stout touts and taxi routes

Hello everybody, or perhaps selamat siang - g'day has (regrettably) been left far, far behind! After a bit of discomfort towards anything which sounded as cute and un-rugged as "maryandjimontour" i've finally come around to the usefulness of blogs and so we've decided to save a bit of time and take a leg of the trip each (from the past few days) to bring y'all up to speed. Brace yourselves for shocking tales of lizards, beaches, spraypainted chickens (although i might not get that far) and monkeys - we liked the monkeys...

Melbourne in spring, apparently, is pretty rainy. In fact, it was pouring it down so loud that it woke us up on the day we were leaving, more or less necessitating a cab for the short-ish journey to the bus terminal so we could get out to the airport. After various bits of sleepy loading and unloading on and off vehicles we eventually arrived at a qantas checkin desk and were rerlieved to find that the gibson-family's age-old approach fo "leavin plenty of time" had paid off - i'll explain to you why in a moment... first i've got to apologise that this typing is going to get worse as the keyboard just sucks, the arrow keys don't work and i can't be bothered hammering any more or moving the type-ey bit with the mouse, so just deal with it, please! ok, back to the yarn - once we'd flashed our i.d. at the lady behind the counter and she'd weighed our bags in, she declared "oh, it looks like it's your lucky day".... i feared that body cavity searches might well be imminent, and braced myself for what was coming our way, when she announced that the plane we'd be flying in on had five rows of business class seats, b ut they weren't running business class today so we'd get the big loungers! Huzzah, we cried, some good luck in an airport at last!

the seats were nothign short of entertaining.... they had more motorised configurations than you could shake at NASA and we delighted in zipping them around as much as possible, comfortable in the knowledge that the people behind us, like ourseleves, had some two feet of room between their reach and the seats so nobody would get worked up! and yes, for the record, mary delighted in adjusting my one when she though i wasn't noticing that her reaching suspiciously at my armrest was coninciding with my neck being bent forward to near the point of breaking! the only other thing to recount from that voyage really was that the child in front of us appeared to be very ill and made horrendous smells whilst wondering around in just her pants. worse still, her parents (?!) were quite uncaring about this medical condition, the mother delighting in bouncing her on her knee and making her laugh for hours... neither of which activities had a beneficial effect upon her internal plumbing from what we could tell. anyway...

you arrive in denpasar after filling out a number of bits of highly significant paper, not unlike arrival in the US. one of the questions, to my horror, required on my part an affirmative answer because i was still carrying the cds which we'd bought for our camper tour of the south of australia, and these were to be sujected to censorship. worse still, when packing that morning i'd done away with the cases, figuring that they'd just waste space, so i couldn't tell them what was on the cds. yet again on the negative side of things the cds were stored on the top of my stack of 50 blank cds which i was carrying with me and, to cap it off, the cds were boldly marked in bright colours with "the best beer songs in the world ever", or something along those lines... i could feel trouble coming with them. as we were discussing what might happen, mary reminded me of the other cd i was carrying which we'd been given by a most exciting girl in glebe village, sydney after she did our horoscopes and convinced us of a number of exciting theories regarding chance, fate and hope. the disc, containing (purportedly) a video that we HAD to watch, was stashed still in my hand luggage, forgotten. i didn't particularly fancy trying to convince the nice man at customs that as well as my fifty cds with who knew what on them and my fine collection of western debauchery-music i also had this video-cd with completely mysterious material on it... particularly when one bears in mind the criminal charges that pornography carries in indonesia, i did what all good do when they realise they have something illicit with them on a plane and hid it amongst the blankets in the overhead locker. i suspetc that really, deep down, that all fits into the kharma and fate side of things that the girl who gave us the disc would have wanted. perhaps right this moment there's a young australian boy, spoiled brat no doubt, just abck from a holiday to bali and hiding in his room he's just discovered that the disc he found on the plane is actually hardcore pornography - for him, probably good kharma. alternatively, perhaps it's like Ring, and we just killed him. i hope that's not the case, but at least we didn't watch it!

anyway, i digress. customs actually passed without a hitch - the man had a chuckle when he saw how many discs were in my bag but told me that so long as they were mine and for me, they were ok. i stammered yes sir thank you sir to his gun and ran away to get a taxi into kuta beach. Kuta beach is a fairly amazing place. it's a mish-mash of surf-bums from around the world, families dipping in and out of the local buzz when they are escorted out of their vast hotel complexes by a guide, old and new architecture on all fronts and a seething mass of mopeds, often being driven by someone who can offer you accomodation, transport or both. and no, the mopeds aren't big enough to sleep on. they must know a hotel or something.

we stayed in a nice little place ten minutes walk from the main beach and indulged ourselves (we thought) with air-con and a swimming pool. in our first few days we achieved comparatively little bcause we were adjusting (shakily) to how many zero's you needed to be gettign charged for something before you shoul dbe worrying - at around 15,000 rupiah to the ound, prices are often confusing. we did however, complete our first purchase ata market stall of two sarongs (which we needed to go to the temple to see a fire dance, not to mention generlly wanting one - beckham's so cool after all).  we spent a short while choosing, then a slightly longer while bartering with the girl who ran the shop and then, once we'd agreed upon a price, we realised we'df spent almost all our money on breakfast and could only afford to give her about two third of the agreed price - she of course agreed since our bargaining hadn't been uber-impressive and we got a nice deal!

our most enjoyable day came after our "sorting-out" day (in which i'd bought anti-malarials, we'd planned out routes, bought bus tickets etc) and it was really just we fancied a treat - we are on holiday after all! booking a surf lesson for the morning, we went adn were lucky enough to be the only two beginners on that day, so we got our surf pro all to ourselves! after a brief half hour of theory by the side of a pool, jumping up onto rubber mats and doing all sorts of practices to make sure we didn't cock it up too much in the water, we were then taken down for a shot. the first couple of waves we just trundled into the beach lying on our boards like seals at the zoo, but then we got to try standing up and, lo and behold, it worked! ish...... from time to time it was perfect (ahem!) and on others it was the old washing-machine treatment, all to the osunds of the catcalls of other people in their lessons, although we were too busy concentrating on which foot went where to notice all that! two hours down, we went ashore for the last time and hung up our boards for the day, content that we'd be coming back to surfing before too long and we headed on to get some proper breakie - black rice puidding with coconut milk and sugar molasses - tasteeeeeeeee!

after a nap, we chose to go to the waterpark (which we'd spotted the day before) and spent a couple of hours spinning down various flumes on rubber rings, mats, belly, back - you name it, they had it, then finally, the absolute star of the day, we went on The BOomerang. now this beast is just unreal. you get a little rubber dinghy, carry it who knows how high up all these stairs and then ride a flume which drops you at pace down towards a big water-run quarterpipe! we went right up this, the top of it coming scarily close (on account of our black rice pyudding no doubt() and then came to a teetering halt at the top of the arc, terrifyingly close to falling over backwards (or so it felt), then finally we slid backwards at a rate of knots in our dinghy, back into a big splash pool - truly epic! needless to say, we slept well that night!

a few other things to note about kuta.The fire dance was truly epic - we went to see the one performed at Ulu Watu on the cliffs near to kuta. the views from this old temple are simply unreal, not to mention monkey-filled. from here you can see the straight-down cliffs cutting into some seriously churning water far below, and aroudn these cliffs and the temple a number of troupes of monkeys play constantly (balinese macaques i think?). as in all places in the kuta area there are endless supplies fo watches, food, clothing etc to be hadin the vicinity, but due to its distance from the centre, bemo rather than taxi is the way to get there. this, unfortunately, was the scar that marred our nigtht. resorting to a taxi we;d basically gotten ourselevs stuck with a driver who was blatantly waiting to take us back and try to charge an exorbitant fee. whilst we eventually got out from paying what he'd wanted, it wasn't a massively comfortable experience. we learned that one FAST! still, the fire dances, when they started, were pehnomenal. i've already mentioned to some folk that it was like the Sky advert, but there's a 70 man choir that chants in the most hypnotic way - hence calling it a trance-dance. the main performers were beautifully garbed in golden colours which caught the light of the sunset behind them in all different shades, particularly once the sun had actually sunk below the level of the sea. against this stunning backdrop they recanted the tale of rama and sita and the monkey hanoman with the odd, periodic, dragging of a member of the audience towards the centre by the monkey figure! at the end, the monkey is to be burned to death and is surrounded by petrol-soaked straw which is shortly afterwards ignited - a serious blaze! because of his magical powers, hanoman is able to escape and vanquish his foes - hooray! this he does however, by kicking balls of fire at them. yes. look at the crazy monkey, mummy, whilst he misjudges the trajectory of his next kick and sends a ball of flaming straw into the swarms of bemo drivers and guides who waiting on the edges of the stage - quite terrifying really!... although i do feel he perhaps deserved a cheer for doing it!

I feel, in fact, that i'd better leave it there... this blogging isn't supposed to be an all at once thing after all, and i've been sitting here for longer than i probably should be at these rates! next installment will come just as soon as the air-con is fixed. i'll try by then to have got the hang of coming to the point.....