Island of touts

Indonesia has been Ben's travel favourite for a long time. He has always wanted to go back since spending a month in Sulawesi a few years ago. We debated for a long time whether or not visit Bali, the most famous of all the islands in Indonesia. Over 80 per cent of travellers going to Indonesia visit only Bali. What we experienced so far with most of the famous places is that we understand why they originally got famous, but they are now ruined by too much tourism. That's how we felt about almost the whole south of Thailand, especially Ao Nang and Ko Phi Phi, and some parts of Vietnam, for example. We read in many places how Bali is now drowning in rubbish, loud dance music playing into the early morning hours in Kuta beach and the cheap poison booze killing travellers even in the 5-star resorts. Didn't sound too good. But then again, in a way we were curious to see what all the fuss was about.

What really decided it for us was the flights. Most of the cheaper flights obviously go to Bali. And it is a good place to start exploring the islands to the east. Lombok, Komodo and Flores were all waiting in a reasonable distance. Two days after Ben's sister and brother had left Vietnam we were already off to Bali. Obviously, the cheap flight comes with a cost: it includes a long stop in Kuala Lumpur airport, once again.

Our first experiences in Bali were indeed not the best ones. We arrived in Bali just after midnight, which was okay for us, meaning that we get an extra day to do a visa extension, which should be done one week before the 30-day visa on arrival expires. We had read many different things on the internet about extending the visa, so on arrival Ben wanted to check with the immigration officer stamping his passport that it is for sure possible to extend this visa. Instantly, the officer wanted to help him do it, wanting to give him his phone number and listed all the friends he had in different offices, who could offer him help with the extension, probably for a special fee or something... That was funny, but we got our passports stamped and got out. And then we got to meet the taxi mafia.

Midnight is not really the best time to haggle for cheaper prices. They know you've just flown in, queued for a while, you're tired, and you just want to go to bed. They have all the power unless you happen to feel like walking. We had come to the conclusion that we'd head to Denpasar, where also the airport was located, for a few nights and then keep going north instead of the usual destination of Kuta beach in the south. We really didn't have to see that. We had booked a guesthouse, and on the website they had said that we shouldn't pay more than 90,000 rupiahs for the taxi. We talked a while with the taxi drivers, whose set price of 20-25 dollars (a set price, is it?) was way over two times more than that. We tried to haggle and only got laughed at, all taxi drivers working together and agreeing to the prices in Indonesian right in front of us. Then we walked to the other side of the terminal, and the same thing followed, until Ben said to me "okay, we go back to the guy who agreed on 150 then". We started to leave, and that's when the price started to drop. We ended up paying still too much, but at least we had done our best now. Finally, a 20-minute drive later we got to our guesthouse, Nakula Familiar Inn, happy that we had decided to stay there and not Kuta. Not because of Denpasar being that nice, but because we now knew that Kuta would probably be a place full of similar attitudes and rip-offs and it wouldn't offer that much for us anyway.

After few days of recovering from the long flight we took a bemo, which is a local way of public transport, basically a minivan, to a bus terminal, where we switched to another bemo, which took us to a place in central highlands of Bali, Candikuning. Candikuning is famous for fruit production, flowers and cool mountain climate. We checked into a guesthouse and met a guy called Amin, who works as a tour guide. He's the one who helped us find our guesthouse. Normally we would be a bit wary of these guys. Amin however seemed to be a genuinely likable guy, he spoke great English and his little book of recommendations was full of good reviews in many languages. He made us a good offer for a motorbike-hiking-sightseeing day tour, which would end in Lovina (or wherever we wanted) on the north coast. That was good, because then we wouldn't have to worry about transport to the next destination. We signed up for the next day. Candikuning itself is nothing special, it has nice botanical gardens and a nice little temple on a lake, but mostly it's the surroundings that people come there for. We thought we might as well do a tour and see a little bit of central Bali.

 

The tour started early as Amin woke us up before sunrise. We took the motorbikes up a mountain, where we spent a while watching the sunrise. Then on schedule was seeing the temple on the lake, which is also pictured on the 50,000 bank note. After that we went back to the guesthouse for western style breakfast, and after finishing that Amin came back with a local breakfast! A day that starts with two breakfasts can't be a bad one, can it? We spent the day with Amin and as the hours went by we realised we made a good decision with hiring this guy. He was funny, full of information of local plants and foods, we tasted many fruits, hiked past two waterfalls and rice fields, learned a lot about culture and we even saw a little chameleon! We finished the day with swimming in thermal pools, a good way to relax after a long day, if nothing special otherwise. After that it was a short ride to Lovina, where we checked into a hotel that Amin recommended.

 

We had planned to rest the next day, but we accidentally haggled ourselves into a doing a dive trip. As soon as we had sat down at the hotel restaurant, a guy approached us, wanting to sell us a dive trip. We said that we just got back from a long tour and wanted to sleep long the next day. However, we looked at the brochures just in case we wanted to go later and it sure looked nice. It was about Menjangan island, probably the most famous dive spot in Bali. We also knew it would be expensive. But this guy wanted us to go tomorrow, because they clearly needed a full boat. We could have considered it, but he asked 90 euros for two dives! That was way too much for us even if the diving was nice. We told him that. We told that we really weren't even planning to go and it was too much for us anyway, so we said that we don't have to dive, we are just happy to relax. But he kept asking, "well how much you want to pay?" again and again. So we said that 25 per dive was the maximum we pay for a dive and there was really no point having this conversation anyway because we wouldn't go up with the price, we didn't even want to dive in the first place. He tried with 75 for two dives, and we were already getting a little annoyed, we just wanted this dude to leave, but then he made a phone call to someone and went "okay", and we, a little bit surprised of what just happened, ended up booking the dives.

The diving was surprisingly good. We were looking for pygmy seahorses and managed to find some! We also saw massive schools of jackfish, huge scorpionfish, nudibranchs and lots of other interesting stuff. There was also a small cave that we got to swim into. The softcorals were beautiful and diving was in the end worth it. We were tired but happy it worked out in the end. In the evening Amin came to visit us and gave us a bottle or Arak, the famous local home made coconut booze. He assured that it was safe, because it was made by a family he knows. He said he is careful with arak and he even knows a guy who died on the cheap stuff. We had no reason to doubt him, so Ben tried a little bit. And he liked it.

Lovina itself wasn't that special, the beach was okay at most and the town itself was on the touristy side but pleasant enough, but what mattered to us was that the sea water wasn't clear so there was not much snorkelling at that moment. We stayed for a few days, since we had a nice place with a pool and wifi, so we did some planning, reading and relaxing. And soon we were off again, this time to Jemeluk.

When we travel in the tropics, we have mostly one thing in mind: the underwater world. Enthusiastic snorkellers and divers, we often choose our destinations based on how good the snorkelling or diving is. And that's why Jemeluk was next on the list. We had heard of Jemeluk Bay being a good snorkelling destination, so we hired a car for about 20 dollars to drive us the 2 hour journey to Amed. Jemeluk is actually a part of Amed, 500 metres away and often mentioned as the same place. And we weren't disappointed! The place kept us busy for a week! First we stayed on the Amed side, just snorkeling off the beach, which was already very nice with lots of fish and the occasional stingray hiding under the table corals. And then we decided to move on to the Jemeluk side and we were amazed! It is a very unusual place, the current sweeping through the protected bay, beautiful hard and soft corals on both sides of the bay and a steep sandy drop off in the middle. 15 metres off the beach the water gets so deep that you only see blue. And one of the best thing is that this brings in an unusual amount of big fishes, coming to clean and feed at the reefs. There is almost everything you might want to see while snorkeling. In fact snorkeling was so good that we decided to leave diving aside. Why pay, when you can just go off the beach with the basic gear and see about the same things? We saw stingrays, scorpionfish, stonefish, a mimic octopus, a bigger octopus of some kind, nemos, unicornfish, triggerfish, surgeonfish and so many things we can't even name them all here. Only thing missing was sharks. We were told they see them occasionally, but we were not lucky enough to see one. But we were extremely happy. This was what we had been hoping for.

But all good things come to an end. We had spent already over two weeks in Bali, and in a week we would have to to drop off our visa extension applications in an office in Lombok, the next island. So reluctantly we decided to move on to Padangbai, our last stop in Bali and the main port for ferries going on to Lombok.

Padangbai was a nice enough place, with a weird beach with the craziest sand we've ever seen. Every step you took you sank very deep, and looking closely we realised why: the sand wasn't actually sand, it was small, perfectly round pebbles of some sort. We never found out why is it like this, but it was funny. We also tried snorkeling in the nearby Blue Lagoon, but it was disapponting. We happened to be there at low tide, and the waves crashing hard on the coral and sharp rocks half a metre below the surface made it kind of dangerous to go out, so we abandoned the plan and just chilled watching lizards for a few minutes before walking back to the guesthouse.

Bali is a beautiful island and what makes it special is the Hindu culture that you can't really find elsewhere. Bali is full of life, culture, temples, music and flowers. But it is also full of touts, rip-off prices, dishonest people and party places. We wanted to give Bali a chance, but it just isn't our kind of place. Don't get me wrong - it's a nice island. But somehow it doesn't feel like real Indonesia, whatever that means. When we think of Indonesia, we think of different things: Muslims, smoking volcanos, deep jungle, orangutans, big lizards, curious locals, beautiful coral reefs and only a few other tourists. So we felt like changing scenery and we booked tickets to Lombok.