The Island of Bali is shaped like a chicken in pro­file. For those of us with a pen­chant for infan­tile humor, there’s a town at the tail end called Aas (see map). We entered from the beak and drove down to the end of the drum­stick in a pub­lic bus for hell­ish ride #178.  The book says that you can’t look at Bali with­out see­ing it’s reli­gion.  98% of peo­ple here are Hindu and they prac­tice this unique form of Indo-Hindu with fer­vor and ded­i­ca­tion.  So I barely raised an eye­brow when our pub­lic bus dri­ver stopped the bus sud­denly to get a bless­ing and mark­ing from a road­side holy man before con­tin­u­ing on our death-defying ride.  Per­haps that does the trick.

Upon arriv­ing safely in Kuta, we noticed that there were offer­ings at every street cor­ner, store, restau­rant, tem­ple, you name it.  These morn­ing alms are to appease the gods (not all of them good gods) and they also serve another pur­pose we dis­cov­ered rather unfor­tu­nately one night at din­ner.  They attract rats!  Huge, cat-looking crea­tures that come forth out of bod­ies of water like roman­tic restau­rant foun­tains for exam­ple and tread across unsus­pect­ing feet belong­ing to, now hor­ri­fied, unsus­pect­ing peo­ple.  They aren’t afraid of us and know very well where their bread is buttered…or at least where they can get a sweet sweet offering.

At our hotel one after­noon we met a friendly cou­ple, him, a surfer from Wales liv­ing with her, an actress in train­ing from Spain and made plans to have drinks later that evening.  We arrived promptly at 9pm to find them already sit­ting at a table eat­ing, what was to be, their sec­ond din­ner.  Greet­ings and pleas­antries and they asked what time we had only to dis­cover that we never adjusted our watches for the one hour time dif­fer­ence from Java to Bali and had been oper­at­ing on seri­ous CP time for days now.  Oh damn, that’s why we’ve been miss­ing the free break­fast every morn­ing!  We had chalked it up to yet another exam­ple of no-rule-bending-Indonesia (no late check­outs, no early check ins, and no, we can’t put avo­cado in a chicken sand­wich or humus in a falafel sand­wich that’s 4 sep­a­rate sandwiches!).

Talk­ing about meet­ing peo­ple, we kept bump­ing into other trav­el­ers that we met ear­lier in Indone­sia.  For instance, the blonds pic­tured here in Lake Toba walked by us one morn­ing and gave us a now famil­iar hand sig­nal from our Batak Danc­ing days.  It reminded us of the com­mon but always sur­pris­ing moments in NYC, a city  of 8 mil­lion, of bump­ing into friends that you hadn’t seen in years.  Of course, every­one we know is self-tethered to the blocks beneath Union Square so run­ning into peo­ple becomes far more prob­a­ble.  And just like that, trav­el­ers who make it to Indone­sia are on a cer­tain cir­cuit with Bali being an east­ward ter­mi­nal. To slam dunk our broth­erly bond, the Bali­nese don’t see them­selves as part of Indone­sia and they’re as sim­i­lar to the Suma­trans as we New York­ers are to West Vir­gini­ans (shout out to Eric G).  Also, let’s not for­get the rats for another sim­i­lar­ity to our fair city.

There are beau­ti­ful wide vol­canic black sand beaches but a swim­ming par­adise a la Bar­ba­dos it is not.  It’s famed for it’s surf and the Aussies have had there way with Kuta, mak­ing it their spring break Can­cun all year round.  And get this, many locals have thick Oz accents throw­ing out phrases like ‘no wor­ries, mate’.

[View Slideshow]