Days 47-54: Kuta, Bali

After resting for a while, we’re ready for some more adventure, but at a slower pace than before. We’ve moved to a hotel closer into Kuta, closer to where more of the action is. One of our first orders of action was to take some surfing lessons, since Bali is one of the surfing capitals of the world and the lessons are cheap. We both made it up a bunch of times, with Mary being the standout of the class! The beach here is pretty incredible; it stretches on for 8 km, and is pretty wide the entire time. It is much more crowded and a bit dirtier than the beaches near Tanjung Benoa, but there is decent to good surfing for the entire stretch.

We’ve also walked up and down the entire section of the island, through the towns of Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak, checking out the thousands upon thousands of small shops that line the streets. It’s a mixture of outdoor markets with small stands, indoor but rather bare shops, fancy boutiques, and a few shopping malls. The level of pressure the sellers use is inverse to the fanciness of the store – the small markets will have people up and down the street, showing you wares, nearly pulling you towards their stands, and the smaller stores will shout their wares and offer bargains from inside. Combined with the constant offers of “Transport, transport!” and “Massage here” it makes for a noisy and somewhat exhausting walk. There sure is a lot for sale though, mostly clothing (a lot of surf gear and tropical wear), CD/DVDs (all copies, $1 a piece), and food (Balinese, Indonesian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, you name it)!

Everyone is very nice, although some of them use it in their attempt to sell you stuff, trying to become friendly in hopes of making you feel guilty of not buying anything. Mary and I, for the purposes of simplifying many conversations, married and on our honeymoon – it makes the locals happy, and they one and all wish us luck on having kids soon! The vendors have good memories – I quickly learned not to say “Not today”, since the next day they’d ask me if today was the day!

We took a day trip out around a large portion of the island, visiting the beautiful temple of Pura Ulun Danu Bratan, on the shores of Lake Danu. We also stopped at one of the several Monkey Forests to feed the monkeys, which were much better behaved than the ones I remember from my last trip to Bali, when the stole my bag of feed right out of my hand! We also hiked down to Gitgit Falls, a beautiful set of waterfalls, as well as a coffee plantation, the northern town of Lovina with its black sand beaches, and over several of the central mountain ranges with their beautiful views. There are lots of new photos in the Bali section, although we haven’t been quite as good at taking the camera with us recently.

Another highlight was going to Jimbaran for seafood on the beach. There are tons of local fishermen based off the beach and there are almost equal number of small restaurants up and down the beach waiting to grill up whatever you want from the catch! We probably ate 3 pounds of seafood (2 pounds of crab, half pound each of clams and prawns!) while seated on the beach, with the local equivalent of a Mariachi band singing in the background.

I lost a couple days to an ear infection, due to swimming every day with all the local bugs, but after we figured out what was going on, antibiotics took care of it pretty quickly. Our hotel had very limited internet access, and there were surprising few internet cafes around, so we’ve been disconnected for a while, save for briefs connections.