Blogs from Indonesia, Asia - page 602

In a nutshell... Laid-back city a stone's throw from one of the world's most beautiful dive sites and impressive dormant volcanoes. Living quarters... This was my second trip to Barracuda Resort which consists of a cluster of bungalows in a rustic village atmosphere. The resort has no beach, but has a long jetty jutting through a small mangrove swamp. View's not fantastic but sunset on the balcony makes for a relaxing time. The common area - lobby/ dive shop/ dining area/ etc - is in need of some renovations. Otherwise, the rooms are quite spacious and comfortable. Staff here are cheerful and friendly and perhaps coz there were only 3 of us, they made us feel really at home:) Under the sea... The diving in Manado offers plenty of choices. Just off the jetty of Barracuda's ... read more

So, the boys left for Perth and I went to the arts capital of Bali Ubud. I felt so sad leaving everyone and I think I was the only person staying in my hotel so it accentuated my lonliness!!! Anyway I had a really good time despite this walking about the area. They had a monkey forest which was really cool. if you've played Tomb Raider 3 it was like the first level in the game!!! !- I loved it!! At night at the royal palace they put on traditional dances so I went to see one of these and also a shadow puppet play which was really good. They give you information about the meaning of both so that was helpful.... read more

(Dave writes...) Well, we're in Singapore now. We arrived here yesterday from Denpasar in Bali. We spent a month split between Bali and neighbouring island Lombok, here's what we've been up to... We left our hostel in Perth on Thursday 29 January and arrived at the airport only to find that our flight no longer existed. Qantas had shifted us on to a different flight on the Friday morning, unfortunately no-one had told us! They also made us fly via Singapore and we lost our veggie inflight meals... anyway, back we went to our hostel after having said goodbye to the people we'd met there, feeling very daft, and stayed another night. People told us Perth was a hard city to leave, but I didn't realise how literally they were talking. We got away on the ... read more

I've been feeling the distance lately. Not only am I twelve time zones apart from home, I am apparently living in a black hole. The phone network has become unbelievably more unreliable lately, so much so, that my work has installed CB radios in all our houses and cars for emergencies. In addition, as I discovered when trying to book a flight to Vietnam, it takes two days to get anywhere from here - one day (two flights) to get to a regional Indonesian airport, then another flight to get to an international airport where you'll be able to make connections to Earth. How do people survive like this?? Magically, even though you can't get a phone call through, you can often send/receive text messages on your mobile phone. They call that SMS here ("text messaging" ... read more

13.01.06~We left Ubud tihis morning nice and early or so we thought-the shuttle bus decided to turn up at nearly 8!! We were really annoyed as we'd missed our free breaky and it was gonna be a long day! We were the only ones on the bus, and arrived at the ferry point about an hour later..luckily we had a little bit of time to kill so we managed to grab some jaffles (jaffles we discovered are the same as our toasted sandwiches but they do them with banana which tastes really good). The ferry was disgusting and smelt really bad of wee, we sat upstairs so the air blowing through helped to diguise the smell! We spotted a couple of backpackers and took a seat near them. We got chatting and found out they were ... read more