Blog Posts, SE Asia Blog Posts

Week 136: Bali to Lombok

This week has been great. I was planning to leave Kuta at the start of the week and ride to Ubud, but my couchsurfing host was really nice, so I decided to hang around for a few more days. We would go out to eat cheap, but really nice noodles and other local food, then get fruit smoothies in the evenings. There are some great smoothy places in Kuta, you can choose what ever fruits you want to add and you only pay about 50 pence for almost a pint of smoothy. One of the best is avocado with chocolate sauce, but I liked to add banana to it too. So on Wednesday I rode 45 Km from Kuta to Ubud. The first half of the trip went quickly, just an hour. But the second half was on a long gradual uphill, my bike is pretty heavy and I haven’t adapted to the weight yet, so I had to slow right down and stop for a few minutes every few Km.

Bali

When I finally arrived in Ubud I stayed with another couchsurfer who I met last week through Sita (My first Indonesian CS host). He has a really nice place down by the river, the only problem is that the river gets a bit smelly sometimes. Sita decided to drive up to Ubud and hung around with me for a couple of days which David was working. Ubud is a nice enough place, but it is basically a tourist town, there are beggars and taxi drivers hassling you all the time and everything is more expensive. After a couple of days there I was ready to leave, so I set off towards the coast to get the ferry to Lombok.

Bali

The ride to the coast was much easier than my first day as it was mostly downhill, taking me through small villages with mountains and rice fields in the background, it was a little over 45Km but I didn’t need to stop for a rest and didn’t feel overly tired when I got on the ferry. I took the slow ferry across to Lombok because it is the cheapest ferry (about $5). It takes about 4 or 5 hours to cross the small channel between the islands. I sat in the air conditioned VIP section because there was nobody checking tickets, then went up on to the roof of the ferry to do some yoga and admire the view. I wasn’t sure whether I would want to ride into town (which I thought was 30Km from the port), or whether I would camp near the port and ride into town on Sunday. But after almost 5 hours on the ferry I decided to just ride. It was only a little over 20Km to my couchsurfing hosts place and I arrived at about 9pm, had a bucket wash and set up my Thermarest mattress for a night sleeping on the floor. Lombok is a Muslim island, like most of Indonesia, so it reminds me a little of Zanzibar and northern Africa. I’m not sure how long I will stay here. I need to extend my visa soon to get my second month, I can do that here and visit some of the small islands around Lombok. I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.

Blog Posts, SE Asia Blog Posts

Week 135: Bali

After arriving in Bali last week, I have been staying with my CouchSurfing host Sita. One of the first things that I noticed when I wandered around Bali was that there are so many beautifully decorated buildings and small temples for people to leave offerings in each day (as the main religion here is Hinduism). It really is a great change after a year of living in the very European culture of Australia. I set up my bike and repacked all of my equipment into my panniers, I am now sure, and relieved, that I have enough space for all of my stuff. I haven’t actually been out on the bike yet, because we have been driving around the south of the island on Sita’s moped, which has been a challenge as it is. I haven’t ridden a motorbike for a year while I was in Australia, but that isn’t the problem. Basically the moped has an automatic clutch, which everyone tells me makes it easier to ride, but as I am used to having a clutch I struggle with ‘slow control’ and changing down through the gears smoothly. The advantage of riding around on the moped is that I am getting used to the hectic traffic here and the different road rules. Basically if you see a space you take it and everyone else just adapts to your movements. The other drivers are used to that kind of thing, so they are alert and I haven’t seen any accidents, despite the amount of mopeds which drive so closely to each other. I also noticed that they actually use their horns for the correct purpose, letting people people know that they are there (when coming around a bling corner or overtaking someone who doesn’t have mirrors), rather that an extension of a shouting voice like we seem to in the UK.

Bali

Each day we have been going out to visit different places around the area, only one of those days did we go to a beach, which I didn’t really enjoy as it was kinda dirty and overly crowded with sunburnt Europeans. On Wednesday we went out to an old temple called Pura Gunung Kawi, bathed in the river that runs through the temple and wandered through the rice fields that surround it. On the way back we stopped in another town called Ubud, where we visited the Monkey Forest and met up with another CouchSurfer for dinner. The Monkey Forest is an area of forest in Ubud which contains a couple of temples and is home to a lot of monkeys. I wasn’t planning to spend much time in this area of Bali because I had heard how touristy it is, but I am staying with my CouchSurfing host and avoiding the main tourist areas, eating street food and meeting local people. I am really enjoying it but I think I will move on soon, heading east and getting a ferry to the next island to the east, Lombok. But before I do leave I want to learn some Indonesian from Sita to prepare for the rest of my trip.

Bali