Tuesday, April 1st – We arrived in Bali late Tuesday night and spent over an hour in line at immigration. As we waited we had to stare at huge signs saying “automatic death penalty to anyone attempting to bring drugs into Indonesia”. Obviously none of us were planning to do any drug trafficking during this trip, but it’s still intimidating! Then Mylene and I had to pay $30 each for the visa to enter the country but the Chilean girls didn’t have to pay anything, we still don’t totally understand why. We grabbed a taxi to our hotel, got some milkshakes down the street, then went to bed.
Wednesday, April 2nd – We basically spent this whole day at the beach. We were staying in the city of Kuta and the beach was just down the street from our hostel. The beach here is very popular for surfing but isn’t quite the clean, uninhabited, paradise beach you would hope for. It was still nice enough to lie on all day and get a tan! There’s only a few small designated “no surfing” areas where you can swim though, so it was annoying to trek all the way over there every 15 minutes when we would get too hot from the sun. The beach had a lot of local guys trying to sell surfing lessons, other locals selling jewelry and stuff, and a lot of western surfers/tourists. The streets on Kuta are all open front shops and restaurants. The locals running the stores usually sit on the sidewalk out front of the store waiting for customers. They would of course say things as we walked by and ask us to come look in their store and buy from them, but they were never rude so it didn’t bother us. I found that if I smiled politely as I walked by they never failed to say “thank you for your smile!” Or if we weren’t making eye contact or smiling they would say “can I have a smile for good luck?” so I would smile and then they would laugh and say thank you. I thought it was really cute. The guys had a habit of saying “I love you” a lot as we passed (traveling in a group of 4 girls it’s expected) but they also were just having fun, not being obscene or trying to make us uncomfortable. In the evening we found a spa, if you can call it that, where Paulina and Maribel got massages and Mylene and I got pedicures. After we agreed on a price the Chilean girls headed back for their massages, the women just pulled out folding chairs in the lobby area for our pedicures! We had to just set our feet on little wooden stools and all they did was paint our nails and try to sell us other things the whole time. They tried getting us to buy jewelry, get our hair braided, get a manicure…they even tried to convince us to get tattoos (this "spa" apparently had many specialties)! It was probably the worst pedicure ever, but we got a kick out of it and it only cost a few dollars. That night we went to a Mexican restaurant and went out searching for a happy hour. There was a cute little outdoor bar next door to where we were staying advertising $4 cocktail jugs! We each ordered one, and these “jugs” ended up being multicolored water bottles decorated with Barbie stickers which was pretty random.
Thursday, April 3rd – The best sites are a bit spread out around Bali so the best way to tour everything is to just hire a driver for the whole day. Another exchange student had just been in Bali the week before us so he gave us the card of a good driver he used. His name was Mr. Made and we hired him for this day. We gave him a broad idea of the types of things we would like to see and he planned out where to take us. First thing in the morning he took us to see a Balinese dance performance. It’s was at an outdoor theater and they put flowers behind our ears as we entered. The show would have been very difficult to follow if they hadn’t provided us a written summary of the storyline. Even with the summary I was still a bit confused, but it was basically a battle between good and evil. The Barong and the Rangda are the characters representing good and evil and they have huge elaborate costumes. At some point the Rangda kidnaps a princess (one of the beautiful Balinese women that dance throughout the show) and the Barong saves her. This is the standard storyline for these Balinese dance shows, not just this one that we saw.
After the show Mr. Made drove us farther north of the city to the “monkey forest.” It’s just a paved trail going through a forest right in the city of Ubin, but there happens to be hundreds of monkeys in the forest that are not scared of people. There were mini bananas for sale at the entrance to the trail so we could feed them. There was a big fountain after about a five minute walk where a bunch of people just stood around to play with the monkeys and the monkeys played in the fountain. We would hold up a banana higher than what the monkeys’ can jump to, so they would run and crawl up the side of our body to reach the banana then jump off and run away! Or if we sat on the benches the younger ones would come sit on our laps. The bigger males were a bit scary so Mr. Made would scare them away if they came too close to us girls!
After hanging out there for awhile and taking a million pictures, we headed to the rice fields. I had never even seen pictures of fields like these so I really loved that we went to see them. I guess the farmers construct the landscape on the hills to be step-like which creates flooding to help grow the rice. We ate lunch at a restaurant that overlooks the fields.
On the way there, Mr. Made’s jeep was having a lot of issues, it kept dying and we would have to pull over. We were getting pretty nervous that we would be stranded 50 miles from our hostel, but he got it checked out while we ate and it was apparently an easy fix because there weren’t any more problems. After eating we headed west and stopped at a couple places including the “royal temple” and the “elephant temple.” Both of these places were pretty small and mostly an outdoor collection of statues, fountains, or tiny buildings. At the royal temple they actually had these outdoor rooms decorated with fancy furniture. Another interesting thing was that at the elephant temple there was a sign out front saying any women who are menstruating aren’t allowed to enter the temple! Obviously they have no way of enforcing this but it was just strange reading that sign out front.
After this we continued over to Tanah Lot temple on the western coast to watch the sunset. Unfortunately it was pretty cloudy so it wasn’t quite as colorful as we would have liked. The temple was on a little island a bit off the coast and it was still a great view despite the cloudiness. Plus, I got to get a picture holding a giant snake out front!
Eventually Mr. Made brought us back to Kuta and to our hotel. Manena’s flight got in that evening so we went back to that same bar with the happy hour and Barbie water bottles and waited for her to get there. Once she arrived we decided to go to bed early as we had to catch an early morning boat!
Friday, April 4th – After breakfast we had arranged for a van to pick us up and drive us to the shore where we could get a boat to Lembongen Island, which we heard had some really great beaches. Unfortunately the van was a bit late so we had an embarrassing moment of running up to the boat as it pulled away and yelling for them to come back for us…since it was the only one leaving that day, we were very grateful that it actually came back! It was an hour boat ride to the island. An Australian guy on the boat pointed out to me that the local guys manning the boat were smoking cigarettes right next to the open fuel tanks…luckily there weren’t any explosions! We were actually really disappointed when we first got to the island. The beach where we docked was absolutely packed with boats and only had a couple of feet of rocky sand before the beach was cut off by a stone wall a few feet tall. Beyond the wall was just a bunch of dingy hotels and restaurants. There wasn’t even enough beach to lay out a towel so we weren’t too thrilled. The locals all were approaching us trying to convince us to stay at their hotel, so we started asking them if there were other places to go on the island that were better. One guy started telling us we should go to “Dream Beach” and he said him and his friends would take us there on their motos for $2.50. We didn’t realize how undeveloped this island was so we told him “no, no we’ll just take a taxi” and they all started laughing at us…there definitely aren't any taxis on this island! The only roads are just over sidewalk width and look like they haven’t been repaved in decades. So everyone gets around the island by moto. We agreed to have that guy and his four friends each take one of us on the back of their moto to Dream Beach. We were still skeptical that they were trying to rip us off, but we figured anywhere would be better than the place we were docked at. Despite the extreme popularity of motos in Asia I had still never ridden on one so I was a bit nervous at first, especially because I had my enormous backpack on and I felt like it was going to tip me over when we went up hills. Turned out being pretty fun though and the guys were good about driving slow. It was about a 15 minute ride. Then, we arrived in absolute paradise!! It was hands down the nicest beach I have ever been to. Not a single rock in the white sand and clear blue water. The beach is actually pretty small so there’s only one restaurant/bar and like 5 bungalows for rent. We bargained and got a pretty good deal on their biggest bungalow. It was two storeys, the lower level being an open area with a bar and a bathroom out back, and the upper level had two bedrooms and a living room overlooking the water. I think only a couple of the other bungalows were rented out at the time because we only ever saw a few other people around besides the workers. It was almost like our own private beach! The waves were enormous, the water would be up to our thighs between waves then suddenly our feet would be swept 3 feet off the ground. So we spent the entire day in the water (trying not to drown) and laying on the beach. The food was more expensive than on the main island, but I guess they can charge whatever they want being the only restaurant on the beach! In the evening I tried to work on our Marketing project for a while, but the other girls didn’t feel like it so I quickly lost motivation as well. We decided to all five crawl on the king size bed and watch the movie Love, Actually on my laptop, then go to sleep.
Our enormous bungalow!
the dream beach bar
Our outdoor jungle shower!
The view from our bungalow's living room window
Saturday, April 5th – Originally, we had planned to only stay one night on Lembongen Island, but since there are only morning boats we would have had to leave at like 7am Saturday morning and we just weren’t ready to leave yet so we decided to skip the opportunity to see Bali’s Saturday night life and stayed one more night. After breakfast we walked to Mushroom Beach; the guys running our bungalow said that beach is more developed and is great for sunsets. We got there after about 30 minutes and went swimming right away. There was definitely more activity here, with a few different places for accommodation, three or four restaurants, and some day-tour boats coming in and out. The beach wasn’t quite as nice, but it was a good change because the water was calm so we could actually swim and stay in for a long time instead of constantly battling waves. We had yet another unproductive day in the sun. We ate lunch, then I used the internet at a hotel for awhile. We noticed they had motos for rental by the hour, and Mylene and I decided we wanted to try it. We ended up walking back to where we were staying because at Mushroom Beach they were trying to charge us $6/hour rental and we knew everything was cheaper on the beach we were staying at. So our place didn’t actually own motos just for the purpose of renting, but the employees that live there just lent us their personal ones for $2.50/hour. They were automatic and very self explanatory to drive so it really wasn’t that adventurous of us to take them around the island, but we got ourselves pretty psyched up for it regardless. We should have asked for some cool places to go or a map or something, but we didn’t, so our drive just went around random paths through the island. We passed occasional collections of homes or little kids playing but it was mostly just trees. It was nice to have something to do other than lay on the beach though!
We returned the bikes and made it back to the other girls (who hadn’t moved from their beach towels and had a magnificent tan!) in time for sunset. Once again, it was a bit cloudy so the pictures weren’t too amazing. We ate a late dinner then walked back. We realized we shouldn’t have lingered for so long because it ended up being pitch black by the time we were walking home and there are definitely not any street lights on the way! We had to go really slow to not trip on the rocky path, and I think we were all legitimately frightened on the way. There were a couple stray dogs barking and growling at us and we couldn’t see where they were, and we occasionally passed men walking which made us a bit nervous. Of course we ended up getting back to our beach perfectly fine, and one of the stray dogs following us actually belonged to the guys running our hotel. After getting back we all took turns in the shower. Half of the back wall of the bungalow was replaced with a cloth curtain and behind it there was a semi-circle stone wall creating an outdoor room that they used as the shower. There was a tree in the corner that they ran a pipe behind so the shower water seemed to be coming right out of the trees. There’s no light back there so I could barely see enough to find my shampoo, but it was really cool to look up and see nothing but stars! We were planning to go have some drinks at the bar after cleaning up, but when we went down there we realized they closed at 9pm. So we just turned around and went to bed!
Sunday, April 6th – We called the guy who gave us a ride to the beach the first day and asked him and his friends to come with their motos at 7:30am and bring us back to the dock. Some of the guys he brought were different than the ones we met Friday and we all laughed at Mylene because the guy driving her was only 13…her backpack took up more space on the moto than he did so she looked really funny clinging on to him as they drove! We were back at our same hostel in Kuta by 10am. We headed straight back to the main beach and hired 5 of the many local guys who were there selling surfing lessons! We each paid $15 for a two hour lesson. They lined up all of our boards in the sand and showed us how to stand up, then had us try. I thought there would be more instruction to come, but after we each tried standing up once they were like “okay! Let’s go in the water!” It was definitely a crash course! I can’t remember my instructor’s name but he was super nice and didn’t even seem to get frustrated with how bad I was! They said we had a great day for beginners; there was enough waves to get us going, but small enough where falling wasn’t scary. One challenge was that it was crowded and I had by no means developed the skill to turn while on the board so I had to purposely fall off plenty of times to avoid hitting someone. I only stood up without falling and actually “rode” the wave all the way to the shore twice in the two hours, but that was good enough for me! All the guys were really fun, they liked us and joked around a lot.
Then, as if learning to surf wasn’t enough adventure for one day, that evening we decided to go bungee jumping!! I actually called in the morning and set it up for all 5 of us to jump at sunset. So after the surfing we changed clothes and pretty soon our van arrived to take us over there. Naturally, we were all scared but very excited when we got there. The place is only a block or two inland from the beach, so when you’re on the ground you just see trees and some buildings, but once you get on the elevator up to the jumping platform, you can see over the trees and there’s nothing but ocean. About 10 feet below where we jump from they have a guy on another platform with a camera that takes a ton of pictures of us mid-jump with the sunset, beach, an ocean in the background! (then they charged us $20 just to copy these pics onto a disk to take home...) The jump is directly over a pool, then there’s a small platform that they slide out over the water once we stopped bouncing. An employee is on the platform and he just holds out a long pole that we had to try to grab onto as we were hanging upside down, and once we had it he pulled us onto the platform. We went in two groups so the girls on the ground could take additional pictures. Manena, Mylene, and Maribel went up first. After a lot of anticipation and deep breaths, Manena was the first one to jump. Once she stopped bouncing and was just hanging upside down, Paulina and I (and the other 5 or 6 people standing around that we didn’t know) noticed that Manena’s chest had almost completely come out of her tank top. It was hilarious!! Once the three girls were all back down Paulina and I headed up. I went first. I got nervous when it only took them like 20 seconds to get me all strapped on! They just wrapped towels around my ankles for cushioning then strapped the harness around the towels and snapped one more line onto the belt we had put on on the ground. I was anticipating it to be a much more detailed and sophisticated process than this! It definitely seemed a lot higher once I got up there! The girls looked tiny, but I could still hear them cheering. The guys that strap people in count down from 5 before the jump, but all 3 of the other girls had stopped them mid-count at least once and were like “wait! wait! just give me a minute…” I was determined to go on the first countdown because once I looked over the edge I knew the longer I was there the more scared I would get. I was terrified when I heard him say 5 only a half-second after I stepped up to the ledge! Anyway, I jumped right away. The girls were so surprised because it was probably only 2 minutes from the time the elevator reached the top to when I was back on the platform. It was extremely fun!!! Paulina probably had the hardest time, I think she stood at the ledge for about five minutes, but in the end we all did it and coughed up the money for the great pics (for the sole purpose of bragging)!
That got the adrenaline going pretty good so we got the music blasting on the way back to the hostel and immediately went to get ready for the club. We went to dinner and it ended up being a disaster, it took almost 2 hours and they mixed up our order multiple times. We didn’t let it get our mood down though! We finished dinner around 9:30 and our favorite Barbie water bottle happy hours lasted until 10 so we ran back there and ordered a few jugs. We had a ton of fun playing cards and chatting for a couple hours, then headed to the club Bounty that we had heard a lot about. It was known as the club all the Australian surfers go to, so we of course wanted to check it out! ;). Since it was Sunday night we were preparing ourselves for it to not be that lively, but it was surprisingly full and we stayed and danced well into the morning!
Monday, April 7th – We hired Mr. Made again to take us around to the island’s attractions this day. We knew we were going to be at the club the night before though, so we asked him to pick us up at noon instead of 8am like the first day! This time he took us to the southern shore. We took a glass-bottom boat ride to Turtle Island. It was actually kind of weird, it was basically just a mini zoo on a tiny little section of an island. It definitely didn’t have an authentic feel, and we were pressured into making donations even though we had already paid to go to the island, but it was still fun to see the animals. There was a bunch of huge and baby turtles. The guy was telling me I could pick up one of the big ones for a picture, but I was too weak to get it more than an inch off the ground! So I just settled for the babies. We also held a bat, a snake, and a toucan.
After this, the boat took us out to go snorkeling. They gave us a little bag of bread to attract the fish so that definitely helped make it interesting. I thought the fish and coral were pretty impressive, but I had never snorkeled before and therefore had no point of reference. The other girls had all done plenty of snorkeling before and said it wasn’t the best. Better than in the Philippines where they only saw one fish the entire time, but not as great as Thailand where they saw sharks and the water was clearer.
After an hour or so in the water we headed back. Mr. Made then drove us to Uluwatu beach where they have international surfing competitions each year because the waves are so big. We watched some guys surfing, checked out some caves, and took plenty of pictures on the cliffs with the beautiful backgrounds. There’s also a small temple that was similar to the Tanah Lot temple we had seen earlier in the week.
Our last stop was Jimbaron Bay. It was dark out by the time we got there but it’s yet another great destination for sunsets so there were countless restaurants along the beach with tables out in the sand. It reminded me of family dinners on TV sitcoms because all of the chairs at the table would only be place on 3 sides of the table so everyone eating would be able to see the ocean and sunset. It was a restaurant where we had to go pick out our seafood dinner from the tanks. All five of us ended up getting squid because it was the only thing we could afford. There was a couple bands walking around taking requests and serenading tables. They were really good! When they came to our table we had them sing “Beautiful” by James Blunt, ”Faith” by George Michael, and “Flake” by Jack Johnson. We all joined in and sang too. That night, our friends Diego (France), Dave (Minnesota), and my roommate Edouard (France) all arrived for the first night of their 5 day trip to Bali. We had given them the name of our hostel and met up with them once we got back to Kuta. We all went back to the club Bounty. There were less people there than they night before, but there was enough of us SMU students there to have a good time! The club had hired male and female dancers and our guy friends had a pretty good time jumping up on the platforms with the dancers. Diego ended up having a rough night and lost his wallet with his cash, credit cards, and green card for Singapore…but we don’t need to get into the details of that!
Tuesday, April 8th – We all slept in later than what is reasonable, but us girls had already hit all of our goals and sight seeing destinations we had planned for the trip so it didn’t really matter. I spent basically the whole day typing up our Marketing report. Our flight would get into Singapore about 1am on Wednesday and our presentation was at 2pm on Wednesday, so we definitely had procrastinated! We met the guys for dinner and gave them some tips for the trip including Mr. Made’s card (the day before we had told Mr. Made that our friends would be calling him, but we also convinced him that our friends were gay and encouraged him to take them around to “those types” of massage places! Hahaha. I later asked Edouard if Mr. Made took them anywhere weird and he said no, but he said Mr.Made did refer to them as the “boom boom team” which we had also told him to say!) After a bit more work on our presentation, it was time to head to the airport!
All in all, a great trip!! It was great to have a few days of relaxing on the beach with the girls mixed in with a few days of touring around the island. We ended up doing pretty well on the final Marketing presentation, but maybe the professor just took pity on us because everyone knows exchange students have the worst projects.
That night was the farewell party thrown by the school. It was poorly organized but we were still happy to have everyone together one last time. Everyone got dressed up and they provided buffet dinner. We later went to our usual Wednesday night club for ladies’ night!
(me and my two female roommates before the farewell party!)
Finals began the next Monday. 3 of my 5 roommates: Alba (Spain), Leslie (France), and Josep (Spain) had all purposely taken classes that didn’t have finals so they finished their semester the day I returned from Bali. The next day all three of them left Singapore! Not to go home, they were all traveling for at least a month before going home, but it was still going to be my last time seeing them so it was a hard day! I had written them all goodbye letters in the morning then left them by their beds when I went to the library to study. Leslie texted me later “Alba and I got your letters, you should see us now, crying like babies!” We all went out to dinner later and many many tears were shed before they left for the airport! My last 2 weeks in Singapore weren’t the same without them!
That weekend Manena and Alba’s friend Sue came to visit. She’s from Spain but is studying in Hong Kong and she showed us around when we went to HK. We spent most of the weekend showing her the sights in Singapore. We went to Chinatown, Little India, the financial district, and down by the river. We even went back to the cute little Muslim district where our hostel was that we stayed at when we first came in December and hadn’t found an apartment yet. We went back there and had some coffee outside and played a game of jenga just like we did on our second day in Singapore and we didn’t know each other at all! We also went to the botanic gardens and got caught in the pouring rain!
(pre-rain pic!)
On Sunday night Sue had already left, but Manena, Caterina (Italy), Wioletta (Sweden), and I all went to the famous Esplanade theatre to see the tour of the musical "We Will Rock You" which only uses songs by Queen. The architecture of the theater is pretty famous so I figured I should go there at least once during my semester. The storyline of the show is kind of silly but I love Queen so I liked it anyway! The other girls enjoyed it as well so it was a great night and an excuse to get dressed up!
(pic of the girls in front of the theatre)
The next week I lived at the library and tried to cram as much as possible for the exams I was completely unprepared for. I didn’t have too much to worry about since my classes this semester only counted as pass/fail, but it was still nerve wracking! I ended up passing all of my classes =). My last final was on April 19th, and I got home May 3rd. During that time I traveled Vietnam and Japan, so be expecting those blogs soon!!!
