My first stop

Bali
(This is from 20th June until I left Bali, but I started writing this journal afterward Bali, so this is a throwback)

Arrived in Denpasar, asked a guy sitting on a curb to give me a ride to the hostel where Harry, Emily, Katie, Liv, Josh and Rob were staying and he said he would do it for the price of a grab, which was fair enough.

Arrived in the town of the hostel but of course I didn’t have wifi to load the actual address, so he instead dropped me off in the centre. I walked around until I found a restaurant with wifi and luckily it was only a 20 minute walk.

Met them all in the hostel, said hello, had a quick shower and we all sat and played uno and I learnt how to play the monopoly card game.

Bali
The Villa

After a few days of hostelling it was time to move to the villa we’d all been looking forward to! And it was definitely worth the wait.

I had the master bedroom with Harry and Josh, this was our private pool.

We spent days at the rice fields, which you don’t have to for pay by the way, despite people trying to convince you otherwise.

We did also spend so much time in the villa, and why not when you’ve got such an incredible villa and spent so much money on it. We really got into monopoly cards, we played an awful lot and it is a really great game.

Also the roof of the villa had amazing views, so I enjoyed climbing up onto the roof to chill out and get away from it all every now and again.

Katie, Emily and I went to the monkey sanctuary but we were all tired and weren’t that keen going in, so tried to sneak in unsuccessfully and then went back home in the pool.

One day, when everyone was hung over Harry and I went on a moped ride to a temple. We had a slow but well needed walk around the temple which has some amazing sites to see.

After we went to a market used much more by locals and not heard of by many tourists. The market sold genuine designer clothes that’d been left over from when Bali was given clothes and food in aid of the countries disaster. Annoyingly, none of it was sorted which meant lots of time was used trying to find mens clothes my size, and it ended up taking more time than it was worth. So we went out and found some little lady serving Mie Gorengs/Nasi Gorengs, which is basically either rice/noodles with egg and some herbs and sometimes meat. They were always the cheapest meal and Rob and I used their price on a menu to decide whether a restaurant was good value. Here, Harry and I found a nasi goreng for 12,000 Rupiah (60p) and was the cheapest one we ever found.

One of my favourite mornings was when everyone went out the night before and so I got up early while they were all hung over in bed to go on a run. I ran only a little before I found a clay tennis court being groomed by the cleaner. The cleaner was Balinese so I tried to communicate with him over google translate to try and convince him to play a game of tennis with me, but he wasnt keen as his boss wouldn’t like it and you were supposed to pay. As I was leaving a father and daughter came in and the father asked if I wanted to take his place, as he was only there to entertain his daughter. I said yes, and the daughter, Bella, was very good at tennis, beating me every game. I didn’t mind as we had some very good rallies and I left with a smile and a story to tell when I got back to the villa.

But before getting back to the villa I was quite close to the beach, so I decided to run there before heading home. On the beach was a bunch of guys training in Tarung Derajat, which is indonesian martial arts. After watching for a couple minutes, one of the guys asked me to join in, and of course I did. Had a few friendly fights with quite a big guy, he threw me down a couple times and i was able to get him down a couple more. The owner then invited me to his other classes but unfortunately I was leaving before any of the others.

Saying goodbyes 😦

Once everyone had left, Emily and Katie to go home, Rob to head to Thailand and Josh to Singapore, it was only Harry, Liv, Michelle and I left in the villa. Harry and I decided to meet up with Liv and Michelle at a hostel in Ubud (the cheapest hostel in Ubud😆) while they stayed around the area for a night more.

The day it was just Harry and I we decided to do a trek up Mount Batur. We were up at 1am, had a minivan of 3 hours to the base and walked up to a good viewpoint to watch the sunrise at 6:30am. The sunrise was disappointing but the trek itself made the trip anyway.

The temples were gorgeous and the other 3 really wanted to queue up in the 2 hour long line to get ‘the photo’. While they queued I left to do some Balinese praying. In the end, the photos were a work of art and we found the wait worth while.

Behind me in the photo was where you did the Balinese praying, and the two towers in the background is where the famous photos are taken.

The photographer uses a piece of black glass to make a reflection below the towers.

Harry and I left Bali together to head to Singapore. Michelle and Liv stayed a week or so more.