19. 7.

Two weeks on Bali on a very Czech budget = epic and sometimes getting on your nerves SO badly.

There was so much happening on the island that I didn’t write a single letter there. I will do my best to reconstruct as many interesting details as possible so prepare for some long reading. At least I will break it into smaller pieces, OK?

Firstly, I would lime to mention the food. In Vietnam, I was done with eating only local food after one week. Perhaps the tastes are too deifferent and exotic, compared to the European ones. Here, I have been eating mostly just rice and noodles (and tempeh! I love tempeh!) and for three weks, I am completely happy with that and even think I would be able to do so for much longer. Perhaps it is indeed not so different from the Czech tastes, moreover it is simple food – rice/noodles, meat, vegetables, tempeh, soya sauce (called kecap in Chinese and most of Asian languages, Europeans must have got something wrong), sometimes sambal or simply a bit of chilli. Well, sometimes a bit more chilli. I got to eat with my hands just once, sadly; it is an interesting experience, would not mind to do so more often but well, don’t use the cutlery when they give it to you. That was in Denpasar, just after I got there after not eating for 30 hours, travelling from Yogya to Bali, spending most of my time on trains, ferries and buses and in the evenings being hidden behind the doors of my rooms, ignoring the knocking of the horny local boys. Just after we arrived to Denpasar, I found the closest warung and even my grandmother would be proud of me how I dealt with that chicken leg. You could look with a microscope for some meat left on the bones and wouldn’t find any. So the bare-handed approach was just fitting. I think I haven’t been hungry like this since I was an about 12 years old Scout and was trying to get the hunger beaver. Also, the local food is cheap. In most pubs for tourists, you can get a local meal for 20 000-30 000, which is about 2-3 USD, but the real masters of budget travels (hello!) go to the restaurants for locals that can be found along the roads, of course, and don’t go above 10 000 for a nasi goreng. I even paid lovely 7 000 in Singaraja – without bargaining (!) – for a very decent portion. Nice. Another pleasant aspect is that you don’t practically find pork here, not just on muslim Java, but also neither on hinduistic Bali. And as with the rest of the meats I chose to be all right while in Asia (my vegetarianism will have to wait), because they don’t stink and are usually not disgusting, I have no problems ordering whatever here without the need to find out what the words mean. And, last but not least, you can meet people in these warungs. More about that in the story about Bugbug.

Maybe you are wondering – why did she not eat for those 30 hours? Is she retarded? Only a little, the same as usual. You see, it is difficult to buy some snacks here as they don’t have bread or cheese and such things, and I don’t have a knife on the other hand, since Sihanoukville, so it is stupid to buy fruits that you cannot peel and cut. But, in Yogya I managed to find a French bakery and bought some – bread with melted chees on it, yay! plus some seeds and dried beans and such. So I was ready for the first 12-hour-long journey to Banyuwangi. There, as I already wrote, I didn’t go for a dinner because of the, again, HORNY LOCAL BOYS, cretains, aaaaah, and next day there was no chance for a breakfast: At the train station, where I was waiting for my train to the port, they had a small shop, mostly with crisps. I was choosing between having crisps for breakfast and having nothing for breakfast and chose nothing, thinking that I would be able to go for a brunch on the other side of the strait, in Gilimanouk. But there is nothing in Gilimanouk. Well, there is a bus terminal with all those guys that tried to rip me off so badly and so shamelessly that I gave up, left the terminal and started simply walking on the road leading to Denpasar (by the way, a great tool on how to get where you want, proved to be working every single time). I was hoping for meeting a warung but there were none, just stalls with a bit dry mandarines. I bought three and ate them straight away but it didn’t help much. Then I saw a bus coming, stopped it, agreed with the steward on reasonable 25 000 and off we went to Denpasar, for 2 hours. My goal was Kuta Beach, but to get there from the bus terminal was not to be so easy. Firstly, I needed to sort out the food situation, determined that I am not going anywhere further without something in my stomach. After 10 minutes in a warung, where I picked every last molecule of meat from a chicken leg so even my grandma would be proud of me, my mood experienced a dramatic uplift. My communication skills improved alike, especially concerning the moto-taxi drivers. Now I was now just mildly crippling them with my glances instead of killing them. A kind man advised me that I need to take a bemo (= a minibus or a van or what, they are the form of public transport here) and that the ride should cost about 4 000 rupias to some terminal from which another bemo will take me to Kuta for 3 000. Easy peasy, at least with the first ride. however, I ended up at the terminal at half past 7 and after a while waiting for Godot, I found out that bemos run only till 7 p. m. sharp. GPS showed Kuta far, far away and what now, right? I tried the time-tested way of walking in the desired direction but it only brought me to a bunch of moto-taxi drivers who were asking 100 000 per ride or something similarly riddiculous, to some expensive hotels and one laundry place where I asked the staff to call a metered taxi for me in the end, apparently the cheapest way of getting to my final destination at the time. I tried to haggle hard but still I ended up paying 50 000, ouch. The bemo costs 3! But it was getting late and there were few options left so I nodded and after 20 minutes in an air-conditioned freezer found myself in the middle of a different, Western world – neons, overpriced shops and tourists in shorts and vests. Yeah, that’s where I wanted to be!

I walked the Poppies 1 and 2, two little lanes with proclaimed budget hotels, well, the budget was again apparently someone else’s, I haven’t got lower than to 80 000 per the first night. On the other hand, it was a decent and huge room after quite a long time. It is fascinating how little is enough to lift one’s mood – a bright, big room, a clean, inviting double bed, even an armchair, a desk and a mirror (and a telly but I wasn’t interested in that one), your own bathroom with only a few mosquitoes, a terrace with a pond view, and suddenly you feel a lot more relaxed, and also safer. Well, I just took a shower and fell into the bed straight away, anyway. But content, having had finished the long travel there and feeling secure, with nobody knocking on my windows and all that.

They made one mistake in that hotel; they provided me with an internet connection. So the first thing in the morning was to find a cheaper place to stay, a hostel with bunk beds for 50 000, and I would like to check out please. It was called Bedbunkers, recommended! I stayed there for two nights, recovered from the travel and spent the days on the beach, watching the huge waves, the surfers, eating and counting my daily budget for the following two weeks on Bali, researching on how to get back to Jakarta and how much will that cost me, and what the heck I will be doing during all the remaining time on the island. As the weather was not that ideal for the beach activities. So I packed myself again and, armed with information, headed inland for a tramp.