Bali – Just Like it Says on the Packet

Alicia and I arrived in Denpasar airport at stupid o’clock in the morning of 16^th Feb. Uniquely for immigration officers, ours appeared to communicate only in Robbie Williams songs. He sang ‘Angels’ as he stared into my eyes, smiling manically. By about mid second verse he had, in perfect 4/4 time, stamped my passport. I wanted to thank him but I didn’t speak boyband. 
              Surely, I thought to myself, the guidebook would have mentioned if Indonesians communicate only through awful pop music. It would be like living in Glee. I’d become resigned to the fact that I’d have to hammer a biro into both of my ears but when I asked the customs guy where the nearest ATM was to the melody of ‘Let me entertain you’, he backed away slowly and whispered something urgent into his walkie talkie. Thank God.
        

A pesky cigarette seller on Kuta beach.

            In a taxi to Kuta beach, we got talking with an Aussie lady who had spent the last four months sailing a yacht around South-East Asia. Apparently the Indo Classic yacht race leaves Darwin every September or something and a whole bunch of tanned people blat around various islands. Before I left I had been trying for months to find out if it was possible to get from Darwin to Indo by sea and an hour after landing I was being told how easy it was to get a gig crewing one of these yachts. Typical. Still, I probably would have had to wear white shorts and learn how to pronounce fo'c's'le.

In a fun reinterpretation of the role of a taxi, our driver dropped us off near Kuta and as we walked around a corner and saw the dirty grey curve of sand stretching into the smog, I could see the driver’s point. I wouldn’t want to get too close to it either. We skipped through a layer of broken flip flops, plastic bags and mangy dogs until we figured it was time to find a room. A night divided between Darwin’s street-front beer gardens, the departure hall of the international airport and a spartan budget flight had left us foggy-headed.

            Away from the beach, Kuta was pretty much as expected – cheap rooms, overpriced restaurants, and poorly driven scooters carrying singlets, sunburn and surfboards through hot concrete streets. After an hour spent looking at rooms that were either too expensive or too revolting, we found a pretty decent one. Up high away from the worst of the heat, it had just enough grime and mysterious stains to let us know we’d arrived in Asia. We crashed out.

Watching the sun dissolve into the smog over a Bintang before tackling the Kuta clubs.

            The next day was spent surfing, drinking Bintang, and eating cheap fishy snacks on the beach. When the sun set and the beach emptied it was on to one of the trashy nightclubs to sample the jam-jars – basically some local spirits served in sports drink bottles with lids and inbuilt straws – and listen to some karaoke. Feeling a dangerous mix of adventurousness and boredom, I bought a roll of pseudo-ephedrine tablets which the swarthy man in the nightclub said were legal and would make me “strong for the drinking”. Well, how could I say no? To nobody’s great surprise, they just gave me a slight headache and a desire to leave.

We wandered through Kuta’s nightclub district, politely refusing offers of “marrywana”, “estassy” and “coke” from bare-chested, long-haired gentlemen reclining on parked scooters in front of the brightly-lit girly-bars and discos. The nightclubs were packed. Like neon rites of passage for every twenty-something Australian, half a dozen of these cheesy fun-factories boom their 5-year-old pop songs onto the street where groups of singing, brawling youths dance with the traffic. A hundred metres away is the monument to the 202 people killed by a suicide bomber at Paddy’s Pub night club in 2002. It’s very easy to imagine the chaos and panic of that night and if it weren’t for the group of blonde girls in bikini tops staggering past screaming Guns N’ Roses songs, I’d describe it as a sobering sight.

            In the morning we negotiated the hire of a scooter and headed north through the traffic snarls, glad to have seen this sacred sight on the banana pancake trail, but even gladder that we’d never have to go back. Well, except to return the bike.

Ubud is a seriously pretty place

            We spent the next three days zipping through the Balinese traffic over mountains, through rice paddies and jungle, and alongside black volcanic beaches. The interior of the island is just like you think Bali should be – green and friendly with people doing incomprehensible things in fields that, apparently, create food.

            We stopped at Ubud, where a monkey stole my water bottle (I’d rather not talk about it, thanks), and stayed in a great little home-stay with reassuringly monkey-proof doors right in the jungle. The following morning we got lost and cold finding a mountain road to the north coast. After our seventeenth wrong turn, we came to a misty village that looked like an Indiana Jones film set. Alicia wanted to stop to take photos but I though I heard a distant chant of ‘Kali Ma… Kali Ma,’ and as anyone who grew up with a VHS of Temple of Doom knows, that means you’re about to have your heart torn out. We jumped on my little pink scooter and roared (ahem) away. At this stage I should point out the odd fact that whenever I pay to rent a motorbike, what I get is a little pink automatic scooter. I have no idea why but I’ve come to accept it as an unfortunate fact of life, like death and Adam Sandler films. So we jumped on Daffyd (the only gay scooter on the island) and whirred down steep, windy roads to Lovina on the north coast, where Alicia got scared of a dog on the beach and I drank a beer.

            After a night in the sleepy east-coast port town of Padang Bai, I dropped Alicia off in Sanur and went solo to return Daffyd in Kuta. We found a room near the dock and bought tickets for the 7am ferry to Nusa Lembongan.

No time for love Dr Jones! This deserted village in the misty Balinese mountains was too spooky to stay at for long.