Advertisement
Published: August 26th 2009
Boards on Bali
This is the most common sight upon getting to Kuta beach; there are literally hundreds of people looking to rent you a board and teach you how to surf for the dayOur Asian and New Zealand Adventure has reached its end, although we're still in denial that it even happened in the first place!
Here is a breakdown of how we spent our last few weeks of “vacation”.
Kuta, Bali - Indonesia Kuta beach in Bali is known for it's world class surf, and it's non-stop night life atmosphere. Throw in the fact that you can live like kings and queens for dollars a day and it's no wonder it is extremely popular among backpackers and vacationers alike (yes, there is a big difference) as the go-to destination of Indonesia. Because of its proximity to Australia, Bali tends to be the Aus equivalent of heading to the caribbean for a short but sweet package vacation where usually the main focus tends to be more about how many tropical drinks or beers you can get down the hatch before the sunset. For this reason, the main beach area in Bali (Kuta Beach) tends to completely cater to westerners so much so that they almost forgot to leave in a little local culture for people to take in. Although during most of our trip this would be a place that we'd
Swim-Up Bar
Coincidently, we frequented this place everyday usually for a happy hour drink. Get there early before they run out of milkshake ingredients try to avoid, at this point we were transitioning from being backpackers to enjoying just being vacationers for a relaxing last few weeks before heading back to the “real world,” so we didn't mind as much.
Whether or not you're in Indonesia for culture, there's one thing that everyone can't deny about Kuta Beach; the beaches really are quite fantastic albeit slightly overcrowded, and they do have some great breaks for riding on. The main highlights of Kuta Beach for us were simply being able to once again take in seemingly endless white sand beaches while enjoying watching literally hundreds, if not thousands of people trying to hang five or ten. It is also a great place for some last minute shopping and souvenir buying before you head home. Almost every other shop in Kuta was a souvenir/tour guide/fake apperal shop which made bargaining almost sport-like. Needless to say we indulged ourselves to some last minute deals before heading home.
Gili Trawagnon, Lombok - Indonesia Although Indonesia is home to the largest number of islands comprising an archipalego, the three most popular islands in the country are located in Lombok and are simply referred to as “the
Kuta Beach in a Nut Shell
Scooter, Cheack. Surf board, Check! Tacking stickers with funny or lewd sayings, Check! Gilis” (even though Gili means island in the local language of Bahasa, everyone generally knows which islands you are referring to when you say Gilis). Of these three, the more laid back, backpacker style is supposed to be the island called Gili Trawangan, or just Gili T for short. We had heard from other travellers that had just come from Gili T that is is quite busy at the moment and that it might be a good idea to try and secure accommodations before heading over, however that was easier said than done as most places usually don't even own a phone. Instead, we thought that we'd get there as early as possible and try our luck by just walking up to places, after all, this was the fail proof formula that we have been using for almost 9 months by this point. What we failed to take into account was that most other places we have been (other than being in Thailand for Christmas and New Years) we had purposely planned to be there outside of their high season, and now we found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of their busiest month of the year. Even with 4 of
us dividing up and seeking out accommodations in the supposedly “budget” area, we weren't able to really find much in our original price range so we had to settle for something that was about 3 times as much as you would usually pay! I know it doesn't receive much sympathy to know that we were quite upset about having to stay in a room on a tropical island for still less than $30/night, but you have to understand that after months of traveling and expecting to only pay $10 for an amazing room, $30 seems quite high. After all, when you're on a $40-50/day budget for the two of us, spending $30 just on accommodations severely cuts into the beer budget. In any case we were more relieved that we had found anything and decided that there were more pressing issues at hand, like heading to the beach.
At this point along our travels we would consider ourselves seasoned veterans on island relaxing and if we had to create a list of some of the best islands we have been to, I'm not sure if Gili T would have made it in the top 5. It's not that it
Business Prospecting
Sandro inquired on the boat ride over if he could have just one of the doughnuts out of the 100 dozen or so that we were riding beside. We ended up buying a whole box for about $2 and giving them out to people on the boat. wasn't a beautiful place, but once again considering how high the prices of everything were since it is the busy season, it is not really a bang for your buck type of place. The beach flagging the shoreline of this island is really only beautiful in one particular stretch along the beach which means that everyone on the island flocks to this specific spot. Unlike Bamboo Island in Cambodia (the one we “worked” on) or Koh Lipe in Thailand, this is not exactly the type of place that you can pull up a piece of pristine beach all to yourself and melt away the afternoon. The currents around the island were the strongest that we've encountered anywhere and although the water looked beautiful and was quite refreshing to jump in, it could be quite dangerous to go in further than a few feet from shore. In fact, while we were there, a snorkler was whisked away to open sea and not found! We reserved going in the water for cooling off purposes only! For fear of sounding too pessimistic, we would like to point out that if we had been here in the low season, it probably would have been
Citimo
This was the only vehicle permitted on the island. It seemed that the more bells and whistles it had (literally), the better a more positive experience. There are certain charms that are still rather unique to these groups of islands, starting with the fact that there are no motorized vehicles to run you down on the narrow streets; instead they have replaced these with horse-drawn carriages! Yup, as you're strolling down the narrow, cobblestone pathways, you'll hear a clown-car like horn from behind and the gentle clip-clip of a small pony as “citimo” jockeys tout you for a fare. We took our unrest with being on a beautiful tropical island as a sign that ity was probably about time to head back home and take a rest from travelling so we can once again appreciate where we've been and what we've seen. With that in mind (and still after 6 days relaxing on the Gilis) we headed back to Kuta Beach to spend our last few days before we flew out.
Bali (Again) Back in Bali, matt decided that he would be rather upset if he didn't attempt one last time for a morning of surfing so he woke up early on our last morning before we flew out so hit the waves. After some negotiating, he had secured himself
Spider-Boat
I thought this was pretty ingenious to balance out the very unsturdy boats with a piece of bamboo running along either side....or they could have just made the boat wider to begin with! a board for a couple of hours along with a short tutorial on how to catch that perfect wave from one of the locals. As expected, although there were a couple of wipeouts, he eventually managed to get himself up and was looking like a pro in no time. It's too bad that the great lakes aren't known for their large tubes as he came back to shore raving about how much fun he had in such a short time. With only a few hours to kill before we had to hop on our plane, we ran around the narrow alley ways of Kuta beach to dodging scooters and touts to buy useless items until we had crossed off everything from our list of things to bring home.
Singapura From Bali, we flew into Singapore for a day a a half before once again making our way back to the land of maple syrup. Since this was our 5th time being through Singapore on our travels, we knew right where to go as soon as we got in. We weren;t as concerned about sight seeing this time around either so we figured we'd concentrate just on the important
Swim-Up Bar
What a great idea. Everyone should have one of these. This place made a deadly drink too: a white chocolate toblerone milkshake. What else could one ask for on a tropical island? things and we headed to a few of our favourite places through the day to grab a beer and some local grub. One of the first places that we found when we went to Singapore was a cool themed bar called “Clinic” in the posh drinking district called Clarke's Quay. This is a place where you get rolled up to your table in a wheelchair and after you pick your poison, it gets brought out to you in the form of an IV drip. We failed to take note of the price of such a novelty drink the first time around and the $50 price tag (usually our daily budget) forced us to concede to another popular place with some live music and slightly cheaper (still $14) beers! Oh South East Asia, how you have spoiled us!
The San Fransisco Treat, Van City and Whistler 28 hours after leaving Singapore complete with a quick stopover in San Fransisco to pick up some sourdough, scarf some clam chowder and snap a few pics of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, we found ourselves back on Native Land. We were greeted at the airport by Brock and Sue, our would
Colourful Crustacean
These bad boys were on ice, ready to be bbq'd every night be hosts for the few days we planned to spend in BC.
Within hours of being back home, we found ourselves fulfilling the prophecies of about how Canadians love to be outdoors enojying fishing and hiking and camping and it couldn't have felt better! Brock had recently taken up fly fishing and we headed up to Whistler for the day to try our luck on a new lake they had heard about. We decided to first head into Whistler so we could compare the summer vibe with the winter vibe: yep, it's just as cool. There's a certain buzz in the air around here as a lot of the finaly preparations are wrapping up for the Winter Olympics that will be held there this upcoming winter. It didn't take much convincing to get us to agree to head over to Dusty's for some world famous pulled pork sandwiches and Beef-Jerky-garnished ceasars before finally making our way over to the lake for some fishing.
Jim Morrison said that it's better to go out with a bang than with a whimper...well, seeing as we never even cought one fish while we were out and it was an early morning flight
Rasta Sandro
This is what happens when you fall asleep on the beach with a beard that could house baby birds through a winter! this morning, I suppose that means that we're not done totally travelling. For now, we'll just call this “a rest” and see where the great wind blows us. We're sure it may be quite difficult to reinstate ourselves back into a normal routine after having endured such an abnormal lifestyle for so long so we've decided to treat ourselves to some more leisure time once we get back in order to ease ourselves beack into “real life.” We can both agree on a few things at this point though:
The world is awesome and there's so much to see
It's always great coming back home to see family and friends
We wanted to finish by saying thanks to everyone who have followed our journey along the way; it was always great to hear comments from you. Thanks to everyone we met along the way for helping to make our travel memories what they are.
Hopefully not for the last time, this is Matt and Lindsay signing off!
“We arrived in November in Tokyo at best, we've been gone for nine months, we've been drunk since we left. This so called “vacation” will soon be our Nasi Goering, Gili T Style
We managed to find a place that had great local food which consisted of squash curry, beef curry, fried veggies and a bunch of other stuff we didn;t recognize....the total bill: $3 for both of us! deaths, we're so sick from the drink, we need home for a rest...Take us home!” - Adapted from “Take me Home” by Spirit of the West (from Vancouver)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.248s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 13; qc: 58; dbt: 0.1462s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Carla
non-member comment
Welcome Back!
Hey guys! Glad to hear you did some relaxing and easing back into "real life". I can imagine a routine, and particularly work, will be hard to get back into. But, what an amazing adventure you both had. I loved reading about it and can't wait to see you both for more stories.