lie down and sleep. So pretty much slept most of the way.
Visa and arrival process at Denpasar very easy. No drugs were added to my bags either which was a bonus. Took a bit to find my ore-organized transfer and got to the hotel at about midnight local where it was straight to bed after what ended up being about 24 hours of travel. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea when I booked those flights...
12 May - South Bali
Slept in til about
8am before deciding to get up and brave exploring. So I ended up
on one of my epic walks where I had no idea where I was, where the hotel was, had no map and had to try to keep backtracking so as not to get lost. I have to admit, with this trip being the least organized of all my travels, I had no idea what to expect of Bali. it was actually a place i had never wanted to go to!
Traffic seemed to be considerably calmer than many Asian countries and I hadn't yet found that many beggars. Apart from that, the streets around my hotel could have almost been in any other Asian country. Scooters, unsteady and damaged pavements, people hosing down concrete steps, people selling things on side walks, lots of offers of hair braiding, fish feet massages, pedicures, you name it. It's what I love about Asia though. The humidity and heat I don't so much like!
Didn't see anything in particular and didn't find the beach that time around either before stumbling back to the hotel around lunchtime for a bit of a break and (most importantly) get a map and work out where I was before starting again. The next time when I left the hotel I turned left out the door rather than right, where I proceeded to find more shops, lots more tourists.
The thing that probably surprised me the most about Kuta and the surrounding area was that there were so many of the large brand name shops, and lots of UK brands, etc. I stumbled across Marks and Spencer, Top Shop, Dorothy Perkins, and then of course the were the surf shops - Quiksilver and Billabong and everything else in between. They were a welcome break from the people selling on the streets and from the humidity. Although they seemed to be somewhat cheaper, they didn't appear to be massively so and I resisted buying anything given it was day one of the holiday.
Found a place along the way that had Aussie rules playing so I stopped for a break and had a beer (for all those who warned me about methanol, I saw it poured out of the bottle and I was at a nice hotel bar, not a dodgy dive bar). The bonus there was the free wifi though really!
Eventually I also found the beach and went for a paddle. This was mostly to get away from the hawkers who scattered the pavement closer to the street - they avoided the area down near the water like it was the plague. Ironically, and again something which I didn't really expect, they had life guards and flags out telling you where to swim. I afterwards skimmed through my trusty Lonely Planet and discovered that apparently the beach along Kuta isn't the safest for swimming and sometimes they out out flags to close the beach too. Bondi Rescue Indonesia anyone?
Then it was back to the hotel via some more streets full of shops, and only slightly getting lost each time, more that I kept missing the relevant street I was supposed to turn at, or turned the wrong way. Means it takes me triple as long to get anyway as it should. But good exercise right?
Back to the hotel to chill for an hour or two before the pre-tour meeting. My room-mate, a girl from Canada (Christina) showed up too so I now know there is at least one other person on tour with me. Pretty certain it is going to be a small group this time around though given they were still advertising seven spots available a couple of days before I left.
At about
6pm we headed down to meet the rest of the group, which turned out to be one other person and the tour guide - Gede. We filled in the obligatory paperwork, I ascertained that the other traveller was - wait for it - from Canberra. Yep. Uh huh. Even on holidays I can't escape from the 'berra...
Thankfully when he (Grant) turned up I didn't recognise him. Once we had sorted the paperwork we all headed out to grab a local dinner.
We each had goreng lalapan (friend chicken something or other, had rice, veges and sampan sauce which was spicy and tasted somewhat like Penang laksa so I knew it had shrimp paste and possibly tamarind in it!).
Tasty though, and the best bit was it cost the grand total of $1.50. From there it was back to the hotel before I headed out for a walk with Grant, making sure to avoid the main tourist drag of Kuta though. Wandered for a good 45 minutes down past shops and lots more massage places, even a bit of the beach before getting back to the hotel relatively early.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.445s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 8; qc: 44; dbt: 0.1228s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb