Wandergaels: Bali

We took the two-and-a-half-hour flight to the Indonesian island of Bali from Kota Kinabalu in the Malaysian part of Borneo. As soon as we left the departures area of the airport, a wave of taxi drivers hit us, each of them asking us where we were going before giving us a range of different prices for the trip. Unfortunately, the taxi drivers at the airport wouldn't turn on their metres, so bartering and agreeing the price before getting a car is essential if you don't want to be ripped-off. We spent three days in a beach-side town called Legian, just north of Kuta on the west coast of the island. Legian is a bit of a surfer's paradise, with no shortage of big waves and surfing schools or sports bars and nightclubs (as well as a fair bit of drugs judging by the amount of times I was offered them walking along the main street at night). We spent most of the three days there on the beach, and rented surfboards on the last day (they cost all of €3 a day to rent). I wiped-out (surfer talk for falling over, I think) about fifty times but eventually managed to stand up on the board a few times (for a couple of seconds each time), so it was worth it! After our three days in Legian, we headed north by shuttle bus to the town of Ubud. Ubud is much less about the bars and nightclubs than is Kuta, and much more about Balinese culture and art, with some of the streets there lined with stonemasons and sculptors selling carvings and statues of Buddha and Hindi and local gods, and others streets populated with art dealers selling their oil paintings of the Bali landscape and people. After staying in hostels in nearly all of the places we had visited, we decided to change it up in Bali by booking into a homestay with a local Balinese family. Our stay in our homestay was a brilliant experience, down to both the kindness of the family we were staying with and the location of the house, which was in the country but still only 2 minutes from the town on a scooter. On our first night in the homestay, we went to the local temple, about a kilometre further out the road from Ubud town, where there was an apparently important 3-day festival beginning. To get into the temple, we had to dress in the local attire, which consisted of a type of head-scarf and a sarong for men (both of which had Balinese names that I've forgotten). The temple itself was crawling with people when we arrived, with women sitting in one area (where each of the religious statues and figurines were surrounded with offerings in the form of layered towers of fruit that the local women constructed and carried to the temple on their heads throughout the day), and the men sitting in another area. There was a large stage in the men's area, where a man dressed in ornate local dress with gold trimmings and a colourful mask with a distorted face and bulging eyes did a body-popping-like dance, to which music played on a multitude of instruments by local men got louder and quieter as the body movements of the man quickened and slowed. Once the dancer-composer finished his routine, he exited the stage through decorated double-doors at the back. In the temple, we sat down beside a soft-spoken Balinese man with near-perfect English who explained a lot of the happenings to us, and brought us up the women's area where everyone had now gathered to pray, where a chick was sacrificed to the gods by cutting its throat after which its blood was mixed with spices (yea, we found it strange too). The man we spoke to told us that the religion itself was based on a mixture of Hindi and local animist beliefs. The following day, we rented a scooter and visited Goa Gajah temple, otherwise known as Elephant Cave due to the elephant carvings around the cave at the site. Just in front of the cave are old bathing pools now filled with fish, with three large stone figurines pouring water from stone jugs into each pool. Ubud is not short on things to see, and we also took a trip to see the impressive rice terraces outside the town as well as taking a tour of the Ubud coffee plantations, where we given a guided explanation and demonstration of how coffee is grown, harvested, and ground. We were then treated to a free tasting of several different types of coffees all the while looking out over the vast area of coffee plantations below us. On our second last night in Ubud, we woke at half past one in the morning to be collected at two o' clock for a sunrise trek of Mount Batur, an active volcano in the north-east of Bali. Unfortunately, there was no sign of our minivan at quarter to three, and we nearly gave up hope, but luckily it arrived just before we headed back to our beds, and we were on the way at three o'clock a little later than planned. After around 45 minutes in the van, ourselves and the four other people in our group (two French and two German) arrived at a village near the mountain for banana crepes and Balinese coffee, and after another ten minutes in the van we arrived at the start of the trek. We made the trek to the top of the mountain in pitch black by the lights of the torches on our phones. The terrain was flat at the start but suddenly got steep and rocky at the base of the mountain. Fortunately, there were dozens of people from other groups going up with us at that stage, and everyone was in good form when we reached the top and got to see the sunrise over the surrounding mountains. After the sun had fully raised its head, our guide made us a breakfast of banana sandwiches and boiled eggs, and after warming up in the volcanic steam coming off the mountain (and taking a few pictures of the macaques that inhabit Mount Batur), we headed back down and took the coach back to our homestay for around ten o'clock that morning. We spent most of the rest of our day planning for Australia, where we were headed to next.