Ubud, Bali - Highs and woes...

So, Ubud.  In central Bali, about an hour and a half from the airport, you'll find Ubud; much touted as Bali's, if not Indonesia's, spiritual and artistic hub.

Let's deal very quickly with the latter, don't believe the hype.  Admittedly there is a fair bit of decent jewellery knocking about, but anything better than anything else I've ever seen? No, not really.  There are galleries everywhere, 1 in 100 painting is ok, everything else is shit.  The end.

As for the spiritual, well, I suppose there is plenty of that wholesale around Bali, especially the rurual and remote areas, but Ubud itself has be poisoned by the novel "Eat, love pray" and its legacy.  I'm not sure it was ever anything like that described in the book, but the Balinese have duly raped the town for all the money the association can bring.

The main streets are now littered with brand stores, tacky salons, overpriced restaurants selling western meals (or, at best, westernised versions of Indonesian meals) and hundreds of shops selling the same tat you get flogged in all the tourist locations in Bali.

That said it has its merits, the buildings in this part of Indonesia all look like temples.  Its quite odd at first, but it gives an amazingly different look and feel to a place, especially when this naturally extends to the accommodation.

We'd booked a "bungalow" off of the main streets and it was ace.  Loads of room, quirky and quiet, the old man who ran the bungalows even served us breakfast on our own little terrace.

When you search the side streets you soon find plenty of real authentic cuisine in the local warungs and we duly feasted very well and often for a mere pittance.

After a couple of relaxing days we were planning our next moves (a few walks outside of town and hitting the markets seemed all Ubud really had on offer) in such a warung when I decided to befriend the Warung's dog... It decided to turn on Bex for no reason whatsoever and, before you knew it, the little shit bit her on the hand!!

I'll not go into the full tale of woe (I'm sure Bex will on her own blog whatbexdidnext.wordpress.com), but basically Ubud is pretty bad for rabies thus we had to stay for an extra 3 days while she had a couple of injections at the local medical centre.  The end result is we got to look around Ubud quite and relax quite a bit more, not such a bad thing really, and we lined up a quick summit as cycle ride at the end too... Much more my kind of thing!!

First impressions, Bali... hmmm

Let's start positive and see where we end up... We returned to Kota Kinabalu in fine spirits and, for the first time, fine weather.  We took advantage of this with a boat trip to the little island of Sapi just off the coast where we snorkelled, walked and I got a great up close experience and video of a monitor lizard!  Top stuff! [Oh, and sunburnt] Then we flew to Bali...

We arrived late at night to 9,667,543 taxis trying to rip us off for a trip 1 min round the corner.  We escaped their clutches and proceeded to get entirely lost on foot while attempting to find our overnight hotel.  Once we'd found it we relaxed and slept in the most comfortable bed we'd experienced in a month.  In the morning we quickly realised we'd made no plans and Bali, it seemed, wasn't going to be as simple to travel as Malaysia had.

We decided to avoid Kuta beach and the lively areas of Bali for now and head inland to Ubud, Bali's spiritual home (allegedly).  Local buses don't exist.  Coach transfers don't exist.  Indonesia's primary travel options, it turns out, are only taxis and scooters... Or scooters that are taxis!  Add to this revelation other things you'll quickly learn here...

I'm sure 10-20 years ago Bali was awesome.  The years of tourism as a primary trade, however, has twisted the country into a vile beast. Everything is a ripoff and everyone is trying to rip you off.  Its not really their fault, it really is the result of the relentless influx of tourists with too much money.

Long story short, and a quick jaunt in to the future; a taxi (by whatever name or flavour it comes in) back from Ubud to the airport will be list price 60,000Rp, negotiable to half that.  A taxi from near the airport to Ubud, which we now had to arrange will cost an arranged 250,000Rp, with quotes in excess of double that AND you'll need to basically fight the taxi driver before and after the trip... And so it was we arrived in a hot and horribly modern/commercial looking Ubud, adrenaline pumping and swearing at our taxi driver on the main street.  Great times.