Bali Trip

Wow, it's been a long while, but I'm back. I've had this blog rolling around in the back of my head for so long that I actually forgot I hadn't posted it. So instead of being three weeks behind, I'm more like five (totally guessing here, by the way) [*editor's note, turns out it's more like six].

After my trip to Ramelau, I had a few more weeks of teaching, and then it was off to Bali to renew our visas. The trip to Bali was ten days of adventures, gorgeous beaches, hordes of beautiful tourists, and, of course, a semi-serious allergic reaction to, I think, soap maybe?

The flight to Bali was unspectacular (which is probably a good thing when you consider the kinds of things that might make a plane trip “spectacular”. Fireworks, for example, are often “spectacular”. I'll take banal, thanks.) but we were both so stupid excited to get out of our tiny Dili world that the trip was a pleasure. Any excuse to sit and read for a couple hours is a good one in my book (heh, book. Get it? No? Oh, it's because I said any excuse to READ is good in my BOOK. Eh? Eh? Still nothing? Huh, alright, well maybe it'll come back around). After landing in Bali, we grabbed some visas, got sent back to re-fill out our immigration forms because we used red ink (next time I'm bringing a crayon) and then scolded for “taking so long” to get to the immigration desk with our correctly black-inked forms (definitely using a crayon next time). While we were moving out to exit the airport we collected tourist brochures along the way. At one point we got sort of lost because the way we thought we should go was closed off, so we went around via several glass doors and tight corridors. We passed several guards who clearly saw us, but no one did anything. When we emerged from the corridors, we realized that we completely circumnavigated the customs bag check. No one even noticed. Maybe I'm just over sensitive because of extreme American TSA regulations and security, but that just seems sloppy. Alexis and I felt kinda weird about it, so we walked in the exit of the customs bag scanners, explained out confusion and apologized, and then sent out bags through with no problems. Out the door, into a taxi, and on our way to Kedin's Inn, the small hotel where we would be staying for our time in the hyper-tourist beach town that is Kuta. Since we only had a half day to work with at that point, we basically just settled our things and explored the shops.

Our first full day there, we went surfing. Yeah, surfing. It was awesome! With the help of my longboarding experience and a lot of assitance in the water from people who were clearly experts I actually did quite well. Better than I thought I was going to do for sure. My expectations were not high after the “master instructor”, who gave us our on land instruction, spaced out for the forth time mid-sentence. Once or twice? Okay, he's a busy man (dubious). Three times? Okay, that's odd, but maybe he's a busy man who also just lost his train of thought (sure...) Four times? This man has obviously spent at least 30% of his life on his board with his cranium being set to broil by the intense sun. The pauses were not little, um... wait, right so what I was saying. These were literally ten, fifteen second pauses were he would just kind of stand there with his hands on his hips looking around. Try to allow for a fifteen second pause in a conversation. Drop of in the middle of your sentence and see how long it takes for the pause to suddenly switch to uncomfortable. Go ahead, I'll wait. How long did it take? I bet no more than three seconds before it was obviously something was wrong to all parties involved. Stretch that out for four, five, six...fifteen seconds. Awkward silence? No, no, no – Excruciating silence. But the experience was really excellent, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has the means or is in Bali. Alexis really enjoyed it although she had to sit out near the end because of a unfortunate knock on the head from her own board. Not before she got a chance to take me out at the ankles just after I'd, barely, gotten to a standing position.

That night we treated ourselves to a gourmet meal. There was a restaurant just down the way from our hotel which was still under construction during the day, but opened for business during the night. Sandbar, the name of the joint, was having it's grandopening, so they had a half-price menu. Alexis and I both got thick steaks with steamed vegetables and mashed potatoes, mojitos and cocktails, and a dessert of chocolate cake and a sampler of different crème brulees. It was probably the best meal I've ever had at any restaurant ever, and the bill came and went leaving us only $25 lighter.

The next day we spent wondering and planning for the rest of our trip. We made some arrangements for touristy things to do the next day and then went to get a massage. In Kuta, massage parlors are something like Starbucks in the states. EVERYWHERE. We picked a parlor more or less at random and went in. The parlor we chose had a good price for a combination full-body massage and earcandle, which I've always wanted to try. The massage was fine (hard to have a bad massage really) but it wasn't great. My earcandle was, let's say, productive. Disgustingly, 'that came out of my head?!” productive.

The next morning, with awfully clean ears I might add, got up and headed down for breakfast. The night before I had purchased a razor blade and some lemon scented shaving cream, which was covered in Indonesian and Thai writing along with the English, and shaved. The razor blade was surprisingly sharp and the soap smelled wonderful. Lemon is an excellent name and scent for shaving cream, by the way, you really get what you are expecting. “Spring day”, “mountain rain”, “glacial rush”? What scents are those exactly? “Lemon”? Smells like lemons. Now shaved, fed, and with glistening ears we waited for our shuttle bus to go on to the next town. One of the brochures that Alexis picked up was for a “Bali Tree-Top Adventure Park” in the town of Bedugul (emphasis on the du) which was about the same distance from the town we were heading to as the town we were heading to from Kuta. One of the things the brochure mentioned is that flipflops were not allowed, which was the only kind of shoe that Alexis had bothered to bring (we both like to pack light and had no idea this place even existed, so no faulting her for that). The man at the station we bought shuttle ticket from check in with the shuttle and told us that it was going to be a bit late. Since we had time to spare, Alexis needed shoes, and there were a plethora of shops across the alley from the restaurant, we decided to use the time preparing for the adventure park. While deciding which store to go to (“store” is generous, they are more like stalls) while sitting in the three walled restaurant, I made the mistake of pointing to one of the stores (again, stalls). The storekeep (stallkeep) saw my gesture and took that as an invitation to start his normal sales pitch/hussle you into the store (stall) talk – from across the alley while I was still sitting at a table in a restaurant. I figured at that point that it would be beyond insulting to choose a different place to check for shoes (it was also the closest one that had what Alexis was looking for) so we headed over (after giving it enough time so that, hopefully, the owner got the hint that we were coming because wanted to and not as a reward to his hassling people who might still be eating and make the mistake of eye contact or, worse, glancing at his wares). Alexis found a nice pair of red vans and asked how much they were. The man proceeded to suggest a ridiculous price, Alexis countered with a reasonable one. As this was happening our shuttle bus pulled up. I told Alexis that it had arrived and that we needed to go. Alexis, cleverly, used me trying to pull her from the store(stall) as a lever against the store(stall)keep and got the price she had originally asked for. Haggled.

The trip from Kuta to Ubud was beautiful, and a nice relaxing trip where my time was split between reading the first book of the Dresden Files (an incredibly good series for those into Sci-fi/Fantasy/Magic stuff) and just enjoying the ride. The shuttle bus dropped us in the parking lot of a supermarket at a busy intersection with three ways to go; each looking like viable options for a hotel. I literally just pointed randomly down one of the streets and we started walking. Less than five minutes later we were in the lobby of a tiny hotel asking rates. Turned out they were cheap and the rooms were really quite excellent. I'm just going to throw this out there now, First-World hotels suck. They are uniform, and boring, and entirely too nice. Third-World hotels are awesome. Each room is unique and interesting, and when you get one that actually meets all your needs as a human being it's that much sweeter. The Pondok Frog was the name of the hotel where we would stay for the next three nights (we quite liked it and Ubud, so we stayed longer than we had originally intended). It was at this point that the little red blemishes on my face started to get a bit more tactile and three-dimensional. At first Alexis suggested that I was breaking out, so we got some acne stuff, which only seemed to enrage it. Wait, I mean me. Enrage me. Why? Because “Ow, dammit, Ow, Ow, OW!” That's why. “Deep cleaning pore exfoliation” does nothing except burn and sting when what's really happening is hypersensitive skin brought on my allergies. Before I managed to finally ask someone directions to the nearest Chemist (that's “pharmacy” for those of you who know how to talk) and get some anti-histamines and cortisone cream. The allergic reaction lasted several days, was actively painful even when I wasn't talking, laughing, eating, or otherwise moving my face at all. It was very, very visible and did a lot of things to my self-image for those four or five days.

Despite this allergy business, Alexis and I did not slow down our vacation. The same night that we got there we went to a traditional Balinese dance called “Kecak” (kay-chak). It was confusing, beautiful, boring, interesting, and exciting all at different times. I'm really glad that I went and saw one, but it was quite long and completely over my head. The most impressive part was definitely the fire dance at the end in which a man danced though a fire. Not around, not over, but through. It wasn't like the ember walking you see on TV either, it was a small bonfire that he knocked over, danced  around in, and then left alone long enough so that it could be rebuild by men with the fire equivalent of squeegees, and then he danced through it again. He did that maybe for times, each time many of the embers would land on his feet and legs and you could watch them slowly go from red-hot to black ON HIS SKIN! It was truly amazing.

The next morning we got picked up by a van filled with bicycles and headed for the top of a volcano. The couple that were already in the car (and along for the trip) were Adam and Janine from New Zealand. We actually got to know them quite well over the course of the car ride, especially when the van got a flat tire and we were forced to wait on the side of the road while the driver and several assistants went to get the proper tools to change to the spare. The four of us chatted for the better part of an hour while this was underway, and then we were back on the road headed up to the near the peak of an active volcano. We stopped one more time, this time it was prearranged, to check out a plantation and sample a bunch of different coffees. For an extra charge you could get a cup of Kopi Luwak, which is coffee that as been eaten by a small creature called a Luwak (mongoose sorta critter), digested, and then excreted to be picked up, cleaned off, roasted, and brewed. This was the kinda thing that's weird enough that you've got to try it, at least once in your life. I'm not a coffee connoisseur. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, really, so I'm sure all the intricacies of flavor and the subtleties of consistency or richness or whatever were completely wasted on me. I liked it, but it wasn't any better than a lot of coffee I've had before and will probably have in the future. One of the other coffees there, however, was a ginseng coffee sweetened with palm syrup and evaporated coconut milk and was hands down the best coffee I've ever had. We even bought some to bring back to Timor as a house present. After the coffee plantation we headed for the top, no more distractions. Once we arrived we were given a breakfast, included in the package that we bought to do this trip, and got more opportunities to shoot the shay with our new buddies from the far south. Adam, as it turned out, is an avid runner, so we spent quite awhile discussing out experiences and plans for the future. He recommended a book on running (with a focus on barefoot running), which I have had no luck finding here and will probably just end up downloading, called Born To Run. Alexis and Janine, as it turned out, were both very crafty. Crafty as in did craft related projects, so they had that to talk about. Once breakfast was over the main attraction began. Downhill bike tour!

Also called a “pedal-less bike tour” (not true, the there was a bit of pedaling), this was exactly the kind of thing that Alexis and I could both get behind. Me for the “bike tour” her for the “downhill”. After two intense uphills right at the beginning, the downhill became constant albeit varying in it's gradient. Most of the trip was on roads, some of it was down dirt paths through fields and villages, and all of it was beautiful. We stopped often for breaks and touristy explanations of local attractions, but not so frequently as to really break up the simple joy that is a relaxed bike ride with friends. Although it's difficult to describe what exactly made the trip so worth it in just a few words on a blog, I can assure you that it was. Stunning views, interesting facts about Bali, seeing parts of the country that we would never have had a chance to see had we not done the tour, and drinking coffee that had at one point been excrement. It was magical really.

We got back to Ubud pretty late because of the delay we had with the flat tire on the way there, but we had had a full day so we found a nice place for dinner that served a potato soup that Alexis fell in love with, and then headed back to the Hotel to sleep.

The next morning we decided to check out what Ubud was really famous for – The Sacred Monkey forest. It was probably a three minute walk from the our hotel to the entrance of the park, we bought some tickets, $2 a piece, and a bunch of bananas to split (hahaha, banana split! Man, you guys are so lucky to be reading this. Genius!) between us. We were heading into a monkey forest, so of course the bananas weren't really for us, but rather to give away for a chance to get up close with the critters. We walk into the forest, beautiful and green filled with huge trees that have clearly been around for many hundreds of years, and are immediately greeted by a rather large monkey. A crab-eating  macaque, as we were later find out they were called, saw Alexis and made a b-line. Alexis, usually a lover of animals and in good control of her faculties immediately started back-pedaling while making little whimpering noises between quiet but panicked little shrieks of “Connor! Connor!....Connor!” She then threw the banana feebly over the monkeys head while pulling her arms in tightly to her body. The monkey looked at the one banana, and then at the other three still in Alexis' hand and clearly made his choice. He went back after Alexis. She dropped them all on the ground and as quickly as she could, while not running, went around the primate and rushed over to me. The monkey happily grabbed the three bananas he scared from her hands a second ago, and then wondered over to the previously tossed banana and sat down to feast. We explored the forest, a grabby monkey literally pulled the bananas from my hand, and had a good time of it. We were probably in there for over an hour, but would have stayed longer had my stomach not been acting up. This was the inevitable part of the trip where I got sick. It wasn't serious and it didn't stop us from doing anything we wanted to do, but it did slow us down a bit.

I was still taking anti-histamines and using the cortisone cream on my rather nasty face-hive things, and sick, but we had things to do and Bali to explore. We decided to follow up on Alexis' Bali Treetop Adventure Park idea, and got a shuttle to take us up to Bedugul where it was located. The drive to get to the city was equal parts beautiful and nauseating. I don't always get car sick, but when I do it's really hard to shake. Usually my only hope of getting rid of it completely is to get out of the car and have no fear of getting back in again. Basically the end of the trip. When we got out of the car we were greeted by four things: Fresh mountain air, a bit of chill in the air, strawberry vendors, and three or so people trying to get us into their taxi to take us to a hotel. One Taxi was actually just part of a hotel down the road and offered us a free ride. Well, we had no idea where we were, nor where any hotels where, AND we were actually looking for exactly that. We took our chances. Turns out we made a good move, because the hotel was not only very close, and affordable, but also built into the hill directly on the edge of the sacred lake for which Bedugul is known. We signed up to do a dawn boat ride out to the temple on the water (which was the picture used for the back of the 5000 rupiah bill (fun fact)), and decided to check out the botanical garden, the other facet of Bedugul for which it was known. Unfortunately my stomach caught up with us and we were forced to make an early retreat to the hotel. I was hoping to make the most of that night by checking out at a local cafe or something fun for dinner after my stomach was all cleared up, when all at once the prescription strength anti-histamines I'd been taking caught up with me. One minute I was reading while we tentatively waited to see if my stomach had in fact been appeased, and the next my eyelids are so heavy my head go dragged down to the bed along with them. It was 6:00pm. Alexis stayed up and read, but I was waking-up-from-surgery tired. That irresistible tired which makes everything seem far away and unimportant. The tired where only the sleep and the need to sleep exist. It worked out reasonably well that that was the night which I got pulled under, because, as it turns out, dawn is quite early. We dragged ourselves out of the warm, comfortable bed and down to the dock with the boatman. It. Was. Freezing. Attention readers, you should probably take anything I say regarding temperature with a grain or three of salt. I am used to Timor weather, and when I was in Bali, I was spending a great deal of time in the sun. Getting up before dawn, in a town up in the mountains, to go OUT ON A LAKE... I was cold. The same way Alexis hadn't packed any shoes but flipflops due to a lack of foreseeable need, I hadn't packed any pants. Or long sleeves. I doubled up on underwear, t-shirts, and socks, but it didn't do much good. Despite the cold, the trip out was completely worth doing. We (meaning our guide while Alexis and I sat curled in little balls shivering) paddled out to the temple on the water. It was quite beautiful, but I was more taken with the scenery of the lake and the surrounding mountains. The fleet of photographers moving in one large clump. They must have actually been one of those touring photography groups based on the equipment they had, plus the fact that they didn't seem interested in any view other than the one through there lenses.

Back on land we decided to make the most of our day. We got breakfast at the hotel and headed up to the botanical gardens. It was about a mile and a half walk, and most of it was up hill, but my stomach was feeling better and we had just had a lovely morning and a nice breakfast. We stopped by a little cafe on the way and had some coffee and a pan au chocolate before finishing the walk and heading into the park proper. The park is particularly well known for it's collection of orchids but, as it turns out, we were there in the orchid off-season. The park was still beautiful and very well maintained with neat and tidy open grassy areas along with clusters of different types of plants and trees and large statues running along the little road that gave vehicle access to the far end of the garden. We walked around for a little bit, but quickly located the Bali Treetop Adventure Park, which took up a small portion of the botanical garden itself, and headed straight in.

They set us up with harnesses and took us through the safety training. The harness was your basic rock climbing harness, so that was nothing new to me, but some of the gear on it was. There were two carabiners along with a rather large metal contraption with only a thin but strong sheet of metal between two or three wheels and the flat top. Under the wheels it was open on one side, so that allowed the contraption to basically function as a large heavy hook with wheels. Any guess what that was for? Yes, it was for zipline, or flying-fox as they called it. The instructions in the training were simple. Always remain clipped in with at least one of the carabiners. Our training area was four trees immediately in front of the little building we had just used to pay for the Ticket. Between the four trees were a range of one to three cables, depending on the challenge, stretched taught. At the beginning of cable, where it was wrapped around the tree, was multicolored tape which acted as your guide. One strip of red tape means clip one carabiner here, two strips of red tape mean clip both carabiners here, and one strip of blue between two strips of red meant clip both carabiners here and your zipline contraption between them. After training we were told to go to the orange course. It was full so we got redirected to the blue course. When we actually walked from the training area into the adventure park proper, all you could see were cables and nets and odd little obstacles strung up between trees and the people who were working to climb, cross, or otherwise complete various courses with a wide range of difficulty. We started on blue, and went through the course. I'm not afraid of heights. Never have been. Do I do have a reasonable caution towards them. I respect that a  10 meter fall could hurt me quite badly depending on how I landed. Alexis, however, seemed to have no concern at all. Zero hesitation. Once she knew she was strapped in there was no fear in her. I was impressed. From a girl shrieking and throwing bananas to evade a monkey walking towards her two or three days before, to this amazon in the trees. It was good to see. We got through blue with relative ease, and then moved on to orange. Orange was not only more difficult, but also a lot longer. It took us maybe thirty minutes to complete that course, which consisted of walking on tight ropes, moving around and between wooden obstacles, climbing through playground sized tubes that bobbed and twisted with every minor adjustment of weight, wooden bars which acted as steps but hung from cables and therefore swung freely, and ziplines. It was a lot of fun, and we were both starting to get tired. The red course was next, and also the second most difficult course. It was 16 meters above the ground, most of the time, and much more difficult than either of the previous courses we'd completed. One of the obstacles consisted of three cables stretching between two trees. One for your safety line, and two that were about a foot and a half apart with a series of ropes hanging from them. On the ends of the ropes were, basically, stirrups. It looked simple enough, but the amount of swing that each one had, it was both very difficult and extremely amusing to try and get through. Alexis especially struggled with it, mostly because of her tiny little legs. The best trick I discovered to make a move from one foothold to the next was to use my adductors to pull my legs together and then use one of my hands to pull the next step into position. Although that was the best way I found to get across, as soon as I'd arrived at the other side, my legs informed me that I had made a grave error and my punishment would be no less than two days of slightly awkward walking. Having crossed such an amusing and difficult obstacle, we were glad to face one that was straight forward. Wait, did I say glad? I meant terrified. I know, I know “but you guys were strapped in. No real danger, right?” Of course but being told that you are now to clip on to a rope, and then jump off the 16 meter high platform, swing across a sizable gap, and then let go in order to grab the spiderweb like net you're swinging into is still a rather daunting task. Alexis asked me to go first. Having bungee jumped before, I was more well prepared for this sort of psychological barrier hurdling. It took me a probably ten seconds to gather myself once my safety line was attached to the rope, but then I took the plunge. Living in Vernonia, we spent a lot of time out in the woods. One particular summer we spent pretty much every waking moment out playing in one particular area or woods that had a rope swing. We spent hours on that thing. So while I was flying through the air towards the net, I was reminded of this. And you know what? It didn't help at all. Bam! Hit the net. Drop the rope. Grab the net with both hands. Find a foot hold. All that in about half a second. I was so full of adrenaline at that point that my legs were basically useless they were shaking so much. My brain also had a misfire, apparently, because without really thinking about where my safety line was supposed to go, I disconnected from the rope. After I let it go, I realized that I was on the net, with no safety line. Whoops. I quickly found that any part of the net that wasn't involved in one of the intricate knots that made it a net instead of just a bunch of rope was thin enough to clip on to. I clipped in one at a time with my carabiners and worked my way to the top where there was an actual safety line. I had to climb a short ways to get to a point where I could actually turn and see Alexis, but once I did I began shouting encouragement. It took her a bit longer to get her self amped up to do it, but I'm proud to say not much longer. She did everything right, including staying attached to the rope for the short climb to the top of the net, and was soon caught up with me. The rest of the red course was challenging, but nothing like the rope jump (Tarzan leap, as they called it), so once we were through with that the rest was down hill, adrenaline speaking. At the very end was a 160 meter long zipline that was the reward for making the rope jump and getting to the end of either the black or red course (they joined right at the end and shared this last leg). The zipline was excellent, we even ended up buy a couple of pictures of us on it from one of the employees whose job it was to take pictures of people while they were climbing about. Alexis chose her activity well. That might have been the single most fun thing we did the entire trip. We stayed in Bedugul one more night, and then headed back to Kuta early the next morning. We bought a shuttle ticket, but there were only two other people who had, so they just took us in a private car for the same price. It was really quite nice. We got back to Kuta and got a hotel room. I don't remember what we did that night, but it was probably just relaxing from the previous days of of walking and adventure parking.

The next day we decided (I decided, Alexis agreed, but it wasn't one of those negotiable things. I was going Hell or high-water (which don't really seem comparable...)) to go try and see the new Batman movie: Dark Night Rises. We arrived at the theater (only one in Bali, as far as I could tell) and got in line. Typically I wouldn't consider going to see a movie as necessarily part of a vacation, but this was important. Why? Because Timor does not have a movie theater. At all. Any where. Doesn't exist. And I really wanted to see this movie. We got there and got in line. It was almost out the door. I found out later that the theater only has two rooms in which they show movies. One was playing Dark Knight Rises back to back to back, and the other was playing Spiderman and Ice-age 4 I think. We finally got the front of the line to get tickets. It was about 1:30 at this point, and the showings were for 1:00, 4:30, and 8:00. 1:00 was basically wide open, but we'd already missed a half an hour, 8:00 was completely sold out, and 4:30 only had ONE ticket left. Defeated we left the theater and decided to try again tomorrow, but we were right next to a giant mall, so we decided to make the most of it. Inside we found a nice place to eat and had lunch. We were going to head home when I spotted a store that caught my interest. Alexis and I went upstairs to check it out. It was an arcade, and it was awesome. We bought about 10 dollars of credit (instead of tokens they put credit on a card that you swipe) and went to town. We played games and hung out for maybe and hour or so and then left with our winnings, a stegosaurus stuffed animal for Alexis and some ice cream to share. The trip out to the theater turned out not to be a total bust, but we only had one more chance to see the movie because of our impending trip back to Dili. That night we got massages because, well, because we could. Turns out the first place we went really did offer only mediocre work, because the place we went the second time was AMAZING. Best massage I've every had, hands down.

The next morning we got up, grabbed an excellent breakfast, and then grabbed a cab to head to the mall early. This theater had a policy that you can only buy tickets for the same day, and the box opened at 12:00. We aimed to be there for 11:00-11:15, but the traffic on the way was awful. We ended up arriving around 11:40. It took an hour of waiting in line to finally get to the front (it really was out the door this time) and when we did we were rewarded for our patience. Two tickets to Batman at 1:00. We had to wait for about fifteen minutes for them to open the theater to go and find our seats, but we were well settled by the time the trailers started. An interesting thing about this theater is that the seats are assigned. When you buy your ticket, you also choose where you will sit. The movie was awesome, I loved every minute of it and wanted to see it again the second it was over. But alas, we were only in Bali for one more day. We grabbed some ice cream at Cold Stone (yeah, they had a Cold Stone), and then headed back to the hotel. We went to the beach for an hour or so, Alexis sunned and read while I played in the waves. When the sunset we went and had dinner at Sandbar, the place that was super gourmet, and each tried something different this time. I was still a bit sick stomach wise, so I ended up only eating about half of what I ordered, even though it was on the lighter side of foods. Alexis wasn't particularly please with her meal either, but we had some delicious drinks and desserts, so we left happy.

After that it was sleep, cab, immigration, plane, immigration, cab, home. It was a fantastic vacation, and I really needed it. I like it here in Dili, but man it can get really claustrophobic after awhile. I've only been back in Dili for a month now, and I'm already feeling like I need a vacation. In all likelihood I will be finishing up here in late October, maybe travel around Southeast Asia for a bit, and then head home for late November/early December. That's the sort of plan for now, but I'll let you all know if anything changes.

Love to my family and friends, hope all is well!

Cheers,

-Rowan Connor