This is my from travel log to Bali. The actual departure date was only three months later after I booked the Free & Easy package with go.holidays, which includes return airfares and three night’s accommodation. As a travel tips, it is always cheaper to advance book your air ticket rather than last minute travel. For this instance, I managed to save up to 60 percent on the package price with booking three months in advance! So, before both my wife and I depart to Bali, as usually I would advise, I did some study on the Bali map, local tourists spots, exchanged some local currency Rupiah, and arranged child care for my two children for the period and finally, after waiting for so long, there came the hectic moment, the departure date on May 21, 2008.
Our flight was 10:55 a.m. and I was planning to arrive in Bali just before hotel check-in time so we could maximize our first afternoon there. We always have a problem catching flights in K.L. because our Sepang International Airport is over one hour away from K.L., so our plan was to leave our home latest by 8:00 a.m to make sure we had time to check in. But, unfortunately, we had some havoc and our flight was delayed until four hours later! We had to wait and have our lunch at the airport.
It ruined our initial planning and when we reached Bali; darkness already fell upon the scene. We missed our sunset! The whole afternoon was wasted! Without further delay, we quickly jumped on to a cab and almost shouted, “Kuta Seaview Cottage!” Taxi fares was Rp45,000. If you check my currency converter at side bar (from IDR to MYR), it is about RM16.00, which was for a twenty-minute drive to Kuta, Bali’s most popular beach. (For those friends who can not figure where is the Ngurah Rai International Airport in relation to Kuta, you can download the map here.)
Along the way to our resort, though it was already nighttime, the streets were still extremely busy. Most shops were still open; lots of cars and tourists on the street. Kuta Seaview Cottage was in front of the Kuta beach, two lots away from the famous Hard Rock Cafe and Hotel. We got a shock when the cab tried to drive past the resort security check point where security actually scanned through the whole car with radioactive sensor before letting us in! I believed this practice was introduced only after the 2002 and 2005 bombing tragedy here in Kuta. After all this, with the most helpful and warm reception officers and bellboy, we finally settled down with our luggage in our cottage. Let me describe a little of the resort on day two since it was too dark to walk around …
We were actually starving like hell so we walked out to the street and looked for food. In fact, I had already scanned through when we were on our way to the resort so it didn’t take much of our time before we settled down at one of the hawker stalls nearby. Full varieties of foods were offered there, from local, Asian, to western. It was easy to understand why because most of the tourists here are either Australian, European, Malaysian, or Chinese. For good food sake, we opted for local dishes. I ordered local beer, Bintang for Rp20,000 per large bottle, and my wife, Jean, ordered local styled rice and noodles for Rp25,000 each. That was our first meal in Bali and I would sadly say that the food wasn’t too good. But never mind still, the beer was quite good though and we bottomed up two large bottles with ease. The dinner took us two hours or so … and it was still enjoyable.
After the whole day of rushing, we relaxed and went walking along the beach in front, admiring the night scene, enjoying the silence under the breezing weather. The peak season of Bali is during June to September, where the weather is clear and windy. We chose to come here by end of May just to avoid peak crowd, but the weather is still reasonably good. To our surprise, the sky there was actually extremely clear without any hints of haze effect, unlike other parts of Indonesia, like Sumatra. We decided to walked up back to the nearby streets to explore a little before we headed back to our resort. There are plenty of shops in Kuta from exclusive restaurants, cafes, fast food chains, convenient shops, boutiques, to a shopping complex! I can tell you that the nightlife at Kuta is excellent and it is so happening everywhere! You can easily get drunk on the street. After all, the most important aspect of it, and it will always be one of the top five factors when you choose a holidays destination, I would say you can have peace of mind when you walk about the street. We crawled back to our resort after midnight.
Well, we did not do much in day one but we gathered enough information and arranged a driver for our day trip we going to have on day two. Day trip to where? I can tell you that we managed to cover maximum spots and activities all in one day, and I’m going to tell you that in my next post—day two in Bali. Stay tuned!