Trip to Asia, Part 2

January 9
The next day was the fateful day. The day I went to Taylor's VILLAGE. We checked out of our hotel at 1pm and went to the travel agent to purchase tickets to Lombok on Sunday (this was Friday), a hotel in Lombok for 2 nights, and tickets for me to go to Jakarta with Taylor for his conference the following Friday (more on that later). The entire thing (4 plane tickets and 2 nights hotel) cost only $240! After that, we headed back to the hotel to get our bags and got a taxi to take us to Taylor's village (or near it). The taxi ride was about an hour and a half in the rain but it only cost about $25.

We got to the area of Taylor’s village at about 6pm and decided that we should check into a hotel and then head up the mountain to his village first thing the next day. We had been spending a lot of money on hotels so we decided to stay at the cheapest place we could find for the night. The first place we went was called Hotel Sativa and was $40/night and really nice. That wasn’t bad, but Taylor knew of another place up the road that he thought might be cheaper. We had the taxi driver take us to that hotel. Taylor got out to go find out about the prices and found out that they had a room with hot water but no A/C for only $10! He wasn’t sure how nice it would be so we got out to go look at the room. As soon as I got out of the car the woman at the desk started talking about how much nicer hotel Sativa is and how they weren’t sure if we would have the proper documentation to stay at the hotel (I guess you need a passport, which we both clearly have). It took a few minutes for us to realize that she just didn’t want some white hussy girl staying at her hotel. It was crazy and I have never felt so discriminated against, but we decided that her prejudice was a good excuse to stay at the very nice Hotel Sativa for the night, so that’s what we did!

Hotel Sativa pool:

January 10
The next day we went up to Taylor’s village. We had a whole lot of stuff from traveling for a week, so we actually chartered the hotel’s car to take us up this mountain to Taylor’s for $5. Not bad. We got there at about 12pm. All of Taylor’s neighbors were outside to speak to him and stare at the woman he brought back with him. He kept calling me “pacarku” which means “girlfriend-my” basically. They all said how beautiful I was, but that’s really just because I have light skin and in Indonesia, light skin is always more beautiful than dark, even within the same race and same level of attractiveness. We talked to his neighbors for a minute (and by that I mean Taylor talked to them and I just smiled dumbly and received translations from time to time). We then went inside for a bit and Taylor showed me around his house before we left for his school.

I had to wear long pants and long sleeves at the school even though it was like 85 degrees out. I also had to wear a jilbob which is the Muslim head covering that all women wear. When I got there, Taylor had a few of his students lent me their jilbobs. They brought out a few different colors, but we settled on hot pink, just in case I didn’t already stick out enough :)

Some great pictures:
In Taylor's village and my appropriate attire, on my way to his school
With my headdress on :)
We tried on a couple different jilbobs...

And decided on this one

Once I was appropriately outfitted, we started to walk around the school and meet Taylor’s students. They were all very interested to see me and glad to have him back. We went to most of the classrooms and just let them ask questions about us, which mainly revolved around basic biographical details and romantic advice (how did Mr. Taylor win your heart?). It was fun and I really enjoyed meeting all of them.

Here's a photo, can you spot the difference?
We arranged for me to stay at the school that night instead of the hotel, which was much cheaper!

We went back to Taylor’s house, which is about a 15 minute walk from the school and ate some dinner, had some coffee, worked on a cover letter for him to use for the job search and watched some episodes of My Name is Earl on DVD (a Christmas gift from me).

That night, I headed back to the school at about 9:30pm to get ready to go to bed. Taylor came with me and we found all the female students hanging out near their rooms cooking corn on the cob (shouldn’t it just be called corn and corn off the cob can be so indicated?). Now, the students have to get up at about 3 or 4am for prayers and a morning ceremony, so you would think that they would get to bed early. Not so! They did not seem to be in any hurry to get to sleep and actually just wanted to hang out. We sang songs (American ones, like Umbrella and Linkin Park) and chatted until about 11 when one of the students kindly but firmly informed me that it was time for me to go to bed (no fair, none of them are in bed!...). I headed to the room of one of the teachers that Taylor is friends with (she was out of town visiting family) and went to bed.

January 11
Sleep was somewhat fitful because the students were still right outside talking and there was a gecko making menacing noises near my ear, but I eventually managed so sleep until the call to prayer at 3am, which was followed with a ceremony over the loudspeaker at 4am and it seemed like everyone was awake and chatting again by 5am. So…I headed back to Taylor’s house to get some more shut eye (I’m not technically allowed to sleep with him, but they just assume that everyone is awake after 5am here so it’s ok). We slept until about 9am and began to get ready to head out for our next adventure! We had a flight to Lombok at 7pm and needed to figure out how to get to Surabaya.

We went to Taylor’s school and luckily hopped an angkat (kind of like a bus/taxi for multiple people who are going the same direction). The car took us to Surabaya where we got a taxi to the airport. We were there by2pm which was pretty early, but we decided just to enjoy the air conditioned airport until our flight. Incidentally, it was Sunday, January 11th, which was our 6 year anniversary since we started dating. CRAZY! Our flight ended up getting delayed until about 9:30pm, so we arrived in Lombok at 11:30pm and were glad we had already reserved a hotel. Here we are, very disappointed in our delay:


Taylor was very proud of the picture because he is at least 6" taller than everyone else (that's him in the middle looking at the camera):
We went straight there, ordered some room service and got to sleep to prepare for the next, busy day.

January 12
Taylor really wanted to go to the Gili Islands, which are 3 very remote islands off the northwest coast of Lombok. We talked to our hotel and chartered a boat to the quietest of the Islands, Gili Meno, which left at 9am. We met at the tour company office at 8:45am and got in a bus that drove us about 45 minutes to the boat.

Here's a good view from the bus:you know, the usual mountainous tropical island, no biggie ;-)

There was just one French couple with us and they were going to the same island, so we all hopped in a really small little boat to the island. Of course we had to make a stop at another island first and by the time we were on our way to Gili Meno, the waves were really high. I was quite frightened that we were going to capsize, but Taylor wisely assured me that unless the locals who were driving the boat looked nervous, we were fine!

We got off the boat and realized that the island is basically just a stretch of about ¾ of a mile along the beach that has a few huts that are restaurants, some bungalows for sleeping, and an assortment of bars, snorkeling rental stands and convenience stores. We walked all the way to the other end of the island exploring and then stopped at this one restaurant for food. Basically you sit in this bungalow looking our at the ocean with the restaurant behind you and order really cheap food! I think we got our whole meal for like $2 or $3. Then, we walked back by where we got off the boat and rented some snorkeling gear for $4 and headed our to sea. The snorkeling was REALLY good! We saw coral with Dori fish (the blue ones, I think they are angelfish?), anemones, and all kinds of other fish. It was really cool. We only snorkeled for about 30 minutes though because we were worried about our stuff that we had left on the beach. After snorkeling, we headed to a bar and just relaxed until our boat returned to get us. The Gilis were great. The only thing I didn’t like was that there were sales people constantly haggling you to buy their necklaces and no matter how much you ignored them they would just stand there and shove things in your face just because they could tell you were a tourist.

The only dude that I liked was this one who asked Taylor if he was “gado-gado” which literally means mixed vegetables. What he meant was is Taylor half Indonesian and half something else. Taylor said it was the first time anyone had ever guessed that. He also told him that he could be a model because he had a good face. Hehe.

Here's a couple of shots from Gili Meno:
That night we watched the sun set from our hotel and went out for dinner and drinks and got a little wasted but also got all of our requests played at a local bar.

January 13
The next day, we got massages for $10 each for 1 hour. They were great and after that we relaxed until we caught a ferry from Lombok to Bali. The ferry took 4 hours and was REALLY dirty and hot and smoky, but it was definitely an experience. We were the ONLY 2 Westerners on the boat for sure. On the way on the boat, I actually scratched my shoulder pretty bad on a piece of metal on the way up some stairs, thank God for tetanus shots! It has healed pretty well though, thanks to Taylor’s careful application of Neosporin.


We were off the coast of Bali by about 8pm that day, but for some reason we stopped moving for like 30 minutes and it started raining really hard. We went into the indoor part of the ship to get out of the rain and before we knew it we were docked and they were telling us to get off the boat. It was very twilight zone because we didn’t even think we were close to docking. We got off the boat and negotiated a guy down from $12 to $6 to take us to our hotel. We arrived there at about 8:20pm and they were expecting us (Taylor had called ahead) so we were checked in in no time.

Our room in Bali was SO nice! We stayed at a place that they Lonely Planet described as “a modern water palace.” It’s hard to describe but basically there are just 12 rooms and a stone walkway heading from the lobby out toward the beach. The walkway is separated from the walls of the rooms by a moat on either side that is about 2 feet wide and 10 inches deep. The moat is filled with water and has huge Asian goldfish in it. Our room was off the main walkway and had an open air bathroom which means that there was no roof, just walls to block it from view. There were plants, bugs and of course lizards, but it was very nice. The room was nice too. It had a king-size canopy bed and a set of glass doors that looked out to our own little pond with fish right outside the room. The main walkway dead ended into a pool which was right above the ocean. And all this for $30/night! We went to dinner at a restaurant nearby and went to sleep.

Hallway of the hotel:

The private pond outside our room
January 14
The next day we planned to go to a beach that LP recommended called Pasir Puti (white sand) and then to Ubud. We rented bikes to take us the supposed 5km to Pasir Puti, which ended up being a lot farther and difficult to find. Nevermind that, it was totally worth it! The beach was a cover surrounded by cliffs on each end with perfect white sand, blue water, rolling waves and little warungs (food and drink huts) that let you use their lounge chairs as long as you bought food (it would be difficult to spend more than $10 on food so it was worth it!). We had planned to stay just an hour and make a bus to Ubud, but the beach was too beautiful and we ended up staying almost 4 hours and getting very sunburned in the process.

Here we are with our bikes:

Enjoying the fruits of our labor to get there:
Cute:

We left at 1pm and found that one of our bikes had a flat tire, so we hired an angkat for $4 to take us back to our hotel. There, we jumped in the pool to ease our burning skin, took a shower, and headed to get a ride to Ubud.

We got to Ubud at around 5pm and walked around looking at the stores until we grabbed dinner at a place called “Dirty Duck Diner” It was an awesome place where you sat on cushions on the floor and had low tables. We had a pretty funny experience there too. So, Taylor and I are notorious for ordering food and drink contrary to our gender to the point where our servers typically give the food/drink to the wrong person and we have to switch as soon as they walk away. The first and most memorable time this happened was in New Jersey at a Mexican restaurant when I ordered a plain and Taylor ordered a kiwi margarita and the bartender actually laughed when he caught us switching. So at Dirty Duck, Taylor ordered a fruity yogurt drink and I ordered a beer. Clearly, these were delivered backwards. Then we ordered a Caesar salad (Taylor’s idea) and a friend appetizer assortment (my idea) again, delivered backward. By the time our actual meals came, they had it figured out, but it was still funny :)
Here we are reacting to drinks:

We headed back to our hotel and went to bed, thoroughly tired by the sunburn and duck.

January 15
The next day, we headed to the bus station to buy tickets from Bali to Surabaya. Taking an overnight bus seemed like a good idea because not only was it less expensive than a flight but it also allowed us to save on a night hotel by sleeping on the bus. We spoke to a bus company and paid $13 each for tickets on a bus that left at 8pm and arrived in Surabaya at 7am. Then, we headed to the most popular part of Bali so I could see it (we hadn’t been yet because Taylor wasn’t such a fan). We grabbed lunch there, but I shared Taylor’s sentiment and after checking out the beach quickly, we grabbed a drink at a bar and headed back to the bus station for our bus.

When we got there, it was a little unclear where the company was from whom we had bought tickets. Eventually we found them and they directed us to a bus that they said was going to Surabaya. It rolled out at about 7:45pm (good thing we weren’t late!) and we settled in for a long bumpy bus ride. All went well for the first couple hours. We arrived at the edge of Bali and the bus hopped a ferry to the main island of Java. That was wear the fun began.

You will have to wait until the next post to get the rest of this story. But I will pause here for a brief interlude to discuss the excitement that is toilets in Southeast Asia. So for whatever reason they have not yet adopted the oh-so-modern amenities of toilets that you can sit on and toilet paper. Most restrooms are just a hole in the ground and do not have any toilet paper. Instead, you are expected to "rinse" off down there (whether having gone #1 or #2, sorry, but let's tell it like it is) and call it a day. I do not understand how you can effectively rinse off nor do I understand why you would not want to dry off...it's crazy. Well, anyway, I just thought I'd share a photo of a "typical" Indo toilet:


Don't worry, most of the time, we were able to find a "western" toilet to sit on and I always had TP in my purse!

More to come!