Leaving south Bali to enjoy a bit of the itinerary Lauren had planned was exciting, but also a little nerve-wracking.  Even though I have a US motorcycle license, I’ve never owned a bike and haven’t driven one much.  Luckily bikes in Bali are limited to 250cc.  Bike is actually a little bit of a misnomer.  Most of the country gets around on scooters, which is what we rented.  Ours was an automatic, which definitely made things easier, but Bali traffic was still an adventure.  The roads are often narrow, driving is on the left side, and the lanes here taken as helpful suggestions more than rules.  Trucks and bikes are constantly using part or most of the other lane to pass or to get around vehicles parked at the side of the road.  Traffic is bad enough that people needing to make a turn across traffic often cross when they can and then ride the wrong way down the edge of the road to where they want to turn.  Driving the wrong way on the edge is also a common way to get started into busy traffic.  Your general responsibility is to watch out for what’s in front of you and assume that those behind you will do the same.  Honking is actually a courteous act here that most people use to warn someone that you’re about to overtake them.  Intersections are probably the worst, as only a few have working stoplights.  The rest are a sort of mad tangle of traffic that’s a little harrowing the first couple of times.  Everyone just works their way into the intersection in the direction they want to go, trying not to stop.  As you gain practice, you learn how people react and how to smoothly cross in front or behind of a moving car or bike, but my first attempt was a near collision.  Luckily a scooter has a pretty short braking distance.  The other added complication we had was that the face mask of the helmet I was wearing needed to be down to avoid being pulled over, but it was old, heavily tinted, and so covered with scrapes and scratches that seeing through it was a challenge.  If Balinese drivers weren’t so incredibly competent and courteous it would have been a nightmare, but as it was we ended up enjoying it even if we were sore by the end of the day.  Lauren sat still behind me and did a great job of reading the occasional road sign preceding an intersection and telling me which way to turn.  Without the occasional signs, we would have had a pretty tough time figuring out where we were going.  Fueling up was the other funny part of driving.  There are gas stations every so often in larger towns where you can buy gas for $0.45/liter, but lots of people just get gas at roadside stands, as anybody with a roadside shop of some sort may be selling gas as well.  The shop owner will put a rack of one and two liter glass bottles filled with yellow gasoline out front, with Absolut vodka bottles being the most popular.  The premium for the convenience is pretty small – only $0.50/liter, so we used them several times.

Getting ready to hit the mean streets of Bali

Our first stop was Pura Tanah Lot (Pura means temple).  Tanah Lot is a picturesque seaside temple that is actually built on top of a mound of volcanic rock that is separated from the mainland by a short stretch of ocean about 150 feet wide.  The tide seemed to be near a low when we were there as several Indonesian men dressed in traditional religious garb were able to cross over to the temple with the water only coming up to their thighs at the deepest point.  After checking out the beautiful ground, temples, and views on the cliffs of the mainland, we waded back through row after row of souvenir shops and climbed onto the bike for a ride into the mountains.

Purah Tanah Lot

After a short stop to down a couple plates of Mie Goreng and cold soft drinks, we climbed up into the cool mountain air through small villages and past hillsides covered with terraced rice paddies until we finally reached Pura Luhur Batukau.  Pura Luhur Batukau is billed as a less-visited misty mountain temple and it lived up to its billing.  It wasn’t misty when we were there, but it was quiet, cool, and beautiful.  To enter a temple here you have to be wearing appropriate clothing, which includes a sarong and sort of satin belt in all cases and a special head wrap as well sometimes.  Since most tourists are traveling in Western clothing, the temple staff keep loaner sarongs on hand that they wrapped around us before we entered.  While we were having sarongs wrapped around us, we got a good laugh out of the sign saying that the following people were not allowed to enter the temple: (1) Ladies who are pregnant, (2) Ladies whose children have not got their first teeth, (3) Children whose first teeth have not fallen out yet, (4) Ladies during their period, (5), Devotees getting impure due to death, (6) Mad ladies/gentlemen, and (7), Those not properly dressed.

The temple itself was made from stone or concrete with lots of stone carvings, mossy stairways and walls, and traditional courtyards with altars and structures for ceremonies.  It was a fairly large complex that seemed to have people living there and was still undergoing expansion.  We followed one new concrete path through the forest and down a long stairway until we reached a mountain stream rushing over rounded boulders.  It’s only rained once or twice since we’ve been here, but the streams, ditches, rivers, and rice paddies are all full of water running down from the mountains.  In typical Asian or at least Balinese fashion, there was a large pile of trash being burned half-heartedly right at the edge of the temple.  Bali is a fairly clean place, but there are definitely cases, especially inside or next to otherwise beautiful locations where you see trash piles that would be removed from view in western areas.  Even with our loaner sarongs, there were several more sacred parts of the temple where we could only look in because were were tourists or because a ceremony was being performed.

A properly dressed, only partly mad lady at the entrance to Pura Luhur Batukau

The ride to Ubud, our destination for the night, wasn’t quite as smooth.  The map in our Lonely Planet book wasn’t really enough to get us there and we went through a fairly large stretch with no useful road signs, especially at one critical point.  Bali is such a roadside society, however, that we didn’t even have to get off the bike to ask directions.  We just pulled over every 5 or 10 minutes and asked a group of people at a roadside warung which way to Ubud.  Like all the Balinese we’ve met, they were immediately friendly and helpful, but it still took us until after nightfall to finally reach Ubud.

After another day on the boat and a big night out in Serangan with some other yachties and a couple of semi-resident Aussies we finally got moving to see some of Bali.  We were counting the bill for our big night out before leaving and realized that at $1.30 for beers and $1-$1.50 for a local dinner meal (I had 3), we didn’t come off too badly aside from the half hour or so we spent in a Serangan karaoke bar listening to awful, sappy Indonesian heartbroken pop songs.  The Indonesian songs actually had videos (mostly guys looking sad), but instead of the "real" videos, the Western rock/pop songs that were performed had videos that were basically someone’s camcorder tape of their trip to a popular tourist destination, mostly Australian. That was pretty weird, especially in Asia, where you can get ripped off DVDs of anything you want for less than $1 (including movies that aren’t out on DVD yet).  My favorite knock-off example came when we bought Lauren a new pair of flip-flops.  I could just be ignorant, but I don’t remember OP and Converse being the same company or ever making clothing using both labels.  The flip-flops had a big OP on the sole and a converse logo on the thong portion.  The woman in the shop told us they were a good deal because they were OP, and I had to add, "Yeah, and Converse too!"  She obviously understood and laughed as well.  After some bargaining (mandatory here) and guarantees of "I make you good price" and "I make special price for you" we walked off with a new pair of flip-flops.  I think the locals generally get a lot more from us than they’d be willing to accept, but it’s still been cheap.

Delicious $1 Mie Goreng

The local warung uses the “count the bottles at the end of the night” method of keeping a tab, so everyone has a “collection”

At the top of our list was some attempted surfing, so we went back to Kuta and got a cheap room near the beach. The room was $11/night, which isn’t as cheap as you can do in Bali, but isn’t bad.  It also includes two free breakfasts (omelet, coffee/tea, some fruit, and orange juice that of course named for its color, not for any fruit used to make it).  It even has a Western toilet, which is to say the sort of toilet you have at home.  An Asian toilet, which we’ve had the chance to get acquainted with, is basically a hole in the floor with a footrest on each side (squat for short, as opposed to sit).  Toilet paper and a flushing mechanism aren’t included, but there is usually a container of water with a scoop for manually flushing.  One thing it doesn’t include is a shower curtain.  We’ve tried 3 hotels now and none of them have one.  Instead there is a drain on the floor for the water that sprays everywhere.  The beds are pretty basic, but it’s still fun to get of the boat for the first time in a while and for us it’s really not a step down in terms of amenities (we even have a big ceiling fan above our bed).

Not bad for $11/night and a short walk to the beach

The surfing was a lot of fun, but I have to admit that the best we looked was standing at the edge of the water with the board under an arm, looking out at the waves like we had some idea of what we were doing.  There are lots of surf classes in Kuta, so we had no problem watching how the beginners start out, but their boards are larger and more buoyant, they’ve actually had a lesson and presumably a day or two of practice, etc.  At least those are our excuses for why we’re still happy to get up on our knees on the white water while they’re surfing the white water and looking a lot like a kid that’s trying to balance a bike without training wheels for the first time.  The water at Kuta is shallow enough that you really don’t have to paddle much to get out to the white water, so Lauren and I had enough energy to take turns with our board about every 15 minutes for a couple of hours.  Lauren has better balance than I do, so after someone out there let her know that you need to paddle to catch a wave, she actually seemed to do better than I did.  After a couple hours of sun and falling off the board, it was time for a nap.

This is our best photo of me surfing

With the cheap food prices, we’ve been doing a lot of eating out. Since I’m a vegetarian, my options are fairly limited in terms of local cuisine, but what I’ve had has been good.  I’ve also managed to have about 10 pizzas and half a dozen attempts at Mexican food.  The pizzas have generally been serviceable, but the Mexican food has been pretty funny at times.  For example, one restaurant advertised "Mixican specialites", including a burrito, which was described as a Mexican spring roll with beans inside.  Apparently some restaurants didn’t really understand that the inside of a "Mexican spring roll" was different than an Asian one, so there are been several funny bean-less Mexican dishes although we finally found two reliable places for tacos or a combination platter within a couple hundred yards of our hotel, which I do think had something to do with us spending an extra day just hanging out in Kuta.

The next day we finally decided to join the ranks of the illegal foreign motorcyclists.  You’re supposed to have an international driver’s license to drive here, but we don’t and neither do a lot of people.  Apparently it’s officially a $20 fine if you get caught, $20 and 2 hours to get a proper local license in the capital, but only $5-$15 for the bribe you’ll need depending on how easy of a mark you look like to the cop that finds a reason to pull you over.  There are checkpoints for just this sort of thing, with locals being waved on and tourists lined up for fleecing, but as long as you know in advance that you should be carrying bribe money if you’re going to be driving it’s not a big deal.  Since we’ve had the bike, we’ve enjoyed a couple of long days with lots of great sights, but we’re at the end of the 2nd long day and hoping to get a gelato before a possible warm shower so the mini tour of Bali will have to wait until the next blog.