Bali, Indonesia Pt.1

Finally, my long await trip to Indonesia! I call this post Pt.1 because my entire trip to Indonesia was centered around a visit with my mother, and then later on a friend from Canada. I arrived at Denpasar airport on July 11 after my quick 5 day visit to Kuala Lumpur. I was picked up at the airport by my mother and her (at the time) fiance, and after a short drive we arrived at our villa in Seminyak. I have to admit, my first impression of Bali was not the tropical island paradise that I expected. DPS airport is actually located just south of Kuta and not actually in Denpasar. The whole area of South Bali is incredibly touristy, especially the long strip between Kuta/Legian/Seminyak. Completely over-run with tourists, and extremely busy with tons of traffic. Not quite what I expected Bali to be like. Although, to be fair, my initial visit coincided with the high season so this should've been expected.
I spent lots of time down at the beach, taking in the amazing Bali sunsets, but the highlight of this part of my trip was just being able to spend some time with my mother. We did some wonderful things, such as the Balinese cooking course we took at Amika. We took a day trip to Nusa Dua and took a glass bottomed boat over the reefs and over to the Turtle Conservatory (and also had the opportunity to hold some very strange creatures!). Later in the day we made a stop at Padang Padang Beach, the later to the monkey temple of Uluwata, where we saw a great Kecak performance right as the sun was setting just beyond the cliffs the temple is situated on.
We also had the opportunity to sample some of the many great restaurants in the Seminyak area, played lots of very competitive games of Rummy 500, and watched a few of the many bootleg movies that you can buy for less than $1/each. The villa we stayed at was wonderful, with an outdoor living area and kitchen, and a pool shared by the other two villas right next to us. I think we pretty much had the pool to ourselves any time we wanted to use it.
Unfortunately, my visit with mom was too short. They left around a week and a half later, and I stayed in the Seminyak area for another week after that. Luckily I had met some great friends - 4 girls from the states who I spent many a wild night out on the town with. Good times for sure, but I was certainly lonely when everybody had to leave. I stayed around until July 29th, then decided that I needed to do some scuba diving and headed out to Nusa Lembongan and Gili Trawangan, some beautiful islands located just to the east of Bali. More on this coming next...

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Wow... do I ever have some catching up to do on my posts. I haven't posted anything since Vietnam, and that was over 2 1/2 months ago!!!

Well, I finally left Vietnam around July 6 working my way to Indonesia by way of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I needed to get a 2 month visa for my stay in Indonesia because of visits with my mom and a friend from Canada who were both coming to Bali a little more than a month apart from each other. The only way to do this is to get your visa ahead of time from one of the consulates or embassies in one of the major cities in SE Asia. I initially tried to do this while I was in Ho Chi Minh city, but in order to do this I needed to have all my flight information on when I was arriving and departing, etc. At that point in my trip I knew none of this. By the time I knew exactly when I needed to be going to Indonesia to meet up with Mom, I was in the middle of Vietnam. China Beach, near Danang to be exact. And nowhere near and Indonesian Embassy. Hence the stopover in Kuala Lumpur. My flight from Danang was to Ho Chi Minh City, so it seems logical that I could've gotten the visa there, but at this point my visa for Vietnam was running out and I couldn't afford to spend the time there waiting for the application to be approved.
It all worked out perfectly in the end as Kuala Lumpur is a very easy city to get an Indonesian Visa (except of course if there are holidays, or an election going on - which was the case when I was there). All in all, I spent 5 days in KL arranging my visa - which I actually got in one day, once I had all the logistics worked out on my flight information.
Not much exciting to write about KL. Arrived in the city late at night - around 1am. So finding a place to stay at this hour wasn't easy. Just so happened that this Swedish couple, who also flew all the way to KL from Danang on the same flights as me, asked if I wanted to share a taxi into the city - 75 Km away. Good thing they asked or this would've been an expensive cab ride for me! Once in the city, we headed to China Town where all the budget places to stay are. We ended up at this funky (and I do mean Funky, in every sense of the word!) little guesthouse called "Le Village". They were full, but actually managed to accommodate us in this tiny little room with two beds and a mattress on the floor. We made do for the night, although it was quite strange sleeping in a room with two (almost) complete strangers walking around in their underwear! Quite funny looking back on it. They checked out the following day, and I decide to keep the funky room since I was only going to be staying a few more nights. Certainly not the nicest place I've stayed in, actually probably one of the worst. But anything else certainly would've been much more expensive. And I hate to pack up and relocate any more than is absolutely necessary.
So other than running around making arrangements for my visa, I did manage to take in a few sights. The Petronas Towers are quite amazing! Until recently they were the tallest buildings in the world. An equally impressive shopping mall is situated at the base for those who are looking to part with some cash. But the best views of the city actually is from the KL Tower, which appears taller than the Petronas Towers, but only because it is located on a hill. One of the other guests from my guest house took me to a chinese temple one day where I had a "numerology" reading. That was cool too. Otherwise I spent most of my time just wandering around Chinatown.

China Beach, Vietnam

China Beach, just outside of Danang, was my last stop my tour through Vietnam. One would think that 6 1/2 weeks would be enough to cover just about everything, but one thing I've learned about myself over the last few months is that I'm a slow traveler... when I find a place I like, I tend to stay longer than I initially intended. Unfortunately, that meant I had to cut some other things out of my trip through Vietnam. I skipped over the mountainous region of Dalat, only saw Danang for one night, and had to completely skip Hue and everything north of Danang. I've been to Vietnam once before on a previous trip to SE Asia, but during that trip I only visited Hanoi. I've yet to see Halong Bay and Sapa, or anything else other than Hanoi in N. Vietnam.... Oh well, ideas for another trip in the future I guess. Or maybe I'll pass back through that way somewhere later on in this trip. Who knows...
I chose to visit China Beach purely on the recommendation of two guys from Finland that I had met during the very beginning of my trip through Vietnam. I'd only been in Vietnam for a few days, staying on the island of Phu Quoc, and Pirkka and Tony insisted that China Beach was the best place they'd been so far in Vietnam. Considering they had traveled all the way down the coast (and I was just begining my trip going north), I found this to be both intriguing and disconcerting. First, I was intrigued by what they found so appealing about China Beach, and second, I was concerned that everything else in between would basically suck. Well, as I've said before in other posts... never believe everything that you hear or read, find out for yourself.
I stayed at a place recommended by Pirkka and Tony called Hoa's Place, and almost immediately realized why they enjoyed China Beach so much. Hoa's Place is the kind of place that makes you feel instantly at home. Before I even had a chance to take my bags to my room and get settled, a group of people staying there invited me to sit down and play cards with them and proceeded to teach me a game called "shithead". China beach itself is beautiful, but it was the camaraderie of the people staying at Hoa's that made the visit so special. Unfortunately I only had a couple of nights to spend here, but they were great nights and it was the people that made it so great. Everyone has dinner together at Hoa's, family style, and during the day people hang out and play cards, go to the beach, or go off and do their own thing. But whatever it was, something about the place just worked.
One night the whole group took a trip to Danang to play pool. Another time a group of us took a trip to the nearby Marble Mountains, which were absolute beautiful... One of the most amazing places I've seen in Vietnam. Unfortunately the pictures didn't turn out so well since we visited in the evening, trying to catch the sunset. The mountains are exactly what they sound like - mountains made completely of marble. One of which has many elaborate temples and caves carved right into the mountain itself. Quite amazing, but being dark and smokey (from the burning of incense inside the temples) made for not so good picture taking. The view from the top was quite spectacular. But again, being that it was dusk made it difficult to take a decent picture.
The following morning I finally had the chance to meet Hoa (he was away on business when I first arrived), and said my goodbye's to everyone else and left for the airport in Danang to fly back to Ho Chi Minh City where I would be catching an evening flight to Kuala Lumpur. Goodbye Vietnam...

Hoi An, Vietnam

Hoi An, my second to last stop on my tour through Vietnam, was quite a pleasant surprise after the torturous bus ride from Nha Trang. The bus ride was supposed to be about 11 hours so I decided that I would take an overnight sleeper bus so that I could sleep through most of the journey. I was to be picked up from my hotel to be taken to the bus at around 7pm, but once again nobody showed. This was the second time I hadn't been picked up from my hotel in Nha Trang, maybe because my hotel was in a somewhat obscure location, but I have a feeling its more likely just the way business is handled with tourism in Vietnam. Unfortunately the tourism industry is fairly new to Vietnam and the bugs haven't quite been worked out like they have in places like Thailand, where things run like a finely tuned BMW.
Anyway, back to the bus... Luckily I was able to contact the booking company and they immediately sent a motorbike to come get me. The bus was running late so I was still able to go. But as I got on the bus, I immediately had the feeling that maybe taking the bus wasn't such a good idea. I suggest to anyone who may be making the trip from Nha Trang to Hoi An or Hue to definitely take the train (or fly), you're body will thank you for it. The bus was completely packed, and the sleeper seats were so small that anyone over 5'8" almost wouldn't fit. The arrangements of the seats reminded me of fallen dominoes, all stacked on top of each other with your legs cramped underneath the seat in front of you. We finally got on our way, but less than an hour later the air-con on the bus stopped working. We stopped, there was some fiddling with the fuse box, fuses replaced, and we were quickly on our way... until about fifteen minutes later when it happened again, then again shortly after that. We finally pulled over at a rest stop and sat there for hours while we waited for somebody to come out and make the required repairs. We eventually got on our way, but that wasn't even the worst of it. The sleeper bus is supposed to have a toilet on board, which it did, to make the journey shorter as they wouldn't need to make as many stops, but it was pad-locked so that nobody could use it. Apparently to keep the smell down. So everybody was at the complete mercy of the drivers who would only stop when THEY needed to go, and this generally meant somewhere along the side of the road along the way. Not so bad for the guys, but I definitely felt sorry for the girls. All in all the journey took over 17 hours!
After the rough journey, I took my time trying to find a comfortable place to stay and found a nice little hotel in the center of Old Town Hoi An, balcony and swimming pool included. I relaxed for a while, grabbed a bite to eat, and spent the evening strolling the streets of Old Town amongst the glow of all the busy restaurants and cafes. Hoi An is also an excellent place to get affordable custom-made clothing. In this town of only 80,000 residents there are over 500 tailors!
Worth checking out in Hoi An is the Japanese Covered Bridge. The bridge has a temple built into one side of it, and a roof over it for shelter. It was constructed in 1593 and could use a fresh coat of paint once again. But according to legend, construction began on the year of the monkey and finished in the year of the dog, which would explain the monkeys guarding one side of the bridge and the other side by dogs... statues, not real ones of course.
Hoi An is situated on the Thu Bon River and is an excellent example of Vietnam's yester-year as it was left relatively untouched by the damage from the Vietnam war that took its toll on so much of the rest of the country. And although Hoi An is situated riverside, beautiful Cua Dai beach is only a short 5km ride away, and bikes are available everywhere for about $1/day.
Hoi An is a beautiful and charming town, and a must stop for any itinerary on a trip through Vietnam!