For our mid-term break, we decided to go to Bali. It’s been on our list for a while, but we’ve just finally gotten around to planning it. Obviously I spent lots of time over-researching this, and honestly, I’m not sure it paid off. We had some great experiences, but we also had some not-so-great ones. Instead of giving a day-by-day run-down of this trip, I’ll categorize it into the good and the bad. I’ll start with the not so great things… So many people trying to rip you off. I know this happens in most SE Asian countries, and I completely expect it when we’re shopping. I know how to bargain and I know when it’s appropriate and when it’s not, so that’s not the issue at all. I understand that. But below are some examples of things that I felt were way beyond the regular standard of SE Asia. Getting overcharged for a faulty SIM card: I read online that it was super easy to buy a SIM card in Bali (simple as going to a convenient store and buying one and putting it in your phone… much like most SE Asian countries), so I wanted to get one so that we could use Uber (more on that later). I knew from online it shouldn’t cost more than about $5-6 to get one for a week with a couple gigs of internet. Our first day we wandered around Kuta (super touristy area) and walked into many different convenience stores, but none sold them. They sold “top ups,” but I needed a card first. Numerous hawkers were selling them on the street, but quoting a price of about $30-40. No thank you. I was fed up after a few of these, so finally when one hawker said the price (400,000IDR ~ $30), instead of just walking away, I said, “wow, that’s ridiculous. It should only be 100,000 (~$7).” And he said, “Okay.” So then I got it for 100K (clearly the money is quite confusing… Haha). But it didn’t end there. He put the card in and it seemed okay, but he was messing with it a bit, and after much arguing, he convinced me that he added 4GB and it would last a week. Shouldn’t have trusted him. It worked great for 300MB and 2 days, but then it stopped. Lesson learned. At least I then had a SIM card so I could go to a convenience store and re-load and they didn’t rip me off. So I guess I only wasted a few dollars, but it was still frustrating. Uber drivers messing with you so that you’ll cancel and have to pay a fee: Every other country we’ve used Uber in (plenty of developing ones, as well as developed one), we’ve had no problem. Everything works exactly how it should, so I thought this would be the same. Nope. The first time we tried it, we booked on and it said it would be 10 minutes. No problem. So we sat and waited and I tracked the driver on the app. He kept on driving around and not coming towards us and the wait time kept increasing. For the few minutes I thought that it was just because of traffic, but then we he was clearly driving the wrong direction for a while, I knew something was up. But it had past 5 minutes, so I couldn’t cancel without a fee. So we waited. We did this 3 times before one actually came. That driver told us that many drivers do this in hopes that the passenger will cancel so the driver can get the cancelation fee without actually doing any of the driving. It’s basically the drivers playing “chicken” with the passengers to see who will cancel first. And sadly to report, this happened every time we tried to use Uber. And we knew using actual taxis would be worse. Restaurant driver being over an hour late and wanting us to pay a cancelation fee when we canceled when we knew he was going to be that late: Our second day we decided to go to Jimbaran and have a seafood dinner on the beach. I found a restaurant that provided free transportation, provided you spent at least $50. And based on our experiences with Uber, I thought this was a great idea. The driver was supposed to pick us up at 4:30pm for our 5pm reservation because sunset was at 6:15pm. At 5pm he still wasn’t there, so I called. The restaurant said the driver was on his way, but there was traffic. I asked if he would be there by 5:30pm, as I didn’t want to miss sunset, one of the main reasons for going there. He said, “yes, definitely.” And I told him that if he wasn’t there by 5:30pm, we would cancel. Well at 5:30pm the restaurant called back and said “he’ll be there in 20 minutes,” clearly too late for us to get to the restaurant by sunset, so we canceled. Then he tried to get us to pay a cancelation fee because his driver was over an hour late. Ridiculous. Unfortunately this meant that we didn’t get to go to Jimbaran or get the seafood dinner on the beach, but we felt dealing with this again, or Uber, just wasn’t worth it. Brandon getting food poisoning: For the most part, the food in Bali was great. We had some awesome local dishes, as well as some great Western food. But there was one night in Ubud that it wasn’t… The place that we went to had really good reviews and it had an awesome view (more on that later), and the service was spectacular. Brandon got ribs, which are a local favorite. He thought something tasted a bit off, but thought it was just the local spices (these weren’t American BBQ ribs). That night he was up all night very sick. He had to stay in bed the entire next day. It started with normal “gut stuff” then moved into an intense headache, chills, and sweating. He said it was terrible. Luckily it only lasted about 36 hours, but it definitely put a damper on a couple days. Getting money stolen from our hotel (we think): Ok, now this one is definitely on the list of crappy things, but we do take partial blame for this one… I brought some USD to pay for an ATV ride (more on that later) towards the end of the week. I stuck it in the safe when we arrived, and didn’t think about it until the day of the ATV ride. But when I went to get it, some of the money was missing. I know I put it in there when we arrived (Saturday night), but on Friday morning, it wasn’t there. But (completely my fault), I didn’t check on it at all during the week to see if any was missing. We took things in and out of the safe every day, and I saw some USD, but I didn’t count it each time, so therefore I have no idea when it went missing. We also know we didn’t lock the safe a couple times (like when we went to dinner because housekeeping wasn’t supposed to come in then), so again, our fault. So we definitely take partial blame for not being more careful, and to be completely honest, I think it’s pretty good that this is the first time that this has happened considering how much traveling we’ve done. So a crappy thing, but we learned from it. It just sucked because it was on our last day and we had already had lots of bad experiences during the week. ATV ride: this one had many positives and negatives, so I’ll end the not-so-good list with this one and segway into the good list. It was advertised as a private tour, but it definitely wasn’t. But maybe I misread it and it was only the pick-up from the hotel that was private (which it was, but bad advertising). Once we got to the ATV riding place (after our private pick-up from a wonderful driver), we were put with a group of about 10 other people for our ATV ride. Definitely not what we were expecting. We’ve done a similar thing in Cambodia and it was just us, and it was wonderful. We could stop when we wanted, we could go at our own pace, etc. This one was not. The tour itself was quite nice, but the experience was definitely minimized because we were in a line of 10 ATVs, many with people who had never ridden one before. The “track” of where we went had some pretty easy parts and some pretty difficult ones. Some people were really struggling and getting stuck often, which meant that we had to stop too to wait. The ATVs were also very old (and not automatic), so they were definitely more challenging to ride than other ones. At one point mine was smoking and I asked one of the guides and he said “No problem. It’s just hot.” Luckily that was correct, but I was ready to jump off of it at any point, just in case. On to the good things about Bali…. The food was pretty great (minus when Brandon got sick). There was lots of Western food, as well as lots of good local food, all very cheap and very good quality (again, minus the food poisoning night). The beach was quite nice. It was very crowded, but gorgeous. Sunsets were incredible. Swimming was great. Relaxing in chairs at night on the beach, listening to the waves crash, beer in hand, was one of my favorite things about the trip. Awesome waterpark, called Waterbom: We were a bit hesitant to go here because of how crazy busy everything was we didn’t want to just spend the day waiting in line, but it really wasn’t bad. At the peak of the day, the worst lines were like 10-15 minutes. Later in the afternoon there were hardly any lines. There were some pretty crazy waterslides too. Like one that we went on together that was called “Boomerang” (for good reason!) that shot you up a massive wall of waterslide and then you came back in the other direction. Another few that had a “trap door” to release you (just like the ones in Dubai). You went into a capsule thing and then the floor came out from under you and shot you straight down the slide (the picture of that one below is not mine (or me)... credits to Waterbom-Bali). There was also a nice lazy river that we could just float around on. It was also really nice to be at a place where no one was trying to get you to buy anything or scam you for anything, which was completely different than the rest of our trip. Of course we had to do an escape room: We found one that had good reviews online and was pretty close to our hotel. It was very good and very unique. To get into the room, we had to climb a ladder and then slide down a dark slide, so that was interesting (and a bit terrifying immediately). But then it turned into a normal-ish escape room. Unfortunately we didn’t escape it, but it was still really fun! Sightseeing around Ubud: This was a highlight. Ubud is a very cute town, and even though it’s been heavily taken over with tourism, I didn’t find it as bad as Kuta/Legian/Seminyak. We had a wonderful driver who took us all around Ubud. The Tegalalang Rice Terraces, which are just north of Ubud were gorgeous. Not quite as stunning as Banaue in northern Philippines, but still very pretty. We also went to a coffee plantation and got to try Kopi Luwak coffee, as well as some of the local flavored coffee. Kopi Luwak coffee is poop coffee. Literally. An animal (the civet) eats the coffee beans, then poops them out, then the poop is dried and the coffee beans sorted, then roasted, and then used to make coffee. It’s supposed to be some of the best (and definitely most expensive) coffee in the world. It was definitely good, but I wouldn’t say it was the best coffee I’d ever had. The temples in Ubud were okay. Nothing special, but nice to see them right in the middle of town, even with all of the Western-ized touristy things. There is also a famous monkey forest on the edge of Ubud. It’s a massive forest where monkeys run around free. It was quite cool to be just walking around and to have monkeys just roaming freely. You do need to be careful though, as some of the monkeys are aggressive and take stuff from you. We also did the Campuhan Ridge walk through the rice paddies, which was amazing. It was so pretty. So green and so relaxing. We stopped at a local café along the way just to sit and enjoy the view. We had dinner at a restaurant near the rice paddies that had an amazing view. Unfortunately, we think this is where Brandon got food poisoning, but the ambiance of the restaurant was great! We also went to a couple other temples throughout the island. They were very nice and I totally see the appeal, if you haven’t traveled a lot through SE Asia. From everything I’d read about them, I thought they were going to be some of the best temples we’d ever seen (side note: that award goes to Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, in my opinion). So I guess with that expectation, I was underwhelmed. Even though we had some negative experiences in Bali, we still had a good trip. I'm not sure that I'll be back, unless it's just to relax in a villa in the middle of the rice terraces. That I could probably do. But if we want beaches, Thailand or the Philippines is where it's at.
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LissieInternational teacher, math-lover, traveler Categories
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