Category: Travel

We’re writing this post from Manggis, a village outside of the town of Candi Dasa, located on the east coast of Bali.  We are happy to report that after 40 hours of travelling, my (TP’s) parents arrived, tired but none the worse for wear.

Our hotel here is just wonderful.  First off, real showers (much better than we had dealt with since leaving Jakarta).  Second off, beautiful scenery.  Third off, super food.  We’ve let mom and dad slowly become acclimated to the time difference, which is +13 hours from the East Coast.  They seem to be enjoying themselves.

What is particularly nice is that this town is small and relatively isolated, meaning that it’s not crawling with loud tourists like Kuta.  It’s so peaceful and pretty here, you can really get a sense of why so many Westerners decide that they want to move here.

So far we’ve seen the organic gardens that the place owns, lounged and drank fruity cocktails, and biked through a little village.  Tomorrow is a big day, with a cooking class, a trip to an apiary, and a place to see traditional fabric weaving.

Another short post–we still don’t trust Typepad.

Our past few days have been largely spent getting from Jogjakarta to Denpasar, the capital of the province of Bali.  But we had to make it fun, so we stopped at Mt. Bromo in East Java on the way.  It was a nine hour minibus ride from Jogja to Probolinggo, then we changed for another minibus ride up to what we thought was the town of Cemoro Lawang.  Turns out we were a couple kilometers short, but that’s OK.  We stayed in a very nice hotel, so it was cool.  The weather was amazing, so comfortable, at night it was about 60 degrees.  For the first time since May, we didn’t need a fan or an air conditioner, and we actually needed blankets to sleep.

We left at 4:00 AM to catch the sunrise at the summit of the volcano, but to make a long story short, we had another one of our misunderstandings/miscommunications, and didn’t make it to the peak until 5:40 or so.  It was other-wordly up there.  First off, it was downright chilly.  Our long-sleeved shirts finally came in handy.  Plus, the landscape looked like something resembling Mt. Mordor in the Lord of the Rings.  You’ll have to check out our pictures when we put them online. 

After that, we had breakfast, descended back to Probolinggo, sweated in the heat for two hours, and then hopped onto a direct bus that put us in Denpasar only 8.5 hours later.  On the way, we took a ferry, which the bus drove straight on to.  The last 128 kilometers from the harbor in West Bali to Denpasar took 3 hours–we’ll let you work out the average speed in miles per hours.  But when you’re on a two-lane road and you’re stuck behind a slow-moving dump truck full of coconuts, there’s not much we can do about it.

So we made it to Denpasar, split a cab to the tourist resort of Kuta, and found a cheap room.  This place reminds us of South Beach…aside from the Indonesian faces on shop owners, you wouldn’t know that this isn’t some other beach town in the West.  Loud Australians in loud surfer wear with sunburned faces and Bintang Beer tanktops.  We don’t particularly like it here too much, and are looking forward to our transfer to Candi Dasa later today.

That’s all for now, we’ll be in touch again later.