Bali is nothing short of paradise for travelers on a tight budget. As Dallas put it, with a stack of $2 and $5 bills (actually 20,000 and 50,000 Rupiah notes), you can live like a king, and that’s what we’ve been doing. We are already talking about how hard it will be to leave here in a couple of years, I mean weeks.

Friday we walked around the village of Serangen and got a taste of local culture. The villagers were out and about on their scooters or walking, some of them wearing sarongs and the stereotypical Asian hats that look like a flattened cone. Most everyone was friendly, although the children seem much more shy around us than those in the Pacific islands.

The Balinese architecture is pretty distinctive. Villagers live in family compounds consisting of several small buildings dedicated to particular activities (cooking, sleeping, praying), all of which are surrounded by a stone wall. Each village has at least one temple, or pura in Indonesian (the locals always tell us this when they hear the name of our boat), and in the evenings we can hear singing coming from the local temple. The compounds and the temple here in Serangen seem to be in pretty good shape, but we were surprised at the amount of trash littering the streets and alley ways — not just the bits and pieces lying around, but actual piles of smelly rubbish right there in the middle of their otherwise orderly village. Perhaps there are trash services coming later in the week…

About every block or so there is a warung, a small building where food and various goods are sold, and we stopped in one yesterday for our cheapest meal so far — two bowls of mi goreng (ramen noodles with vegetables and egg) plus a glass bottle of Sprite for a whopping $2. Not necessarily gourmet, but it was tasty. Dallas and I are both suckers for a good deal, so I’m sure we’ll be back.

Warung with family compound behind

After lunch we headed back to the boat and packed a bag for an overnight stay in the beachside town of Kuta. We asked one of the local boys that provides services for yachties for a ride ashore so that we could leave the dinghy at the boat rather than on the dinghy dock. Crime doesn’t seem to be a major issue here, but we have learned from experience (i.e., Las Perlas Islands) that you can’t be too careful when it comes to the dinghy.

Kuta is where most visitors to Bali make their base. There is a nice, long, fine-white-sand beach with decent swell for surfing, vibrant nightlife, and tons of restaurants, shops, massage parlors, etc. We splurged on a $30 air-conditioned bungalow for the night and sat down for $3 personal pizzas and $2 large Bintang beers in a great little open-air restaurant with couches full of surfers using the free wi-fi. Such a rough life! We then swam and lounged at the hotel pool for a bit before Dallas was ready to further explore the cheap culinary delights. This time he opted for Mexican (veggie burrito), but what he got was more like an egg roll wrapped up in a flour tortilla.

We had read in our travel guide that the nightlife doesn’t really get going until late, so we returned to the hotel for a nice, long nap to prepare….Dallas was enjoying his sleep quite a bit, but it’s not everyday that we are in Kuta, so I persuaded him to rise from the dead and hit the town with me at midnight! He found it was worth the effort, though. We heard some great live music (hearing American classic rock sung with an Indonesian accent is pretty amusing), ate some more pizza, met some cool Frenchies, and did a lot of people-watching. Oh, and of course I got some dancing in while Dallas chilled on the nearest couch.

Ready for a night on the town

Sleeping in is not a skill that we seem to possess anymore, but we gave it our best shot and took it easy the following day. I got a much-needed haircut and pedicure for less than $5 and joined Dallas for some more lounging beside the pool. Then it was time to eat again and lounge some more — this time at the beach. If we don’t start trying to surf pretty soon, we’re going to be too out of shape to even attempt it! So far we haven’t followed our Bali itinerary much at all, but we are taking full advantage of the opportunity to relax and will set off to see the sights that we are most interested in a couple of days.

Getting in some serious R & R

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!!