Two Kutas

After we had finished with volcanoes it was back to the beaches. The first two stops were at two places called Kuta, one on Bali and the other on Lombok. It has to be said that Kuta in Bali wasn’t our favourite place in the world. It was full of Australian chavs, or bogans as they are known to the Australians. As well as this it was the worst place for being hassled by street sellers and taxi drivers since Bangkok. We weren’t there for long and as such there are only drunken photos and this fantastic one of our curtains that had Claudia Schiffer written on, I don’t know why… or why I took the picture.

Whilst we were on Bali we tried our hand at surfing for the first time. We rented a couple of boards on the beach for pretty much nothing and just tried to copy what you see on TV. The tactic worked and both of us were quickly up and surfing like pros (well that’s what we thought).

Our next stop was Kuta’s namesake on Lombok, the island next door. On our first afternoon we tried our hands at surfing again. This time things didn’t go so well. We were told a place called Gerupuk Bay would be ok for beginners so we went there only to find out we had to take a boat 10 minutes out into the bay to where the waves were breaking. When we got out there we realised the waves were huge (well for us) and so we spent most of our time being half drowned and beaten up by our surfboards.

 

During our second night, there was an earthquake off the coast of Bali, with a magnitude of 6.9. In the morning after there was the quake in Japan and the locals were definitely worried about tsunamis. luckily we were able to tell the ones that we were staying with that the forecasts were saying we were safe in this part of Indonesia, though some had already evacuated inland. We spent the night celebrating the absence of tsunamis by drinking palm and rice wine with some of the locals at a restaurant we had eaten at earlier. Whilst on Lombok we had planned to take a ride around the island if we could rent some nice-ish bikes. We were told that they could find us a couple but in the end it turned out there was only one nice bike and one helmet in Kuta so Pete shot gunned that and I was left with the WORST bike in the world. It had no lights, indicators, keys, ignition, had the softest rear suspension, and was an old 2 stroke. I decided it wasn’t a good idea to take the bike around the island which was a good decision as it turned out it also drank fuel at a crazy rate! 

Though Kuta in Lombok was worlds away from it’s counterpart on Bali and there were no street sellers in the tiny town one thing it did have was what we called the bracelet mafia. At pretty much any time of the day small children would come up to you trying to sell little bracelets. On our last night there we finally relented and decided to buy one each, we ended up surrounded by the kids as word quickly spread that people were actually going to buy!

After buying bracelets we learnt one more thing about Indonesians; they like playing with fire almost as much as I did when I was 12 / still do now.