Scribbles Abroad

Driving in Kuta and Bali in general has easily been one of the scariest, craziest, and exhilarating things we have ever done.  I’ve never driven a motor bike for longer than down an empty street for a minute or a moped on Kauai.  So when Shaun put me on a manual bike an hour after arrival I was timid yet excited.  Louise hopped on the back of Shaun’s bike and we went for a cruise around Kuta and got a feel for the place.  Its a crazy Tijuana/Waikikiesque experience.  Tourists everywhere and locals haggling to sell you everything from beautiful paintings to jiggy-jig massages.  The incessant barrage of offers was a definite turn off but for someone that desires to shop and haggle, Kuta is a paradise.  The first moped ride was scary, people in Indo are great drivers (the best I’ve ever seen).  The chaos is organized into a trustful and compassionate mindset as everyone is looking out for each other……most of the time.  Since there were no waves in Kuta, we decided to take a countryside motor bike tour.  The clips below show you some of the scenes.  The drive was great and we got lunch at a little road side stand for 60 cents.  We really got to see more of Bali and the further from Kuta we got the nicer it seemed.  We headed back to Kuta so we could meet up with one of my best buds in the world, Cambo.  We met up with the Aussie at this high end hotel and made it our new hang out spot.  We couldn’t wait to jump in the pool and wash off the grime from the road spent the evening sitting in the pool cruising at the poolside bar drinking Arak, the local rice vodka.  It went down easy but had a funky earthy aftertaste.  We also drank tons of tall Bintangs, the local beer.  Its a good enough beer but you better have a coozie because the beers are big, the weather is warm, and I guess I wasn’t drinking fast enough. 

We came to Indo to surf but mother ocean did not cooperate while we were in Kuta.  After checking the surf report we realized it’s about to start going off across almost all of Southern Indonesia so we decided that we needed to get out of Kuta and head up North to Western Java.  Our original plan was to go to Sumbawa but there are no fast ferrys and the slow ferry would have taken three days.  So we checked out of our place, bought a ticket to Jakarta and off we went.