Indonesia - Kuta, Indonesia
Kuta, Indonesia
We are in Indonesia now, and like I thought my nervousness would disappear fast once we arrived. I am so happy to be here. Beside just the fact that we were traveling to a third world part of the world very far from home, I was really worried that I wouldn't be allowed to enter Indonesia. I realized about 1 week before we flew out of the states that I only had one visa page left in my passport and about 3 days before we left I learned that Indonesia requires 2 full visa pages in order enter the county. I was hoping they just wouldn’t notice or that this rule just wasn’t enforced that strictly and maybe I could plead or pay to be given a visa. I made an appointment for the following day after we arrived to have more pages put in at the US embassy in Bali, so I thought that would help as well. Then when I was at the airport in Miami I thought about how I could hopefully pull off my Brazilian visa (which took up an entire visa page). I pulled it off almost without any indication that it was ever there. When I arrived in Bali and handed the immigration officer my passport he flipped right to that page and put in my Indonesian visa. Yey! I was so relived. I was also really nervous the airlines would lose our luggage since we had three layovers, but our luggage made it too. Another yey!
I had made a reservation at a hostel in Kuta Bali and arranged for a guy from the hostel to pick us up at the airport. The hostel, Granny’s Hostel was really cool. The staff were all really nice and the other backpackers were too. Kuta is the most popular beach town in Bali. The waves are great for beginner surfers and there are lots of shops, restaurants, bars, and spas. The first day we just walked around and got acquainted with our surroundings. The next morning I woke up and did some yoga in the back yard of the hostel and then did some hula-hooping. By late morning Eddie, the hostel’s chauffer, drove a group of us down to the beach. We hung out at the beach for a few hours and then walked down the street to choose from the many spas. I wanted a pedicure and foot massage and Brock wanted a full body massage. I had my hour long pedicure and foot massage with a bintang beer for a bit under $5. Brock’s massage was also just under $5. Then we walked around a bit to look at some of the stores. The clothes here are really cute and light weight and super cheap. I bought a pair of shorts and Capri pants each at $5. Then we bought some Bali style "fanta" drinks and went back to the beach to enjoy the late afternoon and sunset. It was a great day.
The next day I woke up to do some yoga in the yard again. The only other backpacker that was awake was a girl from Texas, Danny, who also practiced yoga and was actually here in Bali to attend a class that would teach her how to be a yoga instructor. We did about an hour of yoga together. I followed her lead and learned a few new things. She also practices acro-yoga which is yoga with a partner, so we did some of that together. I had always wanted to try it and just never knew anyone to do it with. Afterwards I brought out my hoop and it turns out Danny also practices the hula hoop. She’s been doing it for years and is really good. She showed me some new tricks too, which I picked up pretty fast, but I definitely need to practice them a lot to make them look better. I was so thankful and happy to have spent the morning with her. Afterwards we took a shuttle to Ubud which is a town about 1-2 hours north of Kuta.
Ubud is a town with a lot of artists, culture, traditional Indonesian food, and beautiful lush scenery such as rivers, rice paddies, and lots of green foliage. We didn’t make any reservations for a place to stay, so when we got out of the van and a sweet tiny man came up to me to try and get us to come to his family run hotel I agreed. Our own room and bathroom in a lovely room overlooking the lush jungle like forest of trees and plants with breakfast included for a total of 15$ a night sounded good to us. Wiedi and his wife, Ami, run a small hotel with what looks like 6-8 rooms. They were really nice and helpful.
For our first afternoon in Ubud we decided we wanted to try the traditional and famous Babi Guling dish, which is slow roasted and herbed hog. It came with a soup of some sort of root vegetable (maybe turnips) soup, a green bean and hot pepper salad and three slightly different styles of roasted hog. It was really flavorful and delicious, although a bit spicy for me. After lunch we walked past lots of shops, cafes, and spas to “Monkey Sanctuary.” This is a jungle like area with three Hindu temples and thousands of Balinese monkeys. Although Indonesia is the world’s largest population of Muslims, Bali Island is primarily Hindu. The monkeys are CRAZY. Brock bought a few bananas to feed the monkeys. They pretty much attacked him immediately for them. One jumped out of a tree and onto his back to get the bananas. After he quickly got rid of the bananas I think he must have still carried the scent of them on him because the monkeys continued to climb up his legs on onto his back and shoulders. They would try and open his backpack and they would dig through his hair. He was really brave about it. At one point one of the monkeys had poop on his butt and got it on Brock so I took out our hand sanitizer to help clean him up and a monkey jumped on me to get at the hand sanitizer. I yelled at him “NO” and he went away for a few seconds, but he was really craving that hand sanitizer and continued to come after me. I finally just threw the bottle down for him and he took it and opened it and started eating the gel. Another monkey jumped on some lady’s head and pulled her earrings out and ate them. They were pretty funny creatures, but a bit scary. I can’t believe they actually sell bananas to people to give to the monkeys because it seems like this only encourages this aggressive behavior. The trees and lush foliage were beautiful and a green moss was growing on all the stone statues. One of the temples is called “Cremation Temple,” and there was actually a cremation going on in the grave yard at the time we visited. There were some local people (I think friends and family of the deceased) watching as the some other men torched the dead body. There was also a hole in the ground the length of a coffin and plenty of small tomb stones in the ground, so it appears that after they burn the bodies they bury them.
After this interesting event we seeked out another spa, and we both got massages. After our massages we went to The Palace and watched a traditional Balinese dance show of Legong and Barong style dancing. The show was more like a play with dancing and acting and a live band. The theme centered around the fight between good and evil. It was cool to see but the music and style of dancing didn’t vary very much throughout the hour and a half show so we got a bit bored after a while. Plus we still have not recovered fully from the jet lag so we have been getting sleepy by 8pm and the show started at 7:30pm.
The next morning we woke up and had breakfast on the porch of our room and then headed out for the day. We rented bicycles for $2.25 each for the day and explored Ubud and the surrounding area all day long. It’s a very hilly area so we were exhausted by the end of the day, well really, we were exhausted by mid day but we continued to bike anyways. We saw lots of Hindu temples and rice fields and just the typical town scenery. The Hindu people here leave holy offerings everywhere. Almost every sidewalk, building, and intersection has an offering in front of it. We had to stop and ask directions a lot and all the people were very friendly and helpful and most people speak a decent amount of English. We were on our way to an area that is said to have thousands of herons that come every evening to nest when Brock’s bike pedal broke, so we had to turn around. Fortunately, the way home was all downhill. We showered and then went to dinner. The Indonesian food is so delicious and very healthy too, and quite inexpensive.
The next morning we had a leisure morning and then took a bus/boat to a tiny island called Gili Trawangan. There are three tiny islands, the Gilis, off the coast of one of the main islands of Indonesia, Lombok. Trawangan is the biggest of the three and it still only takes 1 ½ hours to circle the island on foot. Besides having lovely beaches with deep blue and turquoise colored water, the islands are also surrounded by coral and heaps of fish. We ended up staying at another home-stay from a guy who approached us shortly after we got off the boat. He and two other guys seemed to be running this small “home-stay,” called Malati Gardens Homestay. The $9 room was simple but nice enough and the three guys and the morning breakfast and coffee were great. We spent the afternoon just walking around the island and watched a beautiful sunset from the beach.
The next day we went on a snorkeling trip. The boat anchored off-shore of all three islands. The coral off the coast of Gili T was fairly bleached out, but the other two islands had very beautiful and colorful coral. We also got to see 6 turtles, an eel, an octopus, a blow-fish which our guide picked up and handed to me while we were under water (it felt really neat in my hands), a medium sized clam, and some “nemos” swimming in their anemone. At the third and smallest of the islands, Gili Air, we got to walk around and have lunch on land. We walked around the island with two guys from Chez Republic who told us about Mt. Rinjani (a trek we decided to do the next day). That evening Brock and I walked up the hill on Gili T and watched the sunset. The sunsets here are really cool because the sun sets alongside the large volcano in Bali, Gunung Agung. Both nights in Gili we ate a delicious dinner from the food vendors that set up every night in the center of town. Gili T is well known for its late night party scene, but Brock and I were too exhausted at the end of each day to go out partying, which is just as well as the drinks at bars are not nearly as cheap as everything else.
The next morning we woke up and decided we wanted to trek up Mount Rijani on the island of Lombok. The trek is three days and two nights and has to be done with a guide. The guide therefore supplies all the camping gear and food and brings along a porter to carry it. We spent the early part of the day organizing a tour which was really easy because the guys from Chez had given us the phone number to the guide they used. The guide met us at the port in Lombok and drove us to a town at the base of the volcano, Senaru. We had lunch and then did a small walk through the jungle to some waterfalls. They were gorgeous and one of them had a swimming hole so we could swim right up to the fall.
The next morning our guide met us and six other trekkers at the homestay in Senaru and we headed out to trek up Mt. Rinjani. The first day we hiked up to the rim of the crater at the top of the volcano. We were accompanied by many packs of wild dogs that live on the mountain and seem to enjoy making the trek with the tourists. I think they particularly like the food scraps. They really didn’t pay much attention to us besides hiking alongside us, but they sure did fight amongst themselves a lot. They really tore each other up at times. The hike up was tough but we took a lot of breaks and had lunch and snacks along the way. The crater is 4x4 km round and has a volcano peak in the middle of it. The crater sits at 2600 meters and the clouds sit below. We arrived to the crater around 4:30pm, so we had time to enjoy the scenery and then the sunset. We camped on a small peak at the rim. It was absolutely majestic but very cold and extremely windy. The next morning we walked down the rim and swam in the crater lake. The water was cool and very refreshing after the long hot trek up to the rim the day before. After chilling off in the lake we walked to the hot springs. These were the most beautiful hot springs we have ever seen. There are many pools of turquoise colored springs along a hot river. There was a large group of locals camping along the springs. Anan, our guide, told us that when the locals are sick they climb up to the springs and camp here for a few days and bath in the water for its healing powers. The spring we stopped at for a dip had a waterfall and the spring was so deep you could jump off the rocks about 10 feet high into the water. We had lunch by the lake and then walked up to the rim again, but this time to the opposite side of the lake than the night before. We were greeted at our campsite by a large troop of monkeys waiting for us to prepare dinner and feed them our leftovers. We had an early night and woke up at 2am to start the very strenuous trek up to the top of the tallest peak of the mountain. This was definitely the most difficult hiking we have ever done. The trail up to the summit was very steep, but the most challenging part of it was finding a sturdy spot in the soft sand and small rocks to plant each step. With half of our steps our feet slid back down. When the sky started to change colors from black to blue and the horizon was lined with a pinkish orange I felt the energy of the day coming and hurried to the top with all my might. We made it up about 15 minutes before the sun rose. We were high above the clouds and as the sun rose we could see many of the islands of Indonesia. It was absolutely breathtaking and very rewarding to be standing at 3726 meters at the summit of a volcano watching the sunrise after such a physical challenge. It was very windy and approximately 32 degrees Fahrenheit. We stayed at the summit for about 30-40 minutes and then descended and regrouped with our monkey friends for a breakfast of banana pancakes and toast. After a quick rest we continued the descent to the base of the mountain. Our guide, Anan, was a small and very strong Indonesian guy who had been running treks up Mt. Rinjani for 20 years. He was very sweet. We had three porters who didn’t speak any English but they cooked great food. During the trek they cooked us hearty soups, fried rice, and fried noodles; all with vegetables, egg, and chicken. It was a great experience!
Once we arrived to the base of the mountain we took transport to another town called Kuta on the south coast of Lombok. Our driver brought us to a homestay his friends owned. It was another $9 simple room with very friendly hosts. We got dinner at a nearby restaurant or a “warung” as they call it here and then went to bed. We were pretty tired.
The next morning we took it easy. Brock worked on all the pictures we took at Mt. Rinjani and I did some yoga and hula hooping. By noon we went out to check out the town and beach of Kuta and have some lunch. Then we rented a motorbike for $5 for the day and rode to some beautiful nearby beaches. The ride was beautiful as well. We rode past villages and rice fields and up hills of palm trees overlooking the beach coves. It’s so simple here that it makes the beauty even more precious. That night we had another relaxing evening and woke up in the morning to take another transport heading back to Bali. The transport required a full day, one car, a ferry, and a van. This brought us to a port town in Bali called Sanur. We arrived around 8pm and found a place to sleep and a bite to eat and then went to bed. We woke up early to catch the slow public boat to Nusa Lembongan at 8am. We were told to arrive at the ticket office by 7am though to buy our ticket. This boat transports water and food over to the tiny island once a day and also loads up a few tourists for about 6 times less than the cost of taking the fast private boats that run tourists over there every hour of the day. We arrived by 9:30am and were greeted like usual by owners of homestays. The guy that approached us had a cheap room for us as well as a friend who would take us on his boat to snorkel around the Island Nusa Penida for a few hours for a good price. The whole reason we came to Nua Lembongan was to dive or snorkel around Nusa Penida. The two islands are very close to each other, but Nusa Penida does not have any accommodation on it, only a few small villages. The island is surrounded with some of the world’s best dive sites according to many divers we talked to. The coral is beautiful there and the other big attraction is the manta-rays. We had talked to other backpackers who saw 10-13 manta-rays while snorkeling or diving there. We had good enough luck to see and swim with 2 manta-rays. It was pretty awesome. That afternoon we walked around the island Nusa Lembongan and settled down at a lovely beach called Mushroom Bay. We brought with us a mask, the Frisbee, the hoop, and some Indonesian whiskey. We played on the beach and in the water for a bit and then relaxed and had a drink with an Austrian couple, Andy and Claudia, who we had met on the public boat that morning and then ran into again at the bay. After the sun went down we rode back into town on motorbikes. I squeezed onto the bike with the Austrian couple and Brock hitched a ride from a local with a motorbike. The four of us went to dinner that night and then said farewell.
The next morning Brock and I woke up early once again for the public slow boat. We decided we wanted to spend our last three nights in Kuta, Bali where we could surf and explore the southern peninsula of Bali. There are a lot of surfing beaches in Indonesia but Kuta has the best waves for beginners. Plus, it’s just a cool place to be. When we arrived in Kuta that morning we found a place to stay and then rented a motorbike for the day. We rode down and through the southern peninsula of Bali, Bukit Peninsula. The traffic and chaos of Kuta wasn’t that pleasurable, but once we got into the Peninsula 20 minutes later the ride was nice. We stopped at a small and beautiful surfer’s beach town called Balangan and had lunch on one of the “warungs” lining the beach. The waves there looked great and we enjoyed watching the surfers and taking notes on what to do the next day when we would give it a try as well. After lunch we got back on the bike and headed to Ulu Watu temple at the southernmost tip. The Hindu temple was built in the 11th century. It wasn’t much to look at, except for the spectacular views of the cliffs that drop into the blue sea and the many monkeys roaming around. From here we rode to the famous Ulu Watu surfing beach to find out that there isn’t much of a beach, just restaurants on cliffs overlooking the water. The surfers enter the water from a very small beach that is really just an opening in the cliff’s wall. We watched the surfers for a bit from one of the restaurants and then headed back up along the coast back to Kuta. That night we took it easy. I had caught a cold from someone on the Rinjani hike and was feeling its toll on my body.
We slept in the next morning, finally, and then headed to the beach in Kuta. We rented a surf board for $5 for the day and took turns taking it out into the waves. Brock did pretty well. I did alright. We also brought the hoop and Frisbee and played with those a bit too. After a few hours we left the beach and got a late lunch. After lunch we showered and then went out for massages and pedicures. We both got a great massage and Brock decided to join me in getting a pedicure. The lady did such a good job. She removed all of his calluses. There was so much dead skin on the ground. The total came to $17.
We chose this night to be our one party night in Bali. We met a guy at our homestay who had been in Kuta for a month so he knew the good bars. We went with him to one called Espresso Bar and had some beers and a potent drink called “Jungle Juice” made from a local liquor called Arak. We met some other travelers (2 South African guys, an Australian guy, a girl from Russia, a girl from Sweden, and another American from Maine) at the bar and they knew of a good club, so after awhile a group of us went to a club called Sky Garden. It was a pretty wicked club and the friends we had made were a lot of fun to hang out with and dance with. It was a long and fun night and we suffered the consequences the next day. The combination of the “Jungle Juice” and the Long Island Ice Tea that came with the admission price of the club gave us both proper hangovers.
We didn’t leave the room until 2 pm the next day, and that was only to get lunch and then we went back for a nap before we finally headed to the beach at 4pm. It was an interesting visit to the beach. I took a walk and walked past a temple that was on the beach and two men were walking down to the water with a big woven basket. They tossed the contents of the basket (a bunch of food such as fruit, rice, and cookies; flowers and banana leaf baskets; and a live duck and chicken) into the water and then walked back up to the temple. The duck just sat there looking confused and the chicken started to walk away. A local guy walked up and took the duck, probably to cook for dinner. I am guessing this was some sort of Hindu offering to the ocean. I continued to walk and walked into a really crowded area of the beach. There were a lot of Indonesian tourists there and many of them appeared to be Muslim as the women were wearing head scarves. They were coming up to me in groups wanting to take pictures with me. I felt really weird because they were fully covered from their heads to their feet and I was wearing only a bikini, but they were so excited and nice so I couldn’t say no to them. It took a while to walk through that section of the beach so on my walk back I walked off the beach just for that section so that I wouldn’t have to stop every few seconds to take a picture with someone. We hung out at the beach until sunset and then went out for dinner. After dinner Brock went out for another massage and I just went back to the room.
The next morning we left Indonesia and headed to Malaysia. If we can arrange it somehow we would like to come back to Bali. We really liked it here.