On the 11th Sam and I traveled from Ubud to Kuta--Kuta is the large city in Bali that was devistated by 2002 terrorist attacks. As a result guards with large guns monitor the streets, especially banks, resorts, and night clubs.
Kuta can best be describe as Kao San Road (in Bangkok) on the beach. Thousands of tourists, millions of things to buy, and tourists acting a fool. Tragiclly awesome.
I know I didn't give Bali the best review before. And what I said before still holds true for Kuta. A spectacle worth a few hours of observation, but nothing more. Ubud did change our percepetion of the island as a whole. The landscape was beautiful, the people were friendly, and the shopping was AMAZING (as a result Sam is now lugging around a 20 lb stone Ganesh--always a topic of conversation when going though security check points). If we had to grade Bali; Ubud would get an A-, Sanur and Candidasa would get B's, and Kuta would get a C-/D (we disagree on this one!). Our final thought, the farther away from Kuta you go, the more enjoyable the island becomes.
We only traveled to Kuta to be closer to the airport, and on the morning of the 12th we woke up at 4:00 AM to catch a flight to Jakarta.
When we arrived in Jakarta we paid $10 to store our packs for the day (20 lb Ganesh included). We took the bus into the city and were immediatelly amazed. Jakarta is like a mix of Bangkok and Hanoi--but with even worse drivers! The traffic is so bad the tuk-tuk's and motorbikes often resort to riding on whatever sort of sidewalk they can find. This is really scary as a pedestdrian. Most of the time there wasn't a sidewalk and we were forced to walk in the streets, with crazy, fast traffic zooming by.
Sam and I had read that Jakarta was a difficult city to tour, so we thought we would just walk north through the middle of it. We trekked from Gambir to Kota, about 3 miles (but we estimated we did it in 5, between all of the mall pit-stops, detours, and street navigating).
Basically by the end of the day we had seen a million plastic knock-off handbags, pirated DVD's, and more car parts than there are cars in the world (probablly a reflection of the high accident rate due to reckless driving). At 6:00 PM we were exhausted--and we joked that Jakarta gave us asthma in 7 hours. Being the genius' that we are, we figured it would be safer (and less tiring) inside a tuk-tuk than on the side of the road. This was a death defying experience to say the least.
We made it back to the airport at 8:00 and our feet were killing us. We spent the rest of our Indonesian money on foot reflexology. Much deserved! We stayed up all night, on the Internet, having dinner, etc. And left JAK at 1:00 AM. Jan 13th
We Arrived in Manila at 6:00 AM, departed for Cebu at 7:00 AM, and finally arrived in Cebu at 9:00 AM. But the fun didn't end there. We hopped into a cab to the port, where we are now on a 4 hour boat ride to Dumagete, on Negros. We are expected to arrive at 7:30 PM. Where upon which we will find a hotel and sleep as much as possible!
Sam and I are being supportive of one another, laughing at our slowness, the fact that he has a 20 lb Ganeshi with him (that we now refer to as the egg, since he is so careful with it).
Thus far the Phillipines... It is very Christian! (we already walked trough a big religious festival). Half of our encounters with locals have been agressive and not so nice (an man threw money at Sam because he didn't have any change) and our cab driver was kind-of a shyster (he tried to rip us off, but we had our trusted Lonely Planet!). But the good experiences have been great. The Phillipinos on our plane were super nice and we had lunch at a cooking school where the people were kind. Such a mix! One thing is for sure, they are not used to Western tourists down here the way they are in other countries. We have yet to be haggled or propositioned!
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