Bali

A crude map of where we went, a 260 km journey

So...Bali.  Pretty great adventure.  Brett and I flew from Singapore to Bali on Saturday the 18th of September.  In the airport, before takeoff, we each exchanged  US dollars to Indonesian Rupiah.  Aka we gave the exchange people about 350 USD and received 2.85 MILLION rupiah.  It was pretty awesome.  Anyway...the flight was a mere 2 hours (cake compared to the 28 it took to get here) and thankfully quite uneventful.  We went through customs in a relatively short amount of time and made it to the hotel in Kuta around 9 pm that night.  The hotel was awesome; it was a 5 minute walk to the beach, provided free breakfast (all of the hotels we stayed at had free breakfast) and had 2 beds for us to sleep in.  Sounds pretty normal, except for the fact that I payed $6.50 for one night's stay.  All of the hotels were dirt cheap and were actually really nice, not reflective of the prices at all.  After we dropped our stuff off in the room we wandered around a few of the shops that were close by.  And thats when it all started.  You see, in Bali people are DYING to sell you something.  Anything.  If you walk into their store they will try their hardest to prevent you from leaving empty-handed by slashing prices to the extreme.  For example, one lady initially wanted 150,000 rupiah (1 USD is about 9000 rupiah) for a wooden carving.  She sold it to Brett for 35,000 rupiah, about one-fifth the price as he was walking out the door.  It was insane and provided for some great bargains.  After our first shopping experience, we went to Uncle Norm's bar.  It was really chill; they had a live band every night and gave us a good place to unwind and prepare for the coming days.

One of the hotels we stayed at

We woke up early the next day (Sunday) and went surfing.  We rented us some boards and hit the waves for about 2 hours, catching some good waves along the way.  Unfortunately there are no pictures of this experience because we were advised not to leave our cameras on the beach...oh well.  We took it pretty easy the rest of the day, just chilled on the beach and explored Kuta for a while before retreating to the bars again and hitting the hay.  Monday was the true start to our adventures in Bali; we rented motorbikes for four days and drove them all over the island.  At first we were going to rent them from the hotel, but they didn't have any type of insurance deal.  So the guy that we were talking to from the hotel flagged down his buddy from the street and we rented from him (all I could think to myself at this point was 'shady...').  Eventually we worked out a deal with the guy where we payed about $8 a day, including insurance that covered everything.  We asked him what would happen if the bike was stolen and he said that he would drive to wherever we were and bring us new bikes.  It was pretty sketchy, but it all worked out in the end :)  Finally we got on the road and began tackling the beast that is the streets of Indonesia.  It was pretty insane and impossible to describe completely.  Basically you just need to understand the hierarchy of vehicles; the biggest ones go where they want, everyone else falls in line.  Or in most cases everyone just zips around the bigger vehicles.  For example, if there were cars waiting in a traffic jam, the motorbikes aren't going to wait.  They are either going to squeeze between the cars or drive on the sidewalk.  It was crazy, but you get used to it.  So we somehow made it through the city to the country roads, headed for the town of Ubud.  These roads were much friendlier and provided us with lots to see on the 2 hour trip.  Upon arriving in Ubud a man rode up to us and asked if we needed a place to stay, we said yes, and he took us to his hotel (another cheap price).  We ditched our bikes and backpacks and got dinner (we had hamburgers for the first time in 2 months!) and proceeded to wander around looking at the shops filled with crafts, carvings and paintings.  We then swam in the hotel's pool before hitting the hay for the night.

The rice paddies

We woke the next morning (Tuesday) and had a free breakfast of pancakes, tea and fruit.  I however didn't eat all of my papaya.  So this little monkey ran up seconds after we got up and ate it for me; it was pretty funny.  We then packed and went to the monkey forest (a forest with temples and was full of monkeys, who would've guessed?) for a couple hours before we continued our journey.  After driving for about 45 minutes we came to the town of Tegallalang.  Here we came across some pretty amazing terraces used for rice paddies.  It doesn't sound like much, but they were really cool.  We kept driving for another hour or so before we came across some of Indonesia's law enforcement.  (Before we left I did a little research about these guys.  Apparently the system is extremely corrupt and cops in Bali just pull people over to fine them if they don't have proper licenses or registration.  They don't do anything about it, they simply pocket the money and send you on your way.)  So, we decided to put a little something else I learned online to the test.  We both pulled out our licenses from home and attempted to convince them that they were international licenses.  It either worked, or they got sick of us because we were sent on our way after about 5 minutes.  I couldn't stop smiling as we drove away :)  Ten more minutes of driving got us to Mount Batur, an active volcano about 5,600 feet tall.  As we arrived, a guy named Tobali drove up to us and took us to a delicious buffet (I reminded myself what being full felt like haha), led us to a hotel, set us up with a guide to climb the volcano, showed us to dinner, tuned up our bikes and took us to the biggest temple in all of Bali.  In return for all of his help, he took us to his art gallery and we bought some really cool artwork from him.  It was a great trade-off.

The next morning (Wednesday) we woke up at 3:30 am and hiked two hours to the top of the volcano with our guide and a bunch of French people to see the sunrise.  We made it to the top about a half hour before sunrise, only to discover dense clouds hiding vision of everything.  It was sad at the time.  But then our guide made us a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs by putting the eggs in a hole in the volcano for 10 minutes, this healed the sadness a little :) Those little holes were extremely hot, easily hotter than an oven.  We waited for a bit to see if the clouds were going to clear, but after they didn't we began our 3 hour descent back down.  At about 1/4 of the way down the clouds finally disappeared and we got an amazing view of the lake on the east side of the volcano and everything surrounding it.  We then continued our descent, checking out the crater in the middle and a cave full of bats along the way.  The whole thing was a great experience, easily my favorite part of the trip.  Brett and I got back to the hotel, washed up, grabbed some lunch on the way out and kept driving toward the north coast.  When we got there we were again greeted by a guy from a hotel and he took us to his place.  We ditched our stuff and hit up the beach and swam in the ocean for a couple hours.  The one thing unique to the north shore is the black sand due to the volcanic rock; it was different.  We had some delicious fresh marlin for dinner that night, followed by a native dance performed by some of the locals.  

Mount Batur

We hit the road the next morning (Thursday) for the last day of driving.  Our path back to Kuta took us past a refreshing waterfall (Gitgit Waterfall) and the twin lakes.  Unfortunately, it started downpouring so I couldn't get any good photos of the lakes.  We also went to Tannah Lot temple, the temple on the ocean.  It looked really cool and provided for some nice pictures.  We finished the trip to Kuta through heavy traffic and breathed a sigh of relief when we finally handed the motorbike keys back to the owner.  This ended the craziest part of the trip, but I'm glad we went for the motorbikes.  It totally immersed us in the ways of the island and definitely gave us a little excitement along the way.  Brett and I spent that night chilling in the bar, listening to the live band and getting some needed recuperation from all the traveling.  The next morning (Friday) we hit up the waves again, this time with some boogieboards.  After some showers and a lunch of kebabs we hired a driver (it was cheaper than a taxi) to take us to the temple of Uluwatu on the southern cliffs of Bali.  Following some great pictures at the temple we hit up a BBQ'd seafood place and finally made our way to the airport.  Overall it was an awesome trip that provided us with tons of adventure, great photos and good times.

Tannah Lot Temple

(Spoiler alert: I'm about to steal Brett's ending)

On the summit of the volcano we got to talking to the Frenchies and one of them summed up Bali quite nicely.  He said, "Here on Bali there are three religions: Christianity, Buddism and Hinduism.  But they all share the same god...RUPIAH!"  Haha, everyone got a good laugh from that.  The people on Bali are all really friendly, especially when you buy a little something from 'em :) Check out all of the photos here.