The Forgotten Bag: Bali

In Bali our goal was to avoid the touristy crowds. As such, we avoided the more popular areas (Seminyak, Kota) in favor of a smaller beach just north called Canggu (thank you Andi!). Despite a cheesy name (Echoland), the hotel was a classy, delightful experience. Canggu appears to be a small beachside town, on the brink of substantial development, which currently houses Balinese who can’t afford to live further south and ex-pats who gave up on the real world in favor of a simple surfing life.

We spent our first full day walking south along the beach to Seminyak – to get flavor for what it is like. First, the beach is built for surfers – huge, consistent waves and frankly too much of a rip tide and too many hidden rocks to be a swimmers beach. As we got closer to Seminyak we noticed an unpleasant transition to scattered litter that became pretty unbearable by the time we got to the busy section. We walked for two hours, had lunch and turned around to retun to Canggu, stopping to rent two beach chairs for 50,000 rupiah ($6). We noticed that this stretch of beach seemed to be cleaner however we quickly learned that all the litter had instead been swept into the water. However one piece of trash, a 50,000 rupiah bill, washed right into Julia. We interpreted this as the Big Guy saying “you guys wasted your money, sorry the beach is foul, here is a refund, you guys should get going.” We took the advice.

While the beach wasn't very welcoming for just a regular swim, the town of Canggu had just the right number of options for restaurants (6) and the atmosphere and food were relaxed and excellent; both nights we were there we got to eat dinner sitting out on a sort of boardwalk right above the ocean.

The next day we traveled to Ubud, a small inland town made famous by the book/movie “Eat, Pray, Love”. It feels just like a resort town; thin streets lined exclusively with shops, art galleries and restaurants. Our first half day there we explored town and after lunch made our way to Monkey Forest which is exactly what it sounds like –a forest with a bunch of monkeys. You pay $3 to enter and can buy eight bananas for a dollar. As soon as you have the fruit in your hands the monkey’s go, well, bananas. You can’t hold onto them for long (see pictures) and you are specifically instructed not to hide the bananas (we saw monkeys grabbing at women’s purses and one monkey tried to steal Julia’s brand new woven placemats, nearly bringing her to tears). Julia and I had a sit down afterwards and I explained that it wasn’t a personal attack and the monkey merely was looking for something to eat. [Readers note: the tears and sit down are merely a hyperbolic exaggeration of Ged's memory of the afternoon...]

The next day we rented a moped and drove around town. I asked the front desk to get the moped for me; 5 minutes later a guy pulls to the hotel on a moped, throws me the keys and says “you pay tomorrow”. No deposit. No information. Nothing. My suspicion – a reoccurring theme for these Asian travels – is that everybody knows everybody in this town and had I stolen, destroyed or otherwise lost the moped I would have been stopped at customs by a big scary Indonesian – “excuse me, sir, but you owe us a moped”.

Driving around was a great time – in town we mimicked the locals (to a degree) bobbing and weaving our way through traffic. Outside of town, among the rice terraces, we could move pretty quickly. We stopped at one particularly stunning rice terrace, and no sooner had we gotten off the moped, than three street vendors were surrounding us. I had the camera so scurried off to take pictures and avoid the awkwardness of continually saying "no" to everything they were offereing, but Julia got bamboozled by them, one in particular (see picture) and ended up buying a sarong. That was our first sign that this was a pretty touristy point to stop, a point that was confirmed on our ride back by there when we saw tour buses lined up with people spilling off. Later on, at one point I feared we were low on gas so I pulled over to a gas station (a nearly-toothless old man sitting in a fold-out chair surrounded by Absolute bottles filled with a mysterious yellow substance called “Petrol”). He spoke zero English so I pulled out 10,000 rupiah ($1.20) and gave it to him and he emptied one of the Absolute bottles into my tank. I really crossed my fingers that he hadn’t just filled my tank with lemonade (again, I pictured the scary Indonesian at customs saying “excuse me, sir, but why was your fuel tank full of citrus?”). But alas, the moped worked.

On the recommendation of a friend of Julia’s we went to a lunch place called Sari Organik (thank you SB!)which was an oasis in the middle of a rice field, accessible by foot or, as luck would have it, mopeds. The trek to and from lunch was, at some points, one to two feet wide and we very nearly drove into a stream a few times (this isn’t as dramatic as it sounds, we wouldn’t have gotten hurt but it would have been a nuisance and dreadfully embarrassing as the fields were laced with farmers). The lunch was great as was the vistas but at the time we went, mid-afternoon, it was filled with the locals who eat at off hours to avoid the tourists. These are the types of people who gave the middle finger to society a long time ago and have turned their backs upon bras, shaving, pop-culture, etc. I truly felt like we were being judged because we used internal combustion engines to get around and ordered a plate of french fries to split with lunch.

The last night we were there, we caught a traditional Balinese dance. I did not read the program before the performance started and had the luck of trying to interpret the stories for each dance (7 in all) - a feat that was not always easy. All in all, a pretty cool thing to see.

Finally, we splurged a bit and bought three paintings, doing our homework on all three. My naïve artistic eye says they are all in the same ballpark in terms of quality but my pending credit card bill suggests one is materially better than the other two. The joys of marrying an art history major.

Conclusion: Beach not nearly as good as Boracay but pretty in the less populated areas and supposedly still very nice at the southern part of the island. I would rather vacation in Boracay but would rather live in Canggu or Ubud. The places we visited were great but best suited for couples (which is what we wanted). I don’t think a bachelor/bachelorette party in Canggu or Ubud would set any records.