Bali, Indonesia

Our flight left Kuala Lumpur in a thunderstorm but managed to make it to Bali in Indonesia around 3 hours later at around 8pm. It was a start to a stressful few hours, even before we managed to leave the airport! We had to pay 25USD for an Indonesian visa each but had no dollars or local money, but we were allowed to use our visa cards! For some strange reason, all our bank cards were refusing to let us pay. A hour passed and I managed to get my credit card working but by that time our luggage was no longer on the luggage conveyor  belt and had a mini-panic until we found our bags at the airline's office. When we left the terminal, we had changed up a small amount of Malaysian money to Indonesian Ruppiah and was bombarded by a load of taxi drivers which was pretty much standard in Asia. The main resort was 5 mins away from the airport but taxi drivers were demanding 22 pound which seemed a little expensive considering petrol only costs 30p a litre. We managed to find the taxi counter within the airport and they charged us 3.50, that's more like it!
It was now 9.30pm and the next part of our ordeal was finding a room in the resort which was especially hard considering the taxi driver didn't drop us off in the centre of the resort. We managed to find a hotel a hour later with our clothes dripping of sweat and we was now hungry by this point as we didn't check into the room until after 10. It was not a good start to Bali.....

Coming to the UK soon.....

Whilst Georgia got her standard 12 hours sleep in, I went out at 8am the next morning in search of a laundry and a hotel with a swimming pool and somewhere that was more within our budget. Bali consists of narrow streets with shops selling fake rubbish, restaurants, bars and hotels. I come across a nice hotel owner which had rooms for 14 pound but with no air-conditioning and a pool so I took it. After being out for a hour and half I imagined Georgia starting to get worried but got back to the room to find her still snoring away. We had some lunch and moved hotels....

Bali was a bit like Koh Samui in Thailand, it was more aimed at people going on holiday rather than backpacking but with an Australian twist. It seemed as if that nearly everybody staying in the resort, Kuta, was an Australian on holiday with their mates or family. It was almost an Indonesian version of Majorca or Tenerife and with Aussies and not Brits abroad lol. It was almost strange seeing groups of girls and boys on holiday by the beach with lots of bars and a couple of huge super-clubs  Talking of clubs, only once we were there it only occurred to me that the Bali bombings were not that long ago and they have a memorial site where the nightclub that got bombed in 2002 used to be. It was in the centre of town and had the names of the 200 people or so that died that night. It was quite a scary thought as we had a drink in the club next door for a couple of nights.

Georgia at a foam party

Originally we were going to explore whole island of Bali but stayed in the same resort for 5 nights as we had a nice hotel, there was good food, nice beach and a few good places for a drink. We knew that the other parts of Indonesia wasn't so touristy so we put our exploring on hold for a bit and pretended we was on holiday for a few nights. And yes there is a difference between holiday and travelling before you ask!

Skinny surfer dude

One day we headed to the beach instead of lounging around the swimming pool and I noticed that there was hundreds of people surfing! It wasn't much of a surprise considering nearly everyone in our hotel owned a surfboard plus 90% of the people on the beach were Australian so there was a lot of surfer "dudes" and a lot of Aussie birds lol. The waves were huge and the current was stronger than any other sea that I had been but I thought I would have been stupid to miss out on the opportunity of having a surfing lesson. I paid a local 10 pound and he taught me for a hour or so and I think I picked it up quite quickly but every time I got back onto the surfboard I looked like a seal jumping on and managed to get all friction burns over my belly, sorry six-pack. It was a good experience and was glad I did it but couldn't manage to persuade Georgia to do it!

Skin-head lol

I also had a mid-travelling crisis by asking to having a skin-head in the hairdressers as I was always hot and my cows lick was annoying me so in the heat of the moment (literally) I said shave it lol. My hair is still in the process of recovering and hopefully it should be OK by this time next week as I will be home.

During the evenings we ate at all types of restaurant, Indonesian, Mexican, Western, Italian and went out for a drink a couple of the nights aswell. The main nightclub was literally giving away free drinks between 9-10pm for men and from 9-11pm for girls which seemed like to much of a good opportunity to miss. The superclub must of had about 6 rooms over 4 floors and we had a good night out. We often looked like tramps compared to the Aussies at they had nice holiday clothes whilst we felt like we had worn-out day clothes but after a few drinks we didn't care! Georgia seemed to notice that all the Australian men were huge, I don't mean fat, more like Mr Muscle! To be fair it was hard to disagree but to be fair all they seem to do is surf and swim all day, back in England the nearest I get to that is stretching for a shot whilst playing snooker lol.

I'm not too sure what else we did in Bali to be fair, we did no excursions and just relaxed and had a good few days off from travelling and not worrying about catching the next bus and booking the next excursion.