(Although I’m currently in Thailand, I have a lot of catching up to do on stories and experiences from Bali.  Over the next few days, I’m going to try to my best to get caught up on those before moving on to blog entries about Thailand.)

Typically, when I take a trip, I research the hell out of it before I go. Nothing burns me up more than to be in a place, do my thing, go home and discover that only blocks from where I was was the coolest little thing that I could have seen/done/tasted … if only I’d known.  I don’t really make out minute-by-minute itineraries.  OK. Who am I kidding?  Of course I do!  Or at least I’ve done that in the past.   What can I say? I like to cram it all in and there’s always loads more to see and do than time allows.  In some regards, I can be a really laid back traveler and rather enjoy the oddities that come my way.   In fact, oddities are sort of what I seek when I’m traveling.  But sleeping in until 10am or, God forbid, noon and wasting all that precious travel time that you can’t get back???!!!  Yeah.  Not so laid back in that department.  So I guess my travel style could be described as Mussolini on the outside with a soft Ghandi core. Or maybe it’s the reverse.  Not surprisingly, I frequently travel alone. 

Before going to Indonesia, I studied the Indonesian language for 4 weeks and read every travel guide I could find on Bali.  I also read travel fiction books set in Bali, Thailand and Vietnam and watched any movie that was set in or filmed in those countries - all in the name of preparation … or at least trying to fit into my head some idea of what to expect.

During my travel throughout Bali, however, I found that my travel style changed.  Mussolini, whether inside or out, kind of melted away as I developed more of a “let’s just see what happens” mantra.  Maybe it was the luxury of having six weeks in Bali that helped me feel like I didn’t need to cram it all into six days.  Or maybe it was just Bali’s laid-back spirit that I absorbed through osmosis.  Whatever the reason, “let’s see” was the motto of my most recent and last road trip through Bali.  

Tegalalan rice terraces

Before I could take off, I had to master (or at last substantially improve) my skills on the motorbike.  For several days after I got back from my road trip with Mun, I practiced late at night in Ubud when the streets were nearly empty, save for the street dogs.  On the fourth day, I took a test drive to Tegalalan, a village about 30 minutes north of Ubud which has gorgeous terraced rice fields.  I made it, got some nice photos of the rice paddies, managed to stave off the relentless sellers of chopsticks, sarongs and other souvenirs that wouldn’t fit in my backpack and headed back to Ubud.  I even relished the little bit of road grit in my teeth which I chalked up to a biker’s rite of passage.  Although not exactly a road warrior, I felt confident enough on the motorbike to undertake a second unguided Bali roadtrip, this time driving the motorbike instead of riding on the back.

Juha imitating a stone Buddha

The week before, I had met a Finnish man, Juha, through Couchsurfing during a rice paddy walk in Ubud.  He had also traveled with Mun and me for a day in Amed.   He had been traveling for about 14 months on a quest to see the world and was “tired of making decisions about where to go and what to see.”  I often meet people during my travels and, if I sense they are like-minded travelers, am open to joining forces for a while.    Juha seemed like-minded so I invited him to join me.  He was all for letting someone else play tour guide so he decided to afollow me around Bali for a week on his own motorbike before heading back to Finland. I decided our first stop should be Tanah Lot, one of the most sacred temples in Bali. I had seen photos of it on postcards (my new alternative-to-a-guidebook method of deciding where I wanted to go) and it looked stunning!  From the photos, the temple appeared to be suspended in mid-air on a giant, interestingly shaped rock slightly offshore of Bali’s rocky Southwest coast.  Entrance to the temple is off-limits to tourists.  Even the sea, however, could deny access to non-tourists as the temple is accessible to potential worshippers only in low tides.  The photos on the cheap postcards showing Tanah Lot washed out in the mid-afternoon sun with ocean waves lapping at the base were intriguing.  The more expensive postcards featured Tanah Lot in all her glory, basking in the setting sun.  Stunning.  Tanah Lot had definitely made the list of “Road Trip Places to See.”  

plan for the second Bali road trip

Juha had been staying in South Bali so I headed to Denpasar to meet him.  He had to mail some packages so we settled on the post office as a meeting point.  When I later looked at a map of Denpasar, it occurred to me that we hadn’t specified WHICH post office since neither of us had been there or knew where they were.  I hoped that Juha would read my mind and also think to go to the main post office, the only one marked on my map.  So that’s where I headed.  

I drove about 30-40 kph (only about 18-25 mph), hugging the left side of the road (they drive on the left here).  The streets didn’t exactly follow what was reflected on my map so, as when I was driving around with Mun two weeks before, I frequently stopped to ask, “Dimana Denpasar?” (“Where is Denpasar?”).  The answers always came in the form of an arm chopping the air in a certain direction, a motion resembling the signature tomahawk chop of Atlanta Braves baseball fans.  Just as well since I understood very little Indonesian anyway.  

I was definitely a tentative and overly cautious driver, but I felt the ride was going well … until 1.5 hours into the trip when I hit the Superhighway in Denpasar.  All of a sudden, the road widened from 2 relatively quiet lanes (1 in each direction) to 6 lanes!  More than the tomahawk-like directions were making me feel like I was driving in Atlanta. I and my little motorbike were on a virtual interstate! Huge trucks were barreling down on us.  The lines marking driving lanes were apparently mere suggestions.  I wanted to stay to the left, in what I deemed the “safe zone,” but somewhere ahead I had to turn right.  I knew the turn would sneak up on me and I definitely didn’t want to try to cut across all 3 lanes of maniacal Denpasar drivers at the last minute, so I steeled my nerves, ground my teeth on some road grit for good measure and crossed through the torrent to the far right.  This was apparently an unpopular move with the masses as I drew what seemed like hundreds of honks on my way.  I sped up to 60kph just so I wouldn’t get run over.  Of course there were no assurances, but I figured speeding up would at least decrease the chances of it happening.  The sight of huge trucks right on my tail filled my mirrors.  

My thoughts raced as fast as my heart and the traffic around me.  Oh God!  Where’s that #$^(^#%& turn anyway????  Juha, why didn’t I just tell you to meet me in quiet little Tanah Lot?  Here’s what looks like a major road.  No street sign.  But this MUST be it.  Shit, shit, shit!  Ok, ok, ok … I’m going for it!  [makes right turn crossing through 3 more lanes of oncoming traffic.]  

The road I turned right on, although major, is no Superhighway.  What a relief to be off that suicidal stretch.  After about 10 blocks, my heart rate slowed back down to almost normal.  After 15 blocks, I was beginning to question whether I made the right call.  There was no sign of the post office where I was supposed to meet Juha.  Finally, I pulled over and asked someone, “Dimana Kantor Pos?”  The tomahawk chop began … back in the direction I’d come from.  Oh no!  Ugh!  You’ve got to be kidding me!  I turned too early and now I needed to get back on the road from hell?  I was desperately wishing that I could call Juha, change the plan and just meet in Tanah Lot, our destination for the day, but because his number is international, my phone will accept calls from him, but not make them.  I can’t just not show up … although the thought seriously crossed my mind to just head to Tanah Lot and email him from there an apologetic “come meet me. I’m a wimp on a motorbike.” 

I drew on one of the faults that tops my list of character flaws … stubbornness … and reluctantly turned the bike around back toward Suicidal Superhighway.  My heart pounded like a rabbit again as I was assaulted with honks, threatening looks and even a rock that flew from a truck’s wheel and missed my head by inches.  I drew on a second flaw - extreme abilities to disassociate from any situation.  I was no longer scared.  I was mad, determined and just downright steeled.  I was going to make it to that flipping post office if it’s the last thing I did (and at this rate, it very well might be!).

Thankfully, some verbal landmarks came along with the tomahawk chop that sent me back to the interstate so this time when I made a right turn on another unmarked major road, I was fairly certain I was on the right track.  Yet still, 25 blocks and no sign of the post office.  Defeated, I pulled over to a laundromat on the side of the road.  “Dimana kantor pos?” I asked pathetically.  At least this time, the tomahawk was pointed in the right direction and wasn’t sending me back to suicide alley.  Unfortunately, it was followed by about 5 more chops in different directions.  Basically I was being told “Go straight.  Then a right (somewhere). Then a left (somewhere).  Keep going.  Chop chop chop.”  My disappointment must have shown in my eyes.  A man who had just retrieved his clean clothes offered, “Would you like to follow me there?”  Thank goodness he didn’t know that I would have eagerly kissed him, bought him dinner and possibly given him children for this information!  He did it for a smile.  And 10 minutes later I arrived at the post office.  What would have taken a local about an hour to drive from Ubud to the main post office in Denpasar took me three.  Whew! 

Oh just wait until I tell Juha what all I’ve been through!  I was two hours past my designated meeting time with him at this point.  Surely he must know that I had difficulty getting here, I thought.  I parked my bike, lugged my heavy backpack off the bike and onto my back and huffed into the post office, looking for a big white man with a silver scraggly beard.  Shouldn’t be that difficult to spot, I thought.  But there were no white people anywhere.  Hmmm, maybe he had trouble getting here too.  

The post office had a rudimentary internet cafe inside so I went in and shot Juha a message.  “I’ve arrived!  Please call or show up.”  I did some more emailing, but after 30 minutes, still no contact from Juha.  “I’m starving and going across the street for lunch,” said my second email. “Meet me there when you get here or just wait.  I’ll be right back.”  

stone fish "swimming" in their tank

I wandered across the street and found a very interesting Japanese restaurant.  Live seafood was their specialty and they had many different varieties in large tanks in their front window.  Business was slow that afternoon so the manager gave me a personal tour.  He proudly pointed out stone fish, eels, grouper, lobster in four different types and sizes in addition to a variety of other fish and sea creatures.  Unfortunately, the seafood dishes were made to order and usually served 3-4 people so I settled for a comparatively boring chicken and noodle dish.  When I returned from washing off the road dust I had accumulated on my way to Denpasar, I saw that I had missed a call from Juha. Damn!  I ate my lunch and hurried back over to the post office.  No sign of Juha.  I checked my email messages (nothing from him) so I did a little more internet work and waited for his call.  

 Finally the call came. “I’m in Matahari shopping center,” he said casually.  “What about the post office?” I asked.  “I went to one already and now I’m at the Matahari shopping center.”  A man standing nearby indicated the shopping center was close by.  I was really hoping Juha would volunteer to come meet me at the post office since that was our original plan and I was still rattled from my earlier Denpasar driving, but he sounded grounded at the shopping center.  So off I went again asking “Dimana? Dimana?” about 5 times until I finally found it.  Another 2 dimanas got me to the food court where Juha was sitting.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long.” I said, still anxious to tell him about my horrendous morning.  “Only for four hours,” he said.  I think I detected a note a grumpiness although he’s Finnish so it could also be that (not that I’m saying the Finnish are grumpy people; they just don’t put on the “dog and pony smile show” … or so Juha tells me).  Sensing his mood, I decided to wait and tell him share my driving horror stories over a beer that evening.  

We sat for a bit, got rehydrated and hit the road.  After a couple wrong turns trying to find our way out of town (I’m hating Denpasar by this time), we finally find a road sign that says “Tanah Lot!”  Hallelujah and glory be!  From that point until we got to Tanah Lot, about 45 minutes later, road signs clearly marked our way.  I was fearful that the word “dimana” was going to disappear from my vocabulary.

Now that the way was clearly marked, I could relax and enjoy the drive.  The sun was out and the day was beautiful.  We passed rice fields filled with mature rice ready for harvesting.  I laughed at a rustic wooden sign with hand-painted letters that advertised “Playstation” and another that invited guests to play miniature golf in a rice field (I imagined a giant sprig of rice in a mini rice paddy as a water hazard and a large motorized quacking duck whose mouth was the target hole.)  We drove through a village still decorated from the Galungan/Kuningan festival with pretty penjors lining their streets.  The decorating committee had obviously convened and organized the villagers as all the shrines of one side of the street were decked out in yellow while the shrines opposite where cloaked in white.

Finally, we saw a sign that indicated we had entered Tanah Lot.  As Juha was riding behind me and we didn’t have verbal communication, I raised my left arm in the air and shook my fist in a sign of victory.  I didn’t see the police officer parked at the “village limits” sign.  Juha later told me the officer gave me a strange look at my gesture.  

We had arrived!  Yay!  We decided to go find a hotel and dump our heavy bags (my bigscreen laptop and photo gear keep me from ever traveling light even though it’s compressed into small bags) before catching the sunset at Tanah Lot temple.

First, let me tell you a little about hotels in Bali.  In the first place, they’re very inexpensive.  The majority of them range from $5-20 per night - ideal for a long-term traveler’s budget.  The room amenities will also range from fan only (no a/c) with a cold water shower to rooms with a/c (which really isn’t necessary throughout most of Bali’s temperate night-time climate) and hot water showers.  There are some hotels in Bali that charge “normal” US prices for a room and range from $75 per night to over $1000.  Of course you get more for your money in Bali as the $75 room here is more like a $1000 room at home.  But I don’t require that kind of luxury.  The higher end of those hotels don’t exist for me in the States, so as far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist for me in Bali either.  Sure I could stay there, but then I’d have to come home in two months instead of seven.  Easy decision.

The first hotel we stopped at was very rudimentary.  It was fan only (no problem), but had no shower at all, only a mandi.  Almost all Balinese (and, I understand, Indonesian) bathrooms have a mandi, which is a tub that stands about two to three feet high and about two feet across.  The mand is filled with water.  To take a bath, you don’t get into the mandi.  Instead, you stand next to the mandi and scoop water from it and pour it onto yourself.  You don’t put “dirty” or used water back in the mandi which is your clean water supply.  Naturally, since the water in the mandi sits there all day, the water is never hot.

Juha and I had decided ahead of time that neither of us required a/c, or TV but hot water would be nice.  (Frankly, some of the coastal areas of tropical Bali are warm and humid enough during the day that I find a cold shower refreshing and often opt for that in the evening even when hot water is an option.)   While neither of us were opposed to a cold water room if that was our only option, we did, however, want to have an actual shower and not a mere mandi so we passed on this hotel and moved on down the road.  We had to laugh that despite the lack of any amenities, the man wanted to charge 100,000 rupiah (a little more than $10) for the room, a room that would have been lucky to bring $4 in Ubud.  This was a well-touristed area, I thought, so I guess the prices are a little higher  here.  

We drove a few blocks and saw a small metal road sign with a picture of a bed.  Neither of us had seen any advertising this “formal” before in Bali and were curious.  We turned our motorbikes down the road and drove … and drove … and drove.  The grounds were meticulously manicured.  The longer the drive went without seeing any sign of a hotel, the more ch-chings I heard on the cash register in my head. We finally came to a guard post (ch-ching, ch-ching, ch-ching).  I suppose few of the guests at this resort arrive on motorbike so we were given a once over at least a few times (would that make it a thrice over?) before we were allowed to pass.  What the heck? We were already here … or almost, depending how much longer the driveway stretched.  We might as well ask about the room price.   

no bugles allowed ... or car horns

I laughed out loud at a sign posted at the entrance to the golf course we motored past.  The sign had a picture of a bugle in a circle with a line through it.  “What?  No bugles?” I thought.  What kind of place had we come to that bugles were so popular that guests needed to be told affirmatively not to bring them?  I laughed for a good five minutes (the driveway continued to stretch onward) … and then laughed at myself as I belatedly got the reference … no horns.  Sheesh.  Sometimes I have to wonder how I made it through law school.  Or high school for that matter.

At long last, Juha and I actually saw the hotel.  Definitely resort material.  We pulled our bikes under the canopied “welcome” area and headed inside to inquire about a room. Before we made it to the second step, the doorman (ch-ching, ch-ching, ch-ching) asked us to move our bikes to a different area.  The place was virtually empty, but I suppose our motor scooters were unsightly and not in tune with the cliental they were trying to attract.  Or who knows why.  At this point, Juha and I took bets on how much the room would cost.  His bet $45.  My bet $75.  Dollars, not rupies.  

Bikes properly parked, we walked in, prepared for a quick dismissal and back on the bikes.  “How much is a room here?” we asked.  The lovely, well-dressed and groomed Balinese woman behind the counter told us, “The normal price for a standard room is two hundred, but we can give you a special price today of one hundred sixty-five.”  Naturally, in Bali, prices are typically quoted in their currency - rupiah.  At this time of this writing the exchange rate was approximately 9100 rupiah to the dollar so even a $5 room sounded phenomenally expensive at 50,000 rupiah.  “One hundred sixty-five thousand?” Juha asked, making sure we were talking rupiah and not dollars.  This was too good to be true!  A $17 room at this smashing place?  “Rupiah or dollars?” I chimed in.  We both heard “rupiah” as the answer so, convinced we’d found the best bargain in all of Bali, we asked to see a room.  

The lovely young lady escorted us to a room with a lovely teak door.  She opened the door and, ahhhhhhhh, the cool air brushed past my face.  Air conditioning!  I hadn’t experienced this since I arrived in Bali!  The room was brilliantly decorated with very modern Balinese appointments.  There was a full size tub in an extravagantly large bathroom that had doors which could open up to lovely bedroom.  My accommodations in Bali up to that point, which I had previously regarded as perfectly fine, more than adequate even, now looked like shanties compared to this luxurious room.  Score! 

We didn’t have to think twice.  “Yes, no problem. We’ll stay here,” we fell over ourselves exclaiming practically in unison.  The lovely lady escorted us back to the front desk to check in.  While we were waiting, another beautiful Balinese girl brought us mango juice and wet towels to refresh our hands and faces.  We beamed at a young Western couple who were also checking in, acknowledging that we had all been so smart as to find this brilliant bargain jewel.  Juha and I toasted each other with our fresh juice that we hadn’t turned around in the face of all the signs of opulence. If this had been a movie, cheery soundtrack music would have begun playing in the background.  It was perfect! 

The desk clerk delivered the paperwork and asked for a credit card.  “Oh we’ll just pay cash, “ I told her.  “We’re only staying for one night” (although thoughts of spending my remaining three weeks here were already circling in my head). “Ok. The minimum deposit is 2,000,0000 rupies,” she said with a smile.  Screech!  The soundtrack music playing in my head comes to an abrupt and jarring stop.  The juice turns sour in my mouth and the refreshing cloth becomes a snake in my hands.  Ok, not really, but an ugly reality was setting in.  

“Two millions rupies?” Juha asked.  “The room is only 165,000 rupies.”  “Dollars,” the lovely clerk corrected, smiling the entire time.  “The room is $165 US dollars.”  

We turned red, embarrassed at our mistake.  We both looked at each other, dumbfounded.  “Didn’t we clarify that the price was rupies before we looked at the room?” “I thought so.” “I thought it was too good to be true, but she said rupies.”  “Didn’t she say it more than once?” “I thought so.”  Well, regardless of what we had thought, we now knew that it was time to move on.  “Thanks anyway for your hospitality,” we said, exiting with our tails tucked between our legs.  

Tanah Lot temple at sunset

It was now late in the afternoon and we needed to find a hotel soon if we were going to catch the Tanah Lot sunset unburdened.  Someone on the road told us that there was a hotel on the Tanah Lot property itself.  We gave it a shot, negotiated an acceptable rate and dropped our stuff in the room … just in time to catch the sunset.

After watching parts of a ceremony outside the temple and taking loads of photos, we walked the gauntlet through dozens of souvenir sellers and made our way to dinner.  “Well, Juha,” I started, “if Day 1 of this road trip is any indication, we have an interesting week ahead of us.  I think I need a beer tonight.”