The World is My Oyster

From the Crocodile Park, we headed for Danau Bratan (danau=lake) in Bedugul. Had simple lunch just right in front of the area. Our driver said Ayam Bakar Taliwang (Taliwang roast chicken) there is nice, it’s Nusa Tenggara Barat food. But we found it just okay, the chicken was too small. We also ordered fried baby squid who came out looking pretty sad, like babies of baby squid and burned. The taste overall was alright, but they definitely didn’t bother about the presentation of the food. So I’m not gonna present it here too.

After lunch, it rained quite heavy, so we were stuck for a couple of hours. I guess we could go with umbrella, because there were a lot of little kids renting it, but you can’t see much in that weather anyway. So we decided to roam around the small shops nearby and bought quite a lot of stuff. I bought that-Bali-T-shirt-that-everybody-has. If you’re Indonesian you’d know what I mean.

So starting from the beginning, this is the front gate. Love the mountain in the background. Mountain and lake is totally genius combination of divine invention. I don’t know what mountain that is, looks like it’s either Gunung Catur or Gunung Mangu (gunung=mount) according to this website. Oh and from here I just knew that the same guy built Pura Ulun Danu and Pura Taman Ayun. Well, not just any guy, he’s a King.

Me in front of a stupa. I like that orange beings in contrast with the earth color of the stupa. Nice.

The sign read: Kawasan Suci! Dilarang kencing di areal ini! Translated: Sacred area! Do not pee here!
Of course it does look like a good spot for urinating…

We present you.. Pura Ulun Danu!

I wonder if they built the shrine first then the water went up, or if they just purposely built the shrine in the middle of the lake.

I love this place! Everywhere you take picture it came up nice! Apparently I was so absorbed in taking pictures of us that I forgot to take pictures of just the shrines and lake like a professional photographer. The sun was just the right amount too after the rain, so the colors just came up nice.

I feel a bit guilty for putting so many pictures of me and not Rendy. It just happened that the best composition of pictures have ME in it. Sorry baby, love you ;).

Now there he is! Thanks to some random people we grabbed to help us taking picture.

Empty ceremony tables inside one of the temple.

The same place with the one before this picture. When we came back after a while, I saw these Balinese starting some kind of ceremony.

There’s nice park around the lake too. The place is just beautiful and properly maintained. The weather in Bedugul is nice cooling because it’s located on highland. So it’s a nice change from the burning sun we had just a few hours ago.

Waiting…

Where the hell is he?

Before we left, I bought this Rp10.000,- hat that makes me look like a Jew. If you can’t get enough of the hat, I will have more pictures with me and the hat in the next post :).

Pura Ulun Danu, Bratan Lake
Bedugul, Bali
Indonesia

Admission: free

Haven’t posted food for a while and I claim myself hungry!

In Bali, since we stayed in Kuta area, of course we wouldn’t miss the famous Warung Made (Made’s Warung). Just ask anybody there, most people, if not everyone, should know this eating place. During the 4 days of our stay, we went here twice ;). Note that Made is read muh-day, not made as in past tense of make, na-ah.

The place has lower floor area and upper floor (overlooking the lower floor). I quite like the overall ambiance. When you like it quiet, you can choose the upper floor, otherwise you can hang out at the front patio, looking around the busyness at the small street outside.

Warung Made’s ‘Nasi Campur Special’ (special mixed rice), cost Rp45.000,- (~S$8), significantly more expensive than the normal ‘Nasi Campur’ below.

Warung Made’s ‘Nasi Campur’, cost Rp20.000,- (~S$3.5). I think the normal one is best value for money, while not losing any of the tasty bits. The special one had prawns and more meat. However they were both very tasty! We could tell they used a lot of coconuts as ingredient (shredded coconut and coconut cream/milk).

Another delicious dish, Sate Bali (Pork Satay Bali style). The chunks of meat were so properly done, juicy, generous, and yummy! Woo I didn’t expect it to be that good!

Rendy gulping down the Avocado juice, looking very happy.

Me and my satisfied look. The avocado juice was yummy but was a bit too heavy for me, but the Banana Honey juice that I sipped in the picture was HEAVENLY! Even the fruit juices were that good! We were all giddy with happiness ;)

View from the upper floor. Have I told you I love Bali architecture?

Warung Made
Kuta area, Bali
Indonesia

Plus: Yummy ‘Nasi Campur’, yummy ‘Sate Bali’, yummy fruit juices.

Minus: Mmm if I try to find something to complain about, the place was a bit dark and had no air-con. Although if you take away these two then it wouldn’t be an authentic ‘warung’ anymore (warung=traditional eating place). I would leave it as it is :). Oh and we did try another dish the second time around, some kind of pork soup, and it was very ordinary.

From Taman Ayun Temple on our way to Beratan Lake, we stopped by this Crocodile Park, or aka Taman Buaya & Reptil in Indonesian [Taman = park, buaya = crocodile, reptil = reptile]. It’s located still in Mangwi district, I’m guessing the location is around that red dot with black aura on the map below.

The entrance fee is Rp20.000,- for locals and Rp 70.000,- for foreigners! What a big difference! First they were going to charge us foreigner fee, I had to use my bargaining skill to convince them that I’m supposed to be local whenever it is more advantageous to be local. Nah, actually I just had to smile and talk in fluent Indonesian to set things straight. Note that a lot of Balinese talk to us in English by default, I guess because of the high number of tourists roaming about everywhere, it’s better to stay on the safe side and speak in the language that everyone is supposed to understand. I replied in English whenever I feel like it unless the situation is more advantageous otherwise :).

They said there were about a hundred crocodiles living in the park. After circling the park I think there really were that many. It’s a bit sad that the park wasn’t properly maintained though. I guess it’s really costly to have hundreds of crocodiles, it’s already pretty good that they could keep everybody alive and healthy.

Can you spot 3 crocodiles? This is supposed to be the stage where they had show of crocodile wrestling (shown on the ticket), but there was no show. Overall the park was very quiet and looked almost abandoned. I only saw one other ang-moh guy with his guide apart from us. There were probably another handful of people plus the park keepers.

Most of the crocodiles were in the stone state (term created by me for some living being acting like stone). I couldn’t even see them breathing. They were just totally still! The funniest pose was staying (sleeping?) with their jaws wide open. I have no idea how they could stay at that state for such a long time.

Right now I forgot why I didn’t take more pictures of the open-jawed crocodiles. They’re so cute that way. The picture below is one that I zoomed in from the previous picture.

Here I tried to show how gigantic the crocodiles were. But instead, I look gigantic. It’s hard to show how BIG they were with camera shot!

Yellow crocodile. There are many types of crocodiles, and they were put in separate cages. Looks like crocodiles will have greater chance to fight the ones that of different color. Sounds familiar.

I saw in one cage there were 2 crocodiles wrestling and biting each other while water splashing everywhere. Rendy said they were just going on a date. Crocodile date heehee.

A lonely komodo. It’s all alone. I feel bad for him/her.

Before we left, we posed in front of these cool big statues at the front gate of the park. Didn’t see any snake though.

I can’t wait to get to Beratan Lake post. It’s so prettyyyy.

Taman Buaya & Reptil (Crocodile Park)
Mangwi district, Bali
Indonesia

Admission: local Rp20.000,-, foreigner Rp 70.000,-

While I’m talking about interesting conversation, I had this just a couple of days ago with my Korean colleague. Boy I’m on the roll! :D

Me: I saw a queue in front of Louis Vuitton store at Paragon just a few days ago. I wonder why people were queuing (really, it’s not like those bags are anything close to even expensive bag.. they’re super expensive!)

LV girl (carrying a Louis Vuitton bag): Really?

Me: Yea, they may have had discounts or something *shrug*

LV girl: Mm LV never has discount ever.

Me: Woo really? (Seriously, what’s with LV bags?!) I have a Korean housemate whose sister asked him to buy an LV bag in Singapore to bring back to Korea, cost him around 3000 dollars, and after that he didn’t have much money to buy anything else. You know, since the sister only returned back the money after he got back in Korea.

LV girl: Yea 3000 dollars is quite a lot. I bought mine for around 1000 bucks.

Me: So you like bags do you?

LV girl: No, I don’t like bags.

Me: What!? (If you buy a 1000 dollars bag, don’t you at least have to like bags?)

[We're laughing together here.. She's really not the snob type, she's such a sweet girl.. :)]

LV girl: I bought this bag because my cousin said it’s the bag which I can carry my whole life in it. I was looking for that kind of bag. The kind which I can carry my whole life in. So after I bought this bag, I just use it all the time, I don’t really buy other bags.

Woah that’s a pretty good way of talking someone into buying it :D

The “carry my whole life in it” thing was really what she’s trying to say. I asked a couple of times to make sure I didn’t hear it wrong. It’s so cute. I wonder if she just direct translated it from Korean, because it sounds a bit weird in English. Anyway, I know LV is so popular and all, but Koreans may have a special soft spot for LV, because so far I knew only Koreans spent so much for the bags (with the certain level of earning, not sure about the more high class people).

Ah well but what do I know about bags. I carry around a cat bag…

I had this conversation with 2 friends a while ago (names, places, and exact time are not revealed to protect the innocents :)

west-girl (living in the very West of Singapore): I can’t remember the last time I saw sunset. It’s been a while…

central-guy (living in the central of Singapore): But you stay in the West, then you should be able to see the sunset.

west-girl: O yea you’re right, I’m 40km closer to the sun, that’s why the sunset is bigger in the West. Looks more beautiful too.

central-guy: Well yea you’re closer to the West what.

Then west-girl spent about 10 more minutes explaining why it doesn’t matter whether you stay in the central or west of Singapore, you’d still be able to see sunrise or sunset, and the sunset is not bigger in the West of Singapore, while I started laughing uncontrollably.

[silent here]

central-guy: (looking at me with puzzled look) ….. I still don’t understand why it’s funny…..

First thing first, ‘pura’ means ‘temple’, ‘taman’ means ‘park/garden’, and ‘ayun’ means ’swing’. So to literally translate it, ‘Pura Taman Ayun’ is ‘Swing Garden Temple’. So when I heard the name of the place, I imagined there would be a big long swing bridge somewhere in the middle of the garden. But of course to my disappointment, there wasn’t any.

First day we went to 4 places, which are marked by red dots on this Bali map:

I like to have sense of where I am in the map. We stayed at Kuta beach so that’s the red dot at the very bottom, at the foot of the chicken (Bali sure looks like chicken). Kuta is the busiest, most crowded, most famous, most touristy beach in Bali. So our trip that day included Pura Taman Ayun (the red dot with black aura), Crocodile Park, Beratan Lake, and Tanah Lot. Will put all of them in separate posts. Note that this trip already took us the whole day. So the next time we want to go somewhere further like the head or tail of the chicken, we gotta plan better, or stay somewhere in the stomach of the chicken. If you can’t see any chicken, don’t ask me where, I can’t help you! It’s so obvious!

We rented a car (usually comes with a driver) for Rp300.000,- (note that in Indonesia dot is used as the 3-digits separator and coma as the cent separator, boy how I found this weird after so many years using them the other way around..) – that’s for 1 day (~8 hours) all inclusive. Our driver was supposed to be Pak Polos, but since he was occupied that day, he asked his friend to go in his place, who happened to be very quiet like a mouse. I had to ask him questions, otherwise he would just stay quiet. Nice man though. Overall I found Bali people are still very nice even with so many touristy stuff going on, not like Bangkok which is totally stained.

The temperature was super hot the time we arrived at the Temple. I almost got a bit dizzy because of the heat.

Started with this big grassy garden and long path to the gate. The grass was so neat and green, a sign that they maintain the place quite well. In case you’re wondering, the guy standing there is my Rendy, not just any random guy I asked to pose for the picture *grin*.

That’s me at the front gate. I love this particular “two-towers” architecture, it’s sooo Bali! Do you know anywhere else in the world that has similar architecture? (it’s an honest question)

They have so many small buildings inside of the inner garden, but I don’t think we could go there. So we just went along the long walls. I found this information about the court afterwards:

The temple was built by I Gusti Agung Anom, a founder of the Mengwi kingdom in 1934, and were skilfully and renovated in later years, giving its present appearance which tourists find so attractive and interesting.
The name itself means beautiful garden.
It is built on a high tableland which is surrounded by ponds.
This gives the effect from afar that the temple is floating on water.

In the innermost court, there are twenty nine buildings which function as places for the gods and goddesses.
There are other buildings which house religious regalia used in the ceremonies.

There are multi-roofed structures, some of them having eleven roofs called ‘meru meru’.
The central section is surrounded by a small pond, thus the whole complex is symbolic of the great Mandhara Mountain turning in a sea of milk.

~ taken from indo.com

This is the multi-layers roof/ multi-roofed structure they stated above. I totally love this architecture too. It’s just soo Bali. Again! :)

Even though we couldn’t go in, we saw some local people in the inner court, fishing. There are fish in the pond!

There are some shades along the way when you walk further. I think it’s necessary when the weather was THAT HOT!

Two swans at the pond. So sweet. Do you know that swans mate for life? :)

There was a painting studio/shop somewhere in the area. Hope I don’t violate any copyright issue by putting one picture of the paintings here :). I was just particularly intrigued by this piece. It’s a beautiful one. In the future when I have my own house, I want to buy paintings from all over the world and hang them on the walls.

Pura Taman Ayun
Mengwi district, Bali
Indonesia

Admission: Rp3000,-

Looking at the pattern I’ve been going for the past few weeks, it’s SO FREAKIN HARD to find time to write anything apart from weekend. Even so, I could only spare so much during the weekend. Well on the good side, I’ve been busier having life than writing about it. On the bad side, writing is something that I currently do not want to neglect. So in conclusion, I’ll try to write shorter posts, but more often. We’ll see how that fits in.

Taking a break from my long Southeast Asia series (if I can call them a series anyway, with one post), I’m going to put my more recent trip to Bali (Indonesia) in April this year. You know, before I forget about the details.

I call this series “Finally Bali” because it was a long long due holiday for me and Rendy (it also rhymes!). FINALLY we’re grown up enough and have money enough to have a getaway together! It’s only 10 years of waiting, really, no biggie ;). I was thinking of other lame series title like “Pre-Moon Bali”, because everybody I know teased “Honeymoon eh?” to which I replied “No, it’s pre-honeymoon”. But since pre-honeymoon is too heavy a name, I modified it to Pre-Moon. Now it sounds cute. Also sounds a bit like Sailor Moon. Err.. I should stop now, am not even using the title.

So off we went, using the (in)famous Air Asia (what else?), which is famous for its punctuality.. NOT! Especially Air Asia Indonesia, it’s like they’re trying to be late all the time. But lucky day for us, it was all good on our way to Bali from Jakarta. Totally different story for the other way though. But I’ll just tell you about that later.. maybe..

I have a weird habit of taking picture of the back of the airplane seat. The bottom left box says “whoever takes the life vest would either be fined 1 million rupiah or taken to the police”. If you don’t already know, 1 million rupiah is less than 200 SGD. Yea I know, for a moment there, you were like “WOAH!” right? (By the way since I’m currently in Singapore I will use SGD as benchmark for prices, when I go back to Australia I will use AUD, if I stay in Vietnam I will.. well in that case I wouldn’t use Dong because there would be too many zeros to be sensible..)

Like most budget airlines, you gotta walk to the plane across burning open air field instead of air-conditioned tunnel.

Read:
Welcome to Bali!
Whatever package you choose, Matrix gives what you want

A glimpse of Ngurah Rai airport. You can tell from the picture that Bali is not a big city. In fact, it’s a tiny island on the east of Java. Talking about tiny island, Singapore is bigger than Bali, I’ve checked. So see, Singapore is not that pathetic after all. You guys should be proud *grin*.

Just a tip, if nobody picks you up, do NOT walk outside the airport area to find taxi. I repeat, DO NOT walk outside of the airport area to find taxi. First thing when you arrive, you would not see a taxi caller or stand, because it’s at YOUR BACK. Go out of the door and it’s at your back, dark, hidden, and doesn’t look like taxi locket, especially when there are a lot of people standing in front of it (just because of the shade, not because they wanna call a taxi). Just pay for the ticket and the taxi driver will walk you to the parking lot where he stores his taxi.

This post is getting long and I was just talking about the airport forgodssake. Sorry, I’m fascinated by airports and airplanes. After countless flights I’ve been to, I still have all tingling feeling when the plane takes off the ground. It’s the feeling of knowing that you leave things behind while anticipating new place.

I will stop now. Next post will be about Bali, for real, I promise.

Following my post on Southeast Asia trip, I will also post reviews on all the backpacker hostels that we stayed in. Finding a good backpacker hostel is like finding a piece of gold in a fresh water river in area where people don’t usually find gold. Well okay, it’s not that bad. But it does take a lot of luck to find a decent one. If I could help my fellow backpackers in sharing my experiences, I would, so hopefully less people would fall into a series of unfortunate events. On the other hand, if you always long for a little extra adventure, you can always random pick those hostels and cross fingers you wouldn’t get bitten by bed bugs ;).

Anyway, I love backpacker hostels. I had more stories there than I could ever had staying at big hotels. I met other fellow travelers who share their amazing stories, people who hang on the Lonely Planet book like a bible just like I did, carrying maps, big backpacks, and look like they’ve been on the road for a long time. It smells freedom.

The more interesting stories I had were the ones where I stayed for more than a few days because by then I had met more people and recognized faces. But I also had a lot of one-nights. I would say the experience that you get heavily depends on how long you stay at one place, like everything else in life, country, city, workplace, someone’s heart, and so on.

Enough chit-chatting!
So on my trip to Singapore, I stayed at Bugis Backpackers for 3 nights, located just ever so conveniently close to Bugis MRT station. No hostel can be any closer to MRT station. Moreover, it’s Bugis, which is quite central in Singapore island. The hostel is just opposite of Bugis Junction, a few shops beside KFC to the right.

To ease your entry, I provide you with a picture of the main gate:

So yea you mark it by the SHARED name board just along the shops area. See the door? Go through that door to the upper floors. Like other backpacker hostels, you usually have to arrange the time beforehand if you arrive at late hours. I did. So far I met one chubby woman and one old man at the front desk and they’re all nice.

Rooms have no windows. According to my research, backpacker hostels in Singapore are generally windowless and have only shared bathrooms. For $20-35 range of price anyway. But both room and bathrooms were reasonably clean. Oh and there was air-con too. I purposely chose air-con rooms for my entire trips in Asia where possible, because I couldn’t imagine the heat I had to endure without air-con (Note that that time I’ve stayed in 4 seasons country for many years without ever touching tropical countries once during. These days I’m (more) okay with the tropical heat. It’s just a matter of getting used to.) They also have hot shower. Same reason with why I chose air-con room. I was from ang-moh country where hot shower is NECESSITY and NOT luxury.

I stayed in a double bedroom which cost about 32 SGD per person. I saw their dorm room and the store room was inside the dorm room, so every time someone needed something from the storage, they needed to go in and out. O well, what do you expect from a dorm room.

They have shared (obviously) kitchen and fridge where you can put your food IF you want to ;)

The living room was pretty dark, although colorful, dark colors. But maybe because I always saw it at night =9. In daytime they could open the windows so there’d be more sunlight. There was one computer for Internet in the corner which you can use for a cost. Travel brochures were everywhere.

I took this picture from the hostel:

This view was the one they used on photo they put on some websites to attract people (it definitely attracted me). Note that this is NOT the actual hostel. It’s the VIEW FROM the hostel. Although they also have some circular staircases and colors on the wall, so I guess they don’t exactly trick people.

Bugis Backpackers
162B Rochor Road, Bugis Village
Singapore 188437
www.bugisbackpackers.com

My duration of stay: 3 nights

Plus: Location is totally convenient. Room and bathrooms were moderately clean.

Minus: No breakfast. Room had no windows. It did have a big air hole at the ceiling so you can hear people from upstairs if that’s of your interest.