A Tale of Two Beaches – Kuta

After the quiet of Nusa Lembongan I really wanted some action so I went to the ultimate beach, Australia’s unofficial colony, Kuta.

This is first, and sometimes the only place, that people go to when they get off the plane, there’s a long sandy beach, plenty of facilities and big waves for surfing. It’s funny, you read the Lonely Planet and it seems that all the coastal sections were written with surfers in mind, everything else is secondary…..

The whole town seems to be geared towards making money off the tourists and everything is available, I would be regularly offered hash, marijuana, “massages” and young girls as well as the usual options of sunglasses, t-shirts and transport.

Another thing that was big business was time-share holidays and the ruse was that you get given a scratch-card and in order to claim your prize,all you have to do is sit through a 1 hour presentation on the resort. It was a hot day and 1 hour in an air-conditioned room sounded good so I gave it a try. I listened, I asked stupid questions, I said I wasn’t interested in their timeshares and I came out of it with a week’s free holiday in their resort….

At the same time I had the chance to see the friendliness of the locals. I was only just off the bus and wandering the side-streets in search of accomodation when I got adopted by Wayan who spent the next hour taking me on a tour of the lanes and alleyways until I found a hotel with what I wanted, he never tried to sell me anything and was always ready for a chat when I bumped into him of the streets over the next couple of days. With it being a quiet season a lot of the retailers were bored and had little to do I could sit down and chat with them for a while, it really added a bit more depth to the beach town.

I got to the beach on the first day and had a look around, walking along the strand, watching the surfers tumble into the waves (these were obviously learners). The holiday gods obvisouly weren’t happy with my desire for action and decided to take action themselves as after a seemingly innocuous chicken sandwich later that day, I was knocked out with food poisoning and took it a lot easier than planned for the rest of my time there! And didn’t quite get back to the beach…

Kuta is known not only for the beach but also for being the site of the 2002 bombings and in the heart of the town, right where one of the nightclubs was is a large memorial dedicated to the victims and there’s a long list of names, it’s very sobering to just stand there and read the names….

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A Tale of Two Beaches – Nusa Lembongan

I couldn’t just spend my time in a cultural oasis like Ubud, there was more to Bali than good food, nice people and culture – there was the beach!

I chose a nice quiet beach on a small island called Nusa Lembongan which is known for it’s good diving and snorkelling, after 5 days of relaxing a bit of action would be a nice change. As with everywhere in Bali it didn’t take too long to get there, just a 30 minute bus trip, a boat trip over very rough seas and I was there. About an hour later I was wondering how to get off the island!

As I checked into my guest house I was informed that I’d be staying at least two nights, as the boat to the Bali wasn’t leaving the next day, (suddenly the irrational desire to escape starts to rise….). I then got to check out the diiving, which I’m told is amazing with plenty to see, only catch is that there’s no diving the next day – or snorkelling, or surfing, or even swimming, nothing water related at all.

That next day was a special yearly celebration dedicated to the sea so to pay respect to the sea, no one travels out onto the sea at all, all the boats are tied up and the people who spend their whole lives getting their living from the sea have a day off. And the beach where I was staying was a lovely white sandy beach but it wasn’t there solely for the tourists, it was a working beach.
The beach is enclosed by a lagoon which protects it from the huge waves that crash upon the reef at the lagoon’s edge, as you come into the island on the boat you can see waves of surfers in formation riding to the reef….

Inside the lagoon are wooden frames which are only visible when the tides go out. Every morning and evening you can see the islanders walking out and collecting the seaweed that gathers on the frames. Seaweed is the primary source of income for most of the people on the island. They dry the seaweed under the sun and then kept in storehouses until it is taken to the mainland and sold for use in medicines, food stabilizer, cosmetics and gelatin for ice cream…

So what exactly do you do on an island for two days with nothing to do? Well the only thing to do was just sit back on the porch of my beach cottage, sip some cold drinks and look out at the sea…..

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Bali

When you think of Bali you think of beaches and then more beaches, so it got me to wondering why did I come to Bali, it’s not really a very Dermot-place, is it?

Well it’s not just beaches, a hour inland from the beaches is the small town of Ubud, not far from the beach but a whole world away….

Ubud is not really a town, it’s more a group of villages that grew together as there’s not just rice fields surrounding the town but they’re an integral part of the town itself, you’ll find fields hidden behind buildings and sometimes on the edge of the streets themselves. My guest house was nice and quiet and each morning I woke to the view of rice fields….

Ubud is said to be the cultural centre of Bali and it’s very easy to see why, there are regular performances of Balinese dance and even the chance to learn Balinese dance – don’t worry, I didn’t try to take any of those classes!

It’s also apparent in the number of galleries and art shops in the town, you could spend a whole day rambling through them and still not see all that was on offer. It was good place to relax, rambling around art galleries and book shops, eating good food and sitting reading quietly by the rice fields…

There are temples everywhere in Ubud, every street has one or two, they’re scattered all around the island, temples of all sorts, cave temples, rock temples and sea temples but while I was there I only went to see one set of temples and they were special….

There were three of them and they were located in the Monkey Forest. In my small amount of travelling I noticed that temples seem to attract monkeys like honey attracts bees, there’s always a few hanging around but the Monkey Forest certainly lived up to its name, the place was filled with them, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was over a hundred monkeys there and they weren’t shy either. They’d come up to you looking for food and they wouldn’t always believe you if you told them you had none, they’d check your pockets to make sure! The young ones would just climb over you as if you were a larger monkey, so you’d want to like monkeys!

Besides there was no need to go travelling anywhere to see the people practising their faith, it was all around you from the morning offerings of rice and flowers to the spirits, you’d see these offerings everywhere, around your guesthouse and even on the streets. Not only that but everyday in Bali there seems to be a celebration in one of temples around the area and you see women and men in their best clothes taking larger offerings to the temples, even the temples are dressed up….

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