Monday, 29th September, 2008

We are still here at Lovina Beach, Bali and surprisingly enough we are enjoying our stay here.

On Wednesday Catala and us hired a car and driver for 2 days and headed up into the mountains and then down into Ubud. We stopped in Singaraja to view the Independence Memorial plus a look at a well known temple. I always thought temples would have a roof over them but in fact they are all open air venues. It is unbelievable the number of temples here, seems to us one every few hundred metres in varying sizes. The scenery en route was beautiful and we stopped at a restaurant our driver suggested to have lunch which over looked Lake Batur. The meal was a smorgasbord which was okay but when we got the bill it was rather a shock - about 5 times what we were used to paying and even though cheap by NZ standards was expensive for Indonesia and we were paying for the driver as well. Lesson learned - always ask to see the menu and prices before sitting down!

Near the top we stopped at a little village and visited a family who were producing coffee and cloves so we ended up buying 1kg of ground coffee each and half a kilo of cloves between us. We are using the cloves wrapped in muslin to put around the boat. We stopped at a museum/art gallery on our way into Ubud which was quite large but the paintings were not our scene at all. Janine & Garth are into Art so they also had a look at another gallery which we didn't bother going into. After our expensive lunch we decided we needed to economize on our accommodation so our driver, Alex, took us to a homestay. While the rooms were nothing flash it had a good bed, shower and hot and cold water, a fan, and once arrived were given a cup of tea plus breakfast, all for 100,000 rupiah ($NZ16). We had tea, fruit and a beautiful banana toasted sandwich for breakfast. Great value for money!! Alex went off and stayed with family for the night.

After a bit of a rest we walked up to a temple to watch fire dancing and Balinese dancing - all with a story to it which we enjoyed and did not go on for too long. The Balinese dancers and their costumes are beautiful, by far the loveliest in Indonesia. After that finished at about 8pm we scouted around for a reasonably priced restaurant and had a nice meal. Our homestay was pretty central to the main part of the town so was easy to walk to where we wanted to go. On the way back we stopped at the Water Palace and it was an amazing sight at night as well as going to look at it in daylight on Thursday morning. Thursday morning we spent browsing the town which basically is very touristy so was not really Dave's scene and we met up with Alex just after mid day and headed back over the mountains on a different route. We stopped at a market and stocked up on fruit and vegetables and it was probably the best market we have been to in Indonesia and also the cheapest. Even got some strawberries! Finally arrived back at Lovina around 6pm.

Friday and Saturday morning were spent cleaning up the boat and reorganizing stuff to make room for Norman and Mary. Alex picked us up Saturday afternoon and we headed down to Denpasar, had a bit of a look around while then and then went to the airport to pick them up. They arrived at 9.30pm and we finally arrived back here just after 1am. They were pretty bombed out and yesterday was a very quiet day here as they have been traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia for 2 weeks.

However, on Friday night we were sitting having dinner when another of our sailing fraternity stopped by to talk to us and they had done the trip to Borobudur on Java to see the Buddhist and Hindu temples which were built in 800 AD. They just raved about it and so has everyone else who has made the trip so that set four of us thinking. The upshot of it is that Janine, Garth, Norman, Mary and us leave tomorrow afternoon to go there. We have a 2 hour bus trip to Gilimanuk, then a 45 minute ferry ride across to Java and then a 16-18 hour bus trip to Yogyakarta where we will stay for three nights and do the return trip on Saturday arriving back here on Sunday morning.

We decided that we would skip doing the orangutan thing on Kumai as we can do that next year and we would never have the opportunity again to go to Borobudur which is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

We spent this morning trying to organize flights for Norman and Mary to get to Singapore or Denpasar for their return home and there is absolutely nothing available as it is the end of Ramadan and there are going to be 16.8 million people on the move for 2- 3 weeks - all returning to their families to confess their sins for the year to their parents. We just did not realize how big Ramadan is. They have flights booked from Bali to Singapore so we will probably drop them off on the North East end of Java and they can taxi and ferry back to Denpasar for their flight and will have a few days to look around Bali. As it has turned out it is just as well we are doing the Borobudur thing as the original plan was to go to Kalimantan and then they would never have got back.

Mary and I treated ourselves to a massage today - the first time I have ever had one and it was great. One hour 60,000 rupiah ($NZ10).

The next addition to the Blog will be all about our trip to Borobudur