My Eat Pray Love Adventure: Hello Bali!

First and foremost, I’m listing down my rough itinerary just so that you wouldn’t get lost in the maze of words and pictures on my entries about my recent trip to Bali. It had gone something like this:

My Itinerary

Day 1 – KL to Bali, Staying at Ubud

Day 2 – Monkey Forest, Ubud Market, Babi Guling, Tampak Siring, Tagalalang, Off the Beaten Track

Day 3 – Goa Gajah, Tagalalang Terraced Rice Fields, Ubud Township Area, Blanco Museum, Off the Beaten Track

Day 4 – Moving down to Sanur, Sanur Beach

Day 5 – Barong Dance, Kintamani, Besakih Temple, Kecak Dance

Day 6 – Moving to Kuta, South Kuta Beach, Uluwatu, Tanah Lot

Day 7 – South Kuta Beach, Back to KL

Currency Exchange Rate

In Malaysia :

MYR 1    :  IDR 2857 (Most money changers in KL would sell IDR 1 Million for RM350)

USD 1    :  MYR 2.97

In Bali:

MYR 1   :  IDR 2840 (The highest we found, most money changers in Bali sell IDR 2700 for RM 1)

I traveled to Bali as part of my Eat Pray Love adventure this year. I am not as crazy about Elizabeth Gilbert as most women (and probably some men) out there might probably be but the movie had at least given me some idea on where to travel to this year 🙂I wouldn’t encourage women to dump their husbands and go on a self-discovery or soul-searching journey or whatever you call it because I could imagine how hurtful it would be if I was one of those estranged poor husbands. In fact, if I happened to see Elizabeth Gilbert in person, my words to her would be something like: Hey, you should have considered going for this so-called self-discovery thingy BEFORE you married and not AFTER you married your husband, you bitch! 😀

So, instead of going to Rome, I opted to go to Bali first, may be because the time was just right for me to finally surrender myself to all the calls to go there.I flew into Bali from KL on an Air Asia flight, expecting the unexpected as always. As I’ve written in my previous blog, I didn’t really do much research on Bali so I didn’t really know what to expect. My fight to Bali from KL had taken about 3 hours long, something I’d consider too long for a place that is located very much within South East Asia. And it was indeed very long at least to me.Borneo Trekker – again, my companion in my travel trip this time, wasn’t being much of help. She SLEPT her flight through, almost the whole of it, leaving me with nothing to do but looking at whatever there was to look, which was nothing much.I wasn’t even interested in watching the couple going mushy mushy on each other at the seat right in front me. In fact they were so much all over each other I couldn’t help but peeking through between their seats to check out where their hands were. *kidding

Some people were just so lucky to get more than what they had bargained for. They paid for one seat and they got the whole 3 seats, which they cleverly turned into a sleeper and slept comfortably and soundly on it. Even those on the so-called hot-seats wouldn’t get that much of comfort that they had.So, after that stupid encounter with that stupid immigration officer (in fact ‘officers’ because the ketua was in it too) at Bali Airport, I shrugged it off and walked out of the terminal building in a victorious feeling, knowing that I didn’t give him a single rupiah after all.Sure enough, just like in any 3^rd world country (thanks God Malaysia has long banned haggling at our airports), we were swarmed up with taxi drivers all trying to rape us with their dodgy offers and hey-I-am-an-honest-person shits. They were so persistent we had to learn to ignore them after awhile.A little bit of reading by Ulai had prompted us to walk straight out onto the main road, expecting to get a better bargain from any of the taxis under the Blue Bird Group as recommended by Lonely Planet.

These taxis under Blue Bird Group are not allowed to come into the airport compound so you gotta walk out to the main road to get to them. “HAHAHA. Of course we only do meters” he assured when we asked if he’d use meter to send us to Ubud – again, as recommended by Lonely Planet Travel Guide.He even assured us that there was only one single ‘jalur’ to Ubud, as they call ‘road’ in Bali. It was peak hours as everybody was heading home from their works so the traffic jam was quite bad. Taking in some of my very first views of Balinese neighborhood, beginning from the hustling and bustling township areas in Kuta to the spread of countryside towards Ubud, it was very easy to see why people tend to fall in love with Bali.The first thing that struck right into me was the architectures. The architectures themselves are already unique and different from what I’ve ever seen in any other country that I’ve been to before. They are the kind of architectures that you probably wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world but Bali.

The intricacies, the details and the beauty of Balinese architectures can be mind-boggling and mystifying at the same time I really felt like I was driven across an ancient city which had probably once housed the Balinese version of Michelangelo or Da Vinci in its heydays.

I would say, building a house is not an easy business in Bali, not because people can’t really afford but it appears like every house has to present a certain level of architectural superiority. And when I said every house, I mean EVERY HOUSE. They don’t simply erect 4 walls with a column in each corner as reinforcement and put down a roof on top of it and call it a house. Architectural superiority is the keywords. They CRAFT out their houses.

And the walls and the gates – gosh, I think half of their money to construct a house would go to the walls to fence up their compounds and another big chuck to construct the gate.  Even the intricacies of the walls can already make you go WOW!After what appeared to be a series of narrow roads across villages and paddy fields and past lots and lots of coconut trees , and after a little bit of asking around and some phone calls by the taxi driver, we finally arrived at Jati Homestay – a home stay that I had found about and booked via www.hostelword.com.As if we didn’t get enough of the incident at the immigration check counter, we were actually being more than generous when we silently discussed and decided to give the driver 200,000 rupiah instead of 160,000 as indicated in the meter read. Instead, we were told that that 200,000 rupiah wasn’t even enough!“We are entitled to 20% EXTRA”, he said, still flashing the honesty behind his guiltless eyes that had apparently cheated us earlier on.

I did hear him murmur something like ‘We only get 20%’ when we were about to hop into his taxi but who would have thought that what he meant by 20% was additional to what would already be on the meter??

You see, the taxi driver was the kind of guys that you would immediately put your trust into not only because of his honest looks but the way he speaks and everything. He was the kind of two-goody shoes guys that you’d let your guards down (not your clothes wokey?) to the moment you open a conversation with.

The funny thing is, we INTENDED to offer our gratitude for him for briefing us a little about Bali, for telling us about his father-in-law’s beautiful kampong in some coastal area in the north of Bali and on top of all – their belief in KARMA – that if they do something bad to other people, they will be punished accordingly and if they do good things, they’ll be rewarded accordingly.So Karma it was, he asked for another 20% extra, which I’d come to realize later was another hoax. We were both amused (and disgusted) as we discussed it later. I mean, what was the point of walking out into the main road (which was quite a distance considering our heavy backpacks) when in the end we had to pay the same price that we would have paid if we took a taxi straight out from the airport?

So – yeah, from then on, we were being more careful. Forget about all the talks about Gods and Goddesses and Karma and holiness, every tourist in Bali has every reason to be careful.  I’ll tell you more stories about cheat encounters in Bali in my next posts.

Lessons Learned

1.    Lonely Planet Travel Guides are not necessarily true.

2.    Be very certain about the taxi fare from the airport. Make sure there is no hanky panky, no additional fees, no nothing. 20 % percent? Show your middle finger to the driver and get another one.