Selamat Datang (Welcome)

Touchdown. After a grueling 16 hours in and out of airports and planes, we finally arrived in Bali. I was excited by the announcement over the intercom. I wasn't excited though about the task at hand of finding and making our way to a hotel. While in flight, we had decided to head directly to Ubud, North of Denpasar and so, upon arrival, we went to the information booth with that thought in mind.

As it turned out, neither customs nor getting a ride to town was difficult at all. The guide books told of constant toters and we were ready for an onslaught similar to what we'd found in Fiji. When that wasn't the case we relazed. Just outside of customs was a money exchanger who, with no hassles, converted our remaining 60 Australian dollars to Indonesian Rupiah, enough to get us a taxi, a nights lodging, dinner and leave us with plenty of extra. The taxi was a straight fee of 40,000 RP. Rates are set by the airport, which was fortunate because we were too tired to haggle and sagging eyelids would have been an instant indicator that we were ripe for over-charging.

When the cab pulled away from the curb, we felt we had stepped into another world. Motorbikes zig-zagged between cars and people along narrow lanes; open shops displayed crafts and all manner of goods along every inch of roadway; women, in traditional Balinese dresses carryed tin baskets on their heads; the fruits in those baskets rigged into high immovable cylinders. The women slipped around pedestrians, dodged honking vehicles, stepped up and down the endless dips and rises in the broken brick sidewalks and up and over the extremely high steps leading in and out of buildings (no standardized stair rise height here.) Never a waver from any of them.

Finally our cab arrived in Ubud, the cultural center of Bali. Along Ubud's densely packed corridors are craft shops, galleries, homestays, hotels, restaurants, open-sided bala banjars (local meeting places), and color galore. At the two main crossroads are the temple, the local market, the warning drum tower and a huge banyan tree. We stopped along Monkey Forest Road (more or less what you would call the 'main drag') and looked at rooms in three different homestays and inns. Finally we settled on the Puri Bungalows.

All the accommodations in our price range were generally the same, offering two or three different styles of rooms (room size being the biggest difference between them). For 25,000 RP we settled into a clean two-bed room with attached bath and front porch. The bath had only a cold shower (hot shower rooms are more), but having made a recent transition from a temperate climate into what to us felt like a jungle, would have made a hot shower a waste of money.

The biggest plus to this bungalow over the other two we saw was that this one had doors, and, they could be locked. Granted the lock was just a padlock that slipped around two brass rings, but at least it offered some security. The other rooms had no doors at all.

We were too wiped out to do much more than grab a quick gado-gado (rice and vegetable meal) at one of the local restaurants, buy a mosquito coil and lay on the bed under the ceiling fan and sweat ourselves to sleep.