Bali - Day 1 - Ubud

Good morning Bali!

Our Joglo view

Well, as it happens not such a good morning. Having calmly reassured Lisa just before going to sleep that there were no mosquitos this high up in the cool air at night – three of the little fuckers proceeded to land on my head, waking me up by reflexively swatting myself in the face.

This was the least of our sleeping troubles however. Around 4am the local rice farmers began work, the local cows began mooing, every dog in Ubud (about 3 million) started barking and the local motorbikes began trundling past and we didn’t bring any earplugs… We tossed and turned for a couple of hours until things died down, finally drifting back to sleep and waking up around 9:30, but feeling pretty ordinary after the flight, death race 3000 and agricultural alarm clock. We quickly reminded ourselves we were now on holiday and decided to embrace these things, confident that afternoon naps and early nights ahead would see us through Bali ok.

The garden

First on our agenda for day one was visa applications (wooo!) to get back into Australia, with our 457 sponsorship expiring with my contract in mid-August. Fortunately the process was pretty painless and over with in about 30 minutes. After one of the house staff Cantik brought us a couple of bowls of tasty fruit for breakfast, we had a tea and coffee and a (mostly) cold shower and were ready to take on Ubud.

We decided that a lift in on day 1 would probably be better than scooting blindly towards somewhere we’d never been and it proved a wise decision. Apparently in Indonesia right now it’s holiday time and as Trish put it “the whole of Jakarta has descended on Ubud this week” – plus the rest of the western summer tourists, meant that the main road into Ubud from the south was MENTAL. Last night was nothing by comparison. The day before Trish said she’d attempted to drive into town in her (rather amazing) jeep thing, but given up halfway and returned home as traffic was so bad.

The road from our Joglo is rough at best, passing through the small town of Tengkulak – lining the street is a mix of small convenience stores, makeshift petrol stations for scooters (selling a fuel mix for 50c a litre – out of a variety of containers, our favourite by far being old Absolut Vodka bottles!), and Warungs – street food vendors. Once we are out of our small town and onto the main road it is once again chaos. Although it was only about 5km into town from the turning it took 30 minutes. About halfway there is another small town with a few more warungs, shops, actual petrol stations etc – as well as a fancy restaurant and cause of the chaos. Apparently these guys are doing well enough to afford to pay off the Police to stand outside directing traffic for their customers – and are the only guys in town to have on street parking permitted, which, in a two lane road filled with a constant stream of traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, dogs and chickens is fun to say the least.

We got dropped off on the corner of a couple of the biggest street and waved goodbye to Trish – immediately forgetting everything she had told us about where to go, which direction it was in or why we had decided to come to Bali in the first place. We took a deep breath, looked at each other and wondered if we would ever see her again as she sped off into the haze and we headed west (I think) in search of some lunch.

We spent about an hour meandering along what seemed like a fairly busy and central street – window shopping and turning down offers of taxi’s (most of the guys hold a sign simply saying TAXI – but our favourite was a gent that pre-empted the rejection by having his read MAYBE FOR TOMORROW? – which was the response every other guy gave once you said no. We had been searching for recommended café’s but had seen nothing. A quick check of the bible (Lonely Planet) confirmed we had no idea what street we were on, or where anything was so we ducked down a pathway to what seemed like a nice looking café thing overlooking the river. Here we delved into our first Indonesian food (but played it safe with Nasi Goreng and Beef Rendang) – and our first Bintang beers. All were excellent, but we both felt a bit tipsy after the beers – especially Lisa as a large beer = 2 regular beers and she isn’t known for her daytime boozing.

Lunchtime views

Full, but slightly spaced out from a combination of tiredness, dehydration, the heat and the beer we stumbled down as many interesting looking streets as we could find trying to get our bearings. We saw temples, visited the BAWA office (Bali Animal Welfare Asomething) and stroked some abandoned pooches (street dogs it seems are a big problem no one wants to deal with here), saw the monkey temple and a couple of Macaqs, had a coffee somewhere trendy, before heading to a supermarket to check out the local goods (I think we have become our parents). After much amusement at some of the product names, we stocked up on beers and cereal and grabbed the first taxi we could find back. After haggling the guy down from 80,000 to 60,000 (still 10,000 over what it should’ve been – but halfway through I realized that was only $1 and let it go!!) we arrived back at the villa exhausted, again.

As we wouldn’t get our scooter until tomorrow, we took a stroll around the corner to a resort restaurant for food – which was once again really tasty, before heading back to the Joglo and pretty much both collapsed at 8:30. We had enjoyed our Ubud orientation, and were excited about exploring more on the scooter tomorrow!