The Road to Bali

See our Bali album at Bali Album . Here's another album at Bali iphoto link
Hot, exotic, and cheap.  No, we’re not talking about a Thai hooker, but the tropical paradise of Bali, the tiny island that sits at the end of a string of islands that form the Indonesian archipelago just south of the Equator. It is beautiful and lush, but the weather is hot, humid, and oppressive.  If there were an international armpit farting competition (and we cannot say with certainty that there is not), it would certainly be held in Bali.

We had both been here before—Linda two years ago on her alleged “quilting tour” with Gail, and Roger nearly 40 years ago on his back-packing trip through Asia with Delaney.  Not much has changed for Linda.  For Roger, quite a lot. In the seventies, the tourist mecca was clustered around the surfing beaches at Kuta, infested with beer-soaked Australians, but the rest of island was beautiful pristine rice paddies and quiet rural villages. Today the tourist trade has spread far and wide from Kuta, and it is almost continuous development of hotels, restaurants and boutiques for miles into what was once the countryside.

This is not one of those “you should have been here in the old days before it was ruined” rants.  Bali is still magical, and in fact quite a bit more comfortable and travel-friendly. We started our trip a few miles across the peninsula from Kuta in Sanur, a recent beach development where there are quiet local beaches nestled among the big resorts, and a reasonable amount of shops and restaurants.  The Australians are older now, and have more money, and there is quite a population of American and Canadian ex-pats who have taken up residence in villas and condos near the beach. Our stay here was our standard fare: a modest, charming family-run guesthouse a short walk from the beach, shopping, and ever-present $5.00/hour massage places, MANY of which were legitimate.  We prowled the beach and town in the morning and late in the afternoon, and cooled off at the pool and in the a/c during the heat of the day. As always, there were interesting people staying there- Nancy and Sylvain from Montreal on an amazingly well-planned month-long trip through the island, and Kas, a Dutchman who escapes winter for five months every year, a smart feller for sure.

Beach walking and pool lolling were fun, but we went a little further afield one day with a taxi arranged by the hotel for us. We had a driver and car for ten hours at our disposal for $40.00, and got out money’s worth. We visited a local market, a few beaches in on the western shore, and Kuta and Legian with their miles-long beach filled with locals, tourists, and surfing schools. We finished our day at the seaside Tanah Lot Temple just in time for a breathtaking sunset. A well-spent $40.00!

After our four-day decompression by the seashore, we took a bus to Ubud up in the hills about 90 minutes north of Kuta.  We found a simple home stay for the first night, and then moved into unaccustomed opulence at the Komeneka Monkey Forest Resort for the last two nights.  We had a private villa with our own infinity pool, and gorgeous view of the jungle ravine and rice paddies adjacent the hotel.  A nice way to travel, to be sure, but if this were our normal standard we could afford to travel once, perhaps twice a decade. 

Is that a banana in your pocket…?  We visited the beautiful and enchanting Monkey Forest Temple where Roger was attacked by a troop of monkeys.  He had bought a small bunch of bananas at the park entrance to feed the animals. This is against all advice from the guidebooks and the park signs where the warning was posted in several languages, one of them English.  His first monkey encounter was friendly enough, with Roger handing a banana to a patient little guy who neatly peeled and ate it. Awwww, it is SO cute! The same monkey then decided he wanted ALL of the bananas, right NOW, and proceeded to climb up Roger’s leg, nearly pulling down the poor guy’s cargo shorts. Roger had to protect his glasses, his camera, and the bananas, so something had to go. He wisely chose to give up the fruit, and the attack stopped immediately.  The monkey was pretty cool about getting the best of Roger; he didn’t flaunt his victory or try to make Rog feel less than a REAL man. That’s better behavior than you could expect from a lot of humans. Twenty minutes later two different monkeys leaped on Roger, even without the lure of food.  A decidedly unsympathetic Linda captured the debacle on film, as did tourists representing countries from most of the world. Someone has probably posted a you-tube video by now.

We spent the rest of our visit avoiding the monkey-infested areas of town, although we were compelled to eat dinner one night at the Three Monkeys Tavern, just to keep the memory alive. The area surrounding Ubud is beautiful, and we spent one blisteringly hot morning hiking the ridge and rice paddies. We finished off our Ubud visit with a morning at a local spa, where 2 ½ hours of Balinese massage, mud exfoliation, and floral baths costs under $20.00. The treatments worked, and now neither of us has even a little monkey stench.

In five hours, we leave Bali and fly overnight to Guam, where we get to spend time with Nick and Amanda. We are VERY excited to have this time with them. They have been gone from the mainland for seven months, way too long. We are a little sad to leave Bali, though. The people here are the kindest, calmest, most gracious ones we have found. If getting here weren’t such a long, pricey ordeal, we’d be back in a heartbeat.