I arrived in Indonesia at a little after midnight on January 8th, and hired a criminal (commonly known as a Taxi driver) to take me to my guest house. (all over the world Taxi drivers are among the least honest people). When I first get to a new country, especially if it is at night I have a reservation for a room. After that I never make reservations and just find a place when I arrive, but it is comforting having a place on my arrival to a country that I’m not familiar with. Since I never nowhere I will moved to or when I can’t reserve rooms ahead plus it is always cheaper to go and find a place because most of the places with cheaper rooms don’t have websites. Besides that is all part of the adventure. Claudia will arrive in a day and a half, so the next day I decide to stay at this place a second night (it is only $12 a night) and spend the day getting familiar with Indonesia and the area I’m in as well as find a place to move to the following day. I head out in late morning to walk around and go to the touristy area Kunta Beach. I walked approximately 10 miles during the day, but saw some interesting areas. When I got back to my room that evening there was a bunch of Muslims playing musical instruments right next door. I went over to watch and enjoy but unfortunately they stopped after just a few minutes. It was beautiful and I wish I had returned sooner.
The next day I put on my two backpacks and head out to go to the new place, ( I had found a place that was more in the action area, nicer and still only $16 and that is for two of us). I walked down to the busy street a couple blocks away and find a taxi. Yes another criminal, while he is hesitating in telling me a price to go less than 3 kilometers (<2 miles) another one comes running over he says 150,000 Rp ($12) I laugh and walk away as I know it should be under 20,000. He says 100,000 I keep walking; I decided it is better to walk then to deal with them.
After Claudia arrives we go to a money changer to get some cash for her. It seemed good at the time but 2 days later she is almost out of cash and we think about it and realize what had happened. After they had counted out the money and we had counted it twice, the second guy distracted us for just a second while the first guy took back more than a third of the money while he handed it to her. They were very good at it and would have gotten away with it except they got greedy and kept to much so we figured it out, plus the fact that we keep tract of the money we spent so we could we reconstruct it. And we went to the tourist police. They brought the guys in and she got most of the money back. She gave small amount to the police and I’m sure they got more from the thieves. Although the police required a small payback at least we got results, in neither USA nor Italy would she have gotten anything back after two days and only our word.
After a couple days of jet lag and relaxing we head up to Ubud. Bali is primarily Bali Hindu instead of Muslim. It is similar to Indian Hindu but has some Buddhism mixed in. Everyone who has a house has set aside a portion of their yard to make a temple. Some are small and simple but many are large and fancy. Most of the home stays have a nice temple ours include a big garden. We travel around the area to see several bigger temples that are open to tourist, rice terraces, and places for filming wildlife, (we do have to do a little work and plan for upcoming documentaries). After a few days we move farther north and get away from most of the tourist.
Now we are at parts of Bali that are wild and have jungle and cloud forest. This is the rainy season for most of Indonesia, but it hasn’t been too much while we were at lower elevations, but now that we are at 1300 meters (5000 ft.) it is cooler (that’s nice) and rainier (not nice). On a day that isn’t too rainy we rent a scooter and drive up higher to see the water fall, and overlook a couple lakes and see are first of the largest bat in the world, the Giant Flying Fox. This one isn’t close to full size yet as it is only three years old and is a guy’s pet. We both experience it hanging from our arms and licking salt off of us, (like a dog).