For those of you who know, James can't dive, this was worse than one of his belly flops...
What a couple of days, we've made it through Indonesia alive and have
landed in Bali.
Now we're here, we've booked into quite a big, almost beachside complex, with a choice of rooms from 8,25 or 30 pounds; we had to chose the 8 pound one, but its nice although no hot running water, we've booked for 3 nights from today and just plan to chill out and have a little holiday in Lovina. The hotel has 2 pools and the weather is great so we are just trying to build a tan..
So the last few days, not something we want to repeat soon...we left
jakarta from the 'wrong' station (we somehow ended up and the poor
station, which is a major understatement...with lots of locals and shanty town along the trackside - how we didn't get mugged we'll never know, it was so bad james had to be escorted to the ATM). We had to kill five hours before our train and so ended up at the Western Safehouse of Pizza Hut!! It was very scary waiting for the train; the train itself
wasn't too bad, just a reclining seat for our 17hr journey to Melang, which would have been ok but at every station people got on board and shouted all the items they had brought to sell to u, very annoying and nervy in the middle of the night..plus as normal we were the only whitie around...
We arrived in Malang around 10am on James' bday, place didn't seem very
touristy (another understatement, another shanty town!!) so we moved straight onto the coach station to catch a coach (not that you could actually call it a coach, more like a shanty town on wheels!) to the ferry for Bali, that coach was soooooooooooooooo funny, no room, cramped with locals, and having to put our rucksacs in the footwell, therefore no room for our feet. As it seems is the indonesian way, at every stop people get on, sing you songs for money and sell you food, drinks, peanuts etc, what a country..
We met another bus that would take us all the way across the ferry to
Bali, we caught that at 1400hr, and finally got to the ferry terminal at
1730, after some delays we landed in bali at 1930 (the ferry itself only takes 35mins!).
When we arrived in Bali, we found that the quickest and easiest way to get to the hotel was to hire a bemo (small minibus type thing) as there were no taxis at the ferry terminal, this involved the locals spotting us, rushing around us and offering a crazy sum of 400'000 Indon' Rupiahs, as it was pitch black, we didn't feel overly comfortable in their company and we didn't have any other options, we bartered to a price of 300'000 rupiahs (around 18 pounds). The journey took 1.5 hours, so as u can imagine when we arrived at the hotel we were relieved, tired and
just wanted to sleep.
Kalibukbuk, in Lovina where we are staying, is quite a quiet little town on the beach....only a slight 'shanty town' feel so we've decided to spend a bit of time here...on our 'honeymoon' as everyone seems to keep saying!
