Down south in Bali

It was time for us to move on from Ubud and travel to the south coast of Bali. We needed to head down to Padang Bai to catch the ferry over to the Gili islands, which lie just off the coast of Lombok.

A couple of days in advance (before things started shutting down for Galungan) we went to the Perama office in Ubud to buy our bus tickets. It cost us 50,000 rupiah each - about £3.30.

So it was time to pack up our lives into our rucksacks and leave the Indra Homestay behind.

We'd met a really nice English couple called Justin and Ros during our stay with the Indras, and they gave us some great tips about the Gilis and how to get there, like where to stay and how much we should be paying for things. They were our first encounter with travelers that resulted in some fantastic word-of-mouth advice.

Dave and the luggage at the bus station

Humping our packs down to the Perama office on the Thursday morning, we stocked up on bottled water and after a relatively short wait got onto the bus. It was a decent size but completely full, with no leg room and everyone's luggage piled up front between the passangers and the driver. They really pack you in!

The bus journey itself  was a fun, easy, 90 minute trip. It was great to be out on the road again after being in Ubud for a while, and to see the Balinese landscape whizzing past the windows of our bus. 

There was still a lot of Galungan activity, with penjors lining the roads and people attending religious ceremonies. When we reached the coast we saw a huge gathering of people down by the beach.

We'd found ourselves some accommodation in Padang Bai with  a bit of advance online research. Marco Inn is run by a Dutch guy and his Balinese wife. We contacted Jacob beforehand to make sure they had a room, and this turned out to be a good move. When we all piled off the bus on the main street outside the Padang Bai Perama office, we were immediately hit by the onslaught of guys trying to direct us to their guesthouses. Having something organised in advance was a bonus as it meant we could politely say we already had somewhere booked. 

We found Marco Inn pretty easily and were shown to our room on the first floor. It was small but comfy, with a double bed, cold water shower and one of those toilets that doesn't have a normal flush but instead has a big bucket of water with a cup that you have to empty into the loo to get rid of the 'evidence'. We paid 150,000 rupiah per night - about £10 for the room, with breakfast.

Jacob and his family were really welcoming and there was a small open courtyard where we could chill out and play with their two pet bunny rabbits!

The downside? We were staying really close to the ferry port and centre of town, and it was ridiculously noisy at night. During the day Padang Bai is a pretty sleepy little harbour town but we had a restless, sometimes sleepless, stay. Earplugs were no use when the ferry horn and tannoy, cockerels crowing, dogs barking, and the mosque call to prayer all went off in a ridiculous middle-of-the-night cacophony.

Our main mission was to organise our transport to and from the Gili islands. At that point we didn't really know how long we wanted to stay on the Gilis, but the idea was to head over to Gili Air first for a few days and then see what happened. There are a couple of ways to get over to the islands, mainly the fast boat (quick and expensive) and the public ferry (slow and cheap). We opted for the latter option and had a bit of a scout around for deals; there were loads of local agents advertising the trip and we finally bought our tickets from a guy who was set up at the end of the main street nearest the ferry (Pesona Bintang tours). After some bargaining, we managed to agree upon open return tickets for the two of us for: 

• ferry from Padang Bai to Lembar
• bus transfer up to Bangsal
• boat from Bangsal to Gili Air
• back from any of the Gili islands whenever we wanted. 

It cost us 400,000 rupiah - about £25 - which we were pretty pleased with. 

As well as the official stuff we needed to sort out, we also spent some time along Padang Bai beach front, which was really pretty with lots of traditional boats moored up and bobbing in the shallows. It was lovely being back at the coast after all that time spent inland in Ubud, and the constant calls from the hawkers had changed from "Transport?!" "Massage!?" to "Diving!?" "Boat trip?!"

We spent two nights in Padang Bai and found a really cheap little warung that fed us well on nasi mie and goreng and where we could pick up the unsecured WiFi from the nearby bar (we didn't have internet access at Marco's)! 

On Saturday morning we got up, repacked, and - using our magic piece of paper from the tour office - boarded the ferry to our desert island getaway.

Ubud: Illness, rice fields, hitting the backpacker trail

Ubud is often called the 'cultural centre of Bali'. It certainly had art galleries and traditional performances aplenty, but I get the feeling the description is more reflective of the town 10 years ago. Now it bears more resemblance to the slightly less flattering image it has earned from the book Eat, Pray, Love and the subsequent Julia Roberts movie; a nice place where middle aged women in linen trousers do yoga, eat tofu and hunt for handsome younger men.

Although this isn't really our cup of tea, we did have some real fun in Ubud and managed to find some of the charm that it probably had in greater abundance in the past.

Ubud had an entirely different pace to our time in Tembok, filled with new sights, sounds and smells, festivities, frustrations, rural rice fields and urban tourist chaos.

We had a bit of a stuttering start to our time there. After arriving at Waka Di Ume, Dave was floored by a bout of severe food poisoning that put him out of action for two days and lingered for a week. I played nurse and we were grateful to be in surroundings that delivered complimentary bottled water every day and provided room service breakfasts of scrambled eggs, bacon and delicious banana pastries, and cheese burgers for dinner, to sustain my vigil. Not to mention the free, fast WiFi that allowed us to download plenty of movies for entertainment!

A quick mention here of more breakfast peculiarities from posh Bali resorts, assumedly catering for their guess at Western eating habits... garlic bread and a spoonful of mashed potato???

Dave pulled through, of course, and we were able to start enjoying the area. One highlight was an early morning trek through the rice fields. Our guide took a small group of us to the paddies and on the way we passed groups of kids heading to school, dressed in blazers and batik pattered shirts (way more interesting than any of my uniforms were!) Some of the children were hanging around outside the school, drinking tubs of weird coloured soft drinks and sweeping the small, quiet street with stick brooms. Their energy, palpable even at that early hour, was infectious.

The weather inland around Ubud was generally cooler and cloudier than it had been on the coast, but at pre-8am the day was already heating up. In the rice fields the bright white sun reflected back at us from the surface of the water. 

Intricate irrigation systems feed the large square 'pools' where the rice is grown. The precision of the planting - all straight lines of little lush green tufts - is a marvel, considering it's all done by hand. We walked along narrow earth tracks that interlace through the delicate crops and provide precarious protection from soggy feet. Close up, you see the rice sprouting up as neat individual plants, but looking out over the paddies in all directions, it became fields of solid green almost reminiscent of English rolling countryside. Except the oaks were palm trees, the hills were distant volcanoes and the sturdy farmhouses were tiny bamboo huts.

Men in sarongs and conical hats worked the land with long bamboo-handles tools. Ducks - farmed among the rice to keep the crop free of bugs - flapped and quacked around the water. The low, intense sun beat down from a bright blue sky smattered with white wispy clouds. It was beautiful.

While we were staying at the resort, we took a couple of jaunts into Ubud for food and shopping, and to get our bearings in time for leaving the security of pre-arranged accommodation.

Cafe Wayan, on the busy Monkey Forest Road, fed us well one night with nasi campur (rice and stuff), mie goreng (fried noodles), fresh garlic-roasted peanuts and unusual green pancakes stuffed with something sweet and served with ice cream. It was a sharp contrast, in both price and quality, to a disastrous meal of nasi goreng (fried rice) at Warung Lokal, and taught us a valuable lesson that cheap isn't always cheerful. But we've also learnt since that even cheaper can be GREAT (more on Gili Air's tasty £1 offerings in a later post).

On the Thursday of our second week away, we did some advance recon to find a place to stay once we hit the backpacker trail. Goodbye luxury, hello self-sufficiency! We found ourselves a nice homestay in central Ubud, on the street Jalan Hanoman. It was in budget and within an hour of beginning our search, so, deposit paid, we left happy with our first foray into 'by the seat of our pants' accommodation.

After two weeks of lovely honeymoon indulgence, on the Saturday, as organised, we arrived back to the Wayan family (not the one with the eponymous Cafe) only to be told the room had been given to someone else and they were full. All our considered planning! What of our deposit?? We would get it back. Where would we stay?? We were on the streets! Laden! Surely disaster?! Of course not. The fates had smiled upon us and gushing apologies, kind Ibu Wayan went next door to find us a room within the Indra family homestay. 20,000 rupiah more per night (about £1.30) but with free WiFi and a good room with a hot water shower, ceiling fan, clean (dolphin print) sheets and a sweet little veranda, plus breakfast each morning. Done deal! Dave was a master negotiator and bargained the rate down by 30,000 rupiah per night.

The guy in charge was a gently-spoken, middle aged man named Karta. The Indra family milled around the smallish home compound and seemed to consist of a very old parental couple, Karta and his wife, another couple who we assumed to be Karta's brother and his wife, and 4 or 5 children - boys and girls aged around 7-18. The homestay was cool and quiet - the perfect hideaway from busy Ubud. We had relatively little to do with the family, aside from pleasantries (like the evening "Selamat Malam" to the old couple as they sat watching Asian soap operas at the communal TV) and discussing breakfasts with the teenage boys on duty each morning.

And oh the breakfasts! Different each day (always with black Balinese coffee that you had to play very safe for the last couple of sips to avoid a mouthful of grounds, and fresh fruit salad of banana, papaya and pineapple with grated coconut): banana jaffle (that's a toastie), banana pancakes, black rice pudding made with coconut milk, and on the morning before Galungan, steamed rice with sauteed green veg and various spicy meats.

More on Galungan (the most important annual festival on Bali) soon...