Blogs from Asia - page 15988

Seeing SadieandOyvind's contemporary Gili Meno blog on the front page reminded me of a retro-tale, another self-indulgent reminiscence from a (relatively) innocent youth. The names listed have been changed to protect the guilty (and me from any potential lawsuits given the protagonists' careers). 16th December 1990. Two nights ago we’d met the solicitors from London: Alex and Gwynn, both bronzed and sleek from months of travelling, although looking amazingly smart on the back of this. Three bottles of banana wine at our hostel in Cakra, Lombok, and we were of the same opinion, that Meno sounded best. The smallest and least developed of the three Gilis, Meno is half a mile long and less wide. Covered in palms, encircled with fine white sands and Indonesia’s ubiquitous turquoise seas, it has no cars and few people: locals ... read more

2 trips to Nepal... read more

For our last day on Bali it was almost compulsory that we got ourselves down to the beach for some serious surfing. Some success, but there was an awful long way to go before any of us could call ourselves surfers. The flight was at some god-awful time of the morning again, so we were not planning on going to sleep that night. We thought we would make it a late night so we hit the bars and then a club. There was this one bar called SC's that was particularly popular. They had a bizarre promotion in that you got a free SC's tee shirt when you had downed a certain number of beers. Mike and Alan were going for it and were soon the proud owners of brand new tee shirts. Later when we ... read more

Ubud is one of the main cultural centres in Bali and was a must. The most famous attraction is Goa Ganja, otherwise known as the Elephant Cave. Before we were allowed in, we had to cover our legs, but there was someone on hand to lend us skirt-like pieces of material. We visited the cave in two groups so that someone would be keeping an eye on all our worldly good in the open-top staff cars. As Tiny and I were waiting for the others a coach-load of schoolgirls from Jakarata turned up and they all wanted to have their photographs taken with us. There we were in the main tourist location in Bali and the longest queue was one of girls waiting to have their pictures taken with us. Next, for some reason that I ... read more

Bali is small enough that you can quite happily drive around it yourself so we hired a couple of cars to tour round. In keeping with what our budget would allow, the cars we ended up with were clapped-out heaps. They resembled the cars that Nazi generals used to drive around in during World War II. As we were heading north through the mountains one of them broke down on a corner going up a hill. As we were trying to turn it round so that we could jump-start it down the hill, a huge great lorry came round the corner, lights blazing, and we honestly didn't think we were going to make it. We then broke down again just as we arrived in Singaraja and someone who was passing by helped us out. It also ... read more