Cooties in Kuta

Bali - time for some beaches! Time for some R&R after some interesting but not very vacation-like travels in Southeast Asia. We had changed our tickets up a bit in order to get out of Thailand, and we decided to skip Singapore - sorry, we're just not city people, and Thailand kind of killed our budget already. We still ended up with Singapore in our passports though because Cathay Air couldn't check our bags through. I guess Cathay did not trust Valuair not to lose our bags (frankly neither did I, with a name like that.)

Our Valuair flight was very, uh, value - ancient seats that don't recline, $5 for a sandwich, etc. Almost like flights at home! It got in late to Bali got in late because of thunderstorms. We'd heard that you are often mobbed in Indonesia by taxi drivers, bracelet and sarong salespeople, etc, but we had to go looking to find even one taxi driver in the downpour. We bartered him down to $10 to get to Kuta, the nearest resort town. This apparently was too much bartering because the taxi dumped us off a block from the wrong end of the wrong street. I hung out with the pimps and hos for a bit while Sam ran around looking for a place to stay. We eventually found one and crashed out at about midnight - for about 10 minutes. Then we heard a huge commotion outside followed by a woman with a Hindi accent shouting for the next 4 hours straight "When you gonna change? You say you gonna change, so when you gonna change? You say you not gonna change? When you gonna change?" (and repeat) I guess she caught her man with one of the hos from my waiting spot. I wanted to shout "shut up and get a divorce" but instead we just had the management knock on their door three times. At dawn she eventually stopped only to start up again at 11am. So Sam heroically ran out and after looking at a zillion places, found us an even nicer hotel for half the price ($15 a night) just down the road - Hotel New Arena is super nice and is very clean and has a really nice pool if you decide to stay in Kuta due to kidnapping, insanity, or some other ailment.

By this point Sam had seen a fair bit of Kuta and was contemplating heading straight back to the airport and getting out of Bali. Only our nice room and hotel pool convinced him to stay. Kuta, Legian, and Seminiyak are three beachfront towns on the south coast of Bali. Kuta has basically assimilated the others, borg-style, and the whole strip is now one massive smelly dirty tourist trap. When one thinks of a "beach" one usually thinks something like rocks or sand (you know like they make glass from) next to water. However Kuta has its own definition: a solid layer of trash and plastic bags, next to a thick layer of trash and plastic bags floating on sewage. Maybe I exaggerate, maybe not, do not find out for yourself! We didn't attempt to swim or surf but the surfers we talked to said the plastic bags do really drag you down.

Inland from the "beach" Kuta consists of a bunch of super-busy roads and a bunch of narrow alleys thickly lined with tee shirt, sunglasses, and trinket shops, as well as the ubiquitous Circle K (I guess Circle K and not 7-11 has the monopoly in Indonesia.) However nobody could possibly shop because walking is a huge strain due to the need to constantly flatten yourself against the nearest wall or awning or other fat tourist (or whatever) to dodge high-speed motorbikes zooming down the shoulder-wide alleys, then run a few steps, and repeat. If I was a shopowner I'd put a bunch of roofing nails down 100 meters up the street every day so that the tourists could actually get enough peace to look at my goods!

Anyway once we got used to it Kuta wasn't so bad - our hotel swimming pool was quite enjoyable - so we spent a few days hanging out and shopping for a surfboard for Sam. We'd also found the cheapest place to eat near our first hotel - $1 nasi goreng, $0.70 gado gado, mmm. Indonesian food, or rather the tourist version of Indonesian food, is quite tasty. Nasi goreng is good old fried rice, usually with a fried egg on top, made delicious with Sam's favorite - "Sambal" sweet chili sauce, like a sweet Siracha sauce. Mie goreng is chow mein. Gado gado is steamed veggies and tofu with peanut sauce. Satay is meat on a stick with peanut sauce. There's also various curries and of course cap cay, which I never really did figure out but seems to be veggies or meat with what appears to be ketchup on them - but maybe I didn't find a very good place to order it. For the adventurous, you can also try babi guleng, roast pork served with a side of fried pork skin (often with the hair still on it), roast pork skin, blood sausage, and some stuff we couldn't identify, plus chili sauce. The roast pork is delicious hot but usually this stuff is cooked sometime last week and served cold - or rather luke warm, depending on ambient temperature.

Shortly before Sam finally found the most impractical board possibly for Bali's surf, a sweet little single fin, we ran into Kyle and Kassandra from B.C. Canada, some fellow surfers who gave us advice on where to go next, a semi-secret surf spot on the southwest coast. Glad for the advice, we hightailed it out of Kuta straightaway!