My adventures while waiting for my visa extension...

October 21, 2010

I just saw the cutest sight while coming to this internet shop. A mom was driving the motor scooter while her son laying sleeping with his head against the center of the handlebars. He must have been very tired for that to have worked!

I’ve been antsy wanting to hit the road again yet having to wait for this visa extension. I pick it up today at 2pm – cross your fingers all goes well. One day I tried to do something new by heading to a festival in a nearby beach town, Nusa Dua. It is called the Nusa Dua Fiesta (funny to use Spanish I though) and was 5 days long with exhibits and competitions. I decided to splurge for the taxi (no other real way to get there), which cost about $13 each way (more than my lodging!). Unfortunately, I had just missed a dance performance and it was all outdoors and extremely hot. If there had been any wind it would have been okay. So I walked around some exhibits of stone carving, painted trash cans (this is a “green” event) and caricatures. The culinary competition for preparing duck was in progress so I walked around that area and saw some beautiful displays and lots of smiling and nervous faces. They were serving a fancy lunch in the adjacent tent for $4.50, but that was too rich more my blood. I had just blown a wad on a “taksi.” So I walked to another part of the fiesta that had quick vendor food. It was tasty and cheap. I was debating whether to wait around for 4 hours when the evenings festivities began or head back to Sanur.

This area is a long strip of the high-end resorts like ClubMed and the Hyatt so there wasn’t a quick café to poke my head into. I walked to the Hyatt, which was the closest and got a soda at the pool bar. These resorts have lovely facilities, but they are so sterile and generic. It could be a resort anywhere in the tropics because very little of Balinese culture comes through – except in the expensive stores. If a guest were to only stay at the resort he/she could hardly claim they had been to Bali. It would be like after visiting the movie set for “Casablanca” and saying you’d been to Morocco. I’m sure the guests leave their tight security (because of the bombings a few years ago) compound….. I hope. The resort was too rich for my blood anyway. The soda cost 42,000 rupies! This is more than most entrees I’ve been eating. It’s is nearly $5! I decided not to kill anymore time at the Hyatt and just headed back to Sanur. The traffic is very heavy. The New Yorker in me couldn’t believe how slow and safe the taxis drivers were. The automobile drivers in general were very safe, but the motor bikes zipped all around. Not the success of a day that I had hoped, but it was nice to get out and see more things.

Yesterday I headed into Denpensar’s immigration office to pay my visa extension fee. To try to save some money and to experience more of the local life I decided to skip the taxis and take the Bemo. I don’t know if the Bemo is a publicly run thing or not, but it is a small green van that picks passengers up along its route (I’ve included an interior shot). There are no specific stops you just wave it down and then tell the driver when to stop. There is also no set fare and they notoriously overcharge tourists. The taxi to the same office the other day cost me a bit over 20,000 rupies so when the Bemo driver told me 80,000 I laughed. He quickly came down, but I’m sure my final payment of 15,000 was still overpriced. If I was staying within Sanur it would be 4,000. At any rate it was about $1.75. I only saved about $1 from what a taxi would have cost me. Then he dropped me off too soon and told me the office was down the wrong street! Through experience I have learned to continuously ask for directions and not trust one person (esp this Bemo driver who literally couldn’t read a map) so I was quickly corrected on what street to go down. Then I saw some familiar things from my walk from the US Consulate to the immigration office last week. Fortunately, this walk was a bit shorter. I was in and out of the office in 10 minutes. Still deciding if I should try the Bemo again or not – this time I know exactly how to get there. I might if they will accept 5,000.

Afterwards I headed to the beach to relax and read. I had a beer (shocking I know!) at the Bonsai Café. I didn’t realize when I sat down that there was going to be live entertainment. I hear this dog howling like nothing I’ve heard before and I turn and two dogs are copulating by the next table. This lasted about 10 minutes and had everyone in the restaurant, staff and customers, chuckling.

Last night for dinner I tried a new place – well, new for me. The owner is a jovial Aussie and he insisted a join a couple from Liverpool. They didn’t have much choice in the matter as he plunked me down, but they also didn’t seem to mind. We had a really nice time chatting about all sorts of things. There was also a musician singing so we enjoyed that as well. The owner seemed to get a little jealous when I asked him to take a picture of the three of us, but not one with him so then we got one too. The couple heads inland to Ubud today, like me. Mabe I’ll run into them…

I also read some Indonesian newspapers. Off course the top story on day, as I ate breakfast, was about a WHO report citing the fairly widespread preventable diseases in Indonesia, especially among the poor. Poor sanitation and lack of clean water are a big part of this. As I’m reading it I also see garbage trucks go by (wonder if they have them everywhere) and the garbage is loose and flies around easily. Most of the garbage is not bagged so the garbage men sweep the trash into a basket and then dump it into the truck. One man just stays on the top of the truck (with no gloves or mask) dumping the basket and moving the trash around once the pile gets high.

You can also see how waste on the beach seems to be handled. Along some parts of the beach trash is left, but the nicer hotels keep their beachfront clean. However, it seems that burying the unwanted seaweed and trash is their solution. I hope they at least pick up most of the trash that isn’t entangled with the seaweed.

There are also reports of protests, some violent, against the president as he completes the first year of his second term. None of the protests seem to have been here, but in Jakarta and an island the president just visited. The economy of Indonesia has grown despite the global economic downturn. I can see in Bali a lot of construction. I also see a lot of people desperate to work and those who work have very long days. The drivers who don’t have a taxi, but offer (overpriced) transports are constantly soliciting work. All the taxis and transports honk as the pass walking tourists hoping for business. Wouldn’t you think if the tourist wanted a taxi he/she would be looking for one and didn’t need to be honked at? However, the overall economic improvement doesn’t seem to be helping the poorest class.

I have a brilliant invention to put to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs – a language microchip we can put into our brain. It’s so frustrating not being able to speak the language because I know I miss out learning so much and interacting with people. Also, as a woman traveling alone I’m a bit more timid about striking up conversations and hanging out.

Off to get my visa…