We decided to hire out our driver from the airport and spend a day with him showing us the sights. Ignoring the call of cocktails and the ocean we instead got an early start and headed north to the artist enclave of Ubud. It was about an hour drive north considering the traffic. It seemed like every road we traveled on was full of bottlenecks that brought traffic to a crawl. Our driver said that road improvements are on the long list of things to work on once the government starts operating in the black. It sounded familiar.
When we finally arrived in Ubud, our driver interpreted our request to see some local art as “let’s go to various touristy art shops”. After two such stops we asked him to skip the shopping altogether and instead get to the sightseeing of local temples. The driver didn’t get mad – he was getting paid already – but I think he was hoping to get some kickbacks from the shops for bringing us there. The “take the tourists shopping” scam is the oldest one in the book.
Ubud was quite different from the scenery around Nusa Dua, and so it was fun to have the driver take us on backstreets and see how normal Indonesian people live. It seemed like every house was trying to sell some kind of handicraft or artwork. Our driver said that unemployment in Bali was at around 20%, so there were a lot of people around with time on their hands who evidently could learn art quickly.
After visiting some temples, he took us to a local restaurant that looked like it also was a tourist trap, but we were too tired, hungry (and hung over) to care too much. The food was actually pretty good there, and my hangover told me to order a banana milkshake instead of our usual lunchtime beer. It was a good call – a milkshake that I’ll never forget.
After lunch we asked the driver to take us back towards our hotel, with a couple of short stops on the way to pick up some essentials in the shops. On the way back a huge storm came through – dumping water at a rate that was hard to believe. We were lucky we were in the car, and I had flashbacks to our crazy ride back from Agra to Delhi in India last year.
The rest of the holiday we spent mostly around the hotel, taking it easy and spending a lot of time at the beach. Surprisingly we didn’t get too much sunburn, and a lot of my co-workers commented when I got back to Japan that I looked like I didn’t even go to Bali.
Our final trick was to go to the hotel spa and get a long Balinese massage just before heading to the airport to go home. The massage was excellent – there is a big difference when they are professionals. The ride back to the airport turned out to be a really long trip on the same traffic congested road. What was a 20 minute ride when we arrived was a two hour ride going back, and I was glad we allowed a lot of time before check-in at the airport.
So that’s about it – a very relaxing trip and maybe the first one that we’ve taken that was centered around a resort rather than the cheapest hotel we could find. It was a good experience, but I think it’ll be a while before we stay at a resort again. There is something to be said for the independence and freedom that a small local hotel affords. Besides, I like thinking on my feet, using the local language, and taking chances. Maybe that’ll change as I get older.
