Bali Part II: Lovina and Sanur/South

After my last posting, we spent one more day in Lovina.

A story:

When you walk down the street, the beach or anywhere else, you have one person every five or so seconds that asks you if you want transport (taxi service somewhere), boat service (snorkeling or to see dolphins) or trying to sell you something (sarongs, or other art goods are the most popular). Usually we just say, "thank you, but not today." Most of the time they just ask you where you're from or leave you alone. For some reason, one guy asked us if we want a boat ride to go snorkeling, and we asked how much, and we asked his name. We told him we would come back. This one guy was about a 25 minute walk from our hotel, and there were about 25 people in between our hotel and this guy who asked us for the same service, but for some reason we felt we should go back to him when we were ready to snorkel. So we did. We went back to find Agus at some random hut on the beach. We got back there, and Agus wasn't there. One guy claimed to be his dad, and everyone quickly assured us that he was Agus's dad, which made us more skeptical. We didn't know if we should go, but we decided, why not (what's the difference between one random guy or another?). We told the guy we needed two sets of snorkeling equipment (my dad brought his), and he said his friend went to get it. He went to get the boat's motor (not attached to the boat?), and we went to the boat. This guy set up the seats in the boats, and he put the motor in, and then he left. Some other guy, Dan (you know, like Dan the man - is how he described it) came and told us he was taking us. Okay - whatever. We were a bit suspicious - they don't even pretend to have life preservers, we don't give them our names, we didn't know where we were going, etc., but we just headed out from shore, and after about a half hour, we stopped. The guy said we can get in the water, and when we did it was a GORGEOUS reef! It was snorkeling like diving. We loved it. On the way back, the guy just checked with us to make sure we didn't want to get up to see the dolphins at six am. We didn't think so, but for some reason, we said yes. We didn't give him any money, we gave him no assurance, but for some reason, we showed up at five to six am and went to see the dolphins.

This is a long story, but it's all just to show the randomness of all of the people who offer you things - and sometimes you even say yes. We also got some random guy to drive us down south. After TONS of people offered us transport - we decided to say yes to one random person. You can never quite explain why you choose the guy you do.

Anyways - Matt had a GREAT day of diving in Lovina, and the rest of us relaxed. The following day (Thursday), we headed down to Sanur. We stayed in a place called the Swastika Bungalows. Swastika for Buddhism/Hinduism - not Natziism. It was MUCH more simple than the other places (my parents weren't too pumped). We walked on the beach, and headed over to Kuta beach (the place for young partying fun people in Bali). That was one of my favorite beaches I have ever seen - goes on forever, and huge waves, and beautiful sand, and it was even clean! We walked for a few kilometers up past Legian and up to Seminyak. A bit of frisbee, and then we met up with Nicole and Paul, our friends we met when they stayed with us in Singapore a few weeks ago.

The next day Matt and I went diving - I was nervous, since my sinuses still had gunk in them, but it worked. The only thing that didn't work was the mola-molas. We basically went to the places to see the mola-molas, and we went down for two dives where we just waited at their cleaning stations, but apparently they didn't need cleaning! None came. :( The second dive had FREEZING water (21 deg C - which is the coldest I have ever dived in), and also a crazy huge current for a few minutes that felt like it would take my regulator right out of my mouth! Luckily, we survived. The third dive was super - a strong current, but a good one, so it was a nice drift dive.

Mom and dad walked everywhere. That night we went for a fancy Italian dinner.

Saturday we relaxed all day - at the beach, and we headed out to see a temple on the beach - Pura Tannah Lot. It was GORGEOUS, but kind of far away. It's a temple in the ocean. Then we went down back to Seminyak and walked on the beach to a beautiful restaurant and sat and had a beer (and played euchre of course - which we did nearly everyday at nearly every meal). We walked more and more and finally had a good Japanese dinner (go figure!).

Today was another relaxing day - Matt got a massage, I had two banana juices, my parents walked and walked, and we all were pretty sad to leave Bali.

All in all, we absolutely loved Bali, and Matt and I can't wait to go back. We liked Ubud the best, and we can't wait to dive more.