Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Just another day in paradise! Up early and down to pool area about 6:30 am. Went for a long walk along the beach path with my Mum and sister (Mum and Dad were up before us and had already been for their walk before 6:30 am!). Breakfast again, then a swim or two in the pool.

I wandered over to change my massage appointment to an earlier time as we’re going to the Bali Collection (shopping area?) later this afternoon then having a meal there. Possibly also getting a fish pedicure! I also bought a couple of 6 litre containers of water (AU$1.80 each) to top up our supplies. It seems every restaurant and bar in this area (at least) cooks with and uses bottled water for ice and in the kitchens, and we clean our teeth with bottled water, as well as drink it of course.

Then I found the business centre at the resort where I’m typing up these blog posts (free). Once I connect to the internet to upload them, they’ll charge me a small internet connection fee, but just typing up the blog posts costs me nothing.

So here it is, about 11:30 Sunday morning, and I think I like Bali 😉 It’s far more ‘civilised’ than I expected it to be, but then we’re not staying in a Australian yobbo tourist area, which has been my major reason for never coming to Bali until now. I really don’t want to go overseas to see Australians misbehaving or behaving badly and disrespecting the local people and culture. I’ve seen NO evidence of that as yet, which has been a lovely surprise.

I probably won’t get a chance to write another blog post until Tuesday as we’re off on a day trip tomorrow to Ubud, hopefully to the lizard park, and to Denpasar for me to find some fabric 😉 We’ll be gone all day, I expect. The van and driver from the resort is going to cost us about AU$40 for the entire day — not bad for four people!

More from Sunday…

Had a lovely massage this afternoon (though painful in spots where Inda had worked on me heavily the day before). Came back to shower and get ready to go out to Bali Collection (a group of shops in Nusa Dua). Noticed that my phone, which I’d put on the charger just before my shower, was going crazy! It was flickering so I picked it up to read a message that there was one more attempt at login before it would delete all data on the phone! I had no chance to stop it as it was randomly entering letters/numbers into the password field then all of a sudden it stopped and EVERYTHING on my phone was deleted!!!! The screen was locked so I have no idea why it tried to log in. The same thing was about to happen the day before but I caught it in time and was able to enter the correct password. This time I had about 5 secs and just didn’t have time to delete what had already been entered (and was still being entered) before it wiped ALL the data. All my contacts, calendar appointments, ebooks, audiobooks, photos, apps — everything. Just GONE in a matter of seconds. I was FURIOUS — I didn’t know whether to be angry at Telstra or Android for this, but I knew it wasn’t me as I was in the shower and the rest of my family was by the pool!

Then, when I restarted the phone it wanted to set up from scratch and asked me to select a WiFi spot before doing anything else, and it wouldn’t read my SIM card. I tried to go into the APN area for mobile, but the phone said it didn’t recognise my SIM card. I removed the battery and the SIM and tried again — same thing. SIM not recognised so my phone is USELESS until I can get to a Telstra Shop back in Australia. NOT HAPPY! (Update: reason SIM wasn’t recognised is that I still had the phone in Airplane mode… Silly me!)

I was being so good with my phone to avoid any charges — I’d turned off data roaming, had altered the APN details, had it on Airplane mode so it didn’t try to connect to anything, and had all location services turned off. I only wanted to use it to play word games, sudokos, listen to audiobooks and read ebooks! It’s now turned off completely and my first job when I get back home is to contact Telstra about the SIM card and why my phone went crazy trying to log in — and why it DELETED ALL MY DATA!!! The phone had been doing some strange intermittent things the past few weeks (long before I went to Bali) and I wonder if they are related to what happened — for example, I’d have it sitting next to me on the Home page and it would randomly try to do a Google search (different page), or try to send a blank SMS to no-one (it would ask for the cell tower to use to send the SMS!). I hadn’t really thought that anything more sinister might be going on and just thought that maybe I should do a full power down and reboot of the phone at some point.

I’ll also have to download all my apps again, and audiobooks and ebooks, and reconnect with Exchange Server for my contacts and calendar (thank goodness I have Exchange Server!), and set up all my settings again. This could easily take a day…. so I am NOT happy at all.

The only positive was that I’d spent part of the morning on the internet uploading the photos on my phone to Flickr, so they were safe. The other photos I’ve been taking with my camera, not my phone.

Back to Bali…

We went to Bali Collection in Nusa Dua this afternoon. It’s quite big, not many people around, and except for shop workers, the only customers were ‘Europeans’. Shopping is hard when nothing fits, but I ended up buying some track shoes as mine are starting to get holes in them. I got a pair of New Balance women’s running shoes — retail ~AU$100 but with the 90% discount I got them for AU$16.70!! I also picked up some little goodies for some friends.

We had dinner at Frangipani’s Restaurant in Bali Collection. It was OK, but not as good as some of the other food we’ve had. Best bit? AU$45 for 4 people (2 starters, 3 mains, one dessert, 4 fresh fruit drinks), plus free transport back to our resort (quite some distance).

We were all up fairly early (it’s a family trait…). I saw the sun rising over the ocean and was able to see more of the resort than just the room — absolutely beautiful! Went for a walk with the family; after the path along the beach ended in one spot, my sister and I continued walking along the beach sand at the tide mark.

Unlike my experience walking along beaches in Sri Lanka 30 years ago, there was NO evidence of ‘human waste’ at all, although there was a bit of plastic rubbish on the beach. Not a lot, though.

We had a full buffet breakfast at the resort (AU$7 per person) — it seems my parents eat a hearty brekky, then a piece of fruit for lunch, then go out to dinner somewhere. Sounds good to me! I had muesli, yoghurt and fresh fruit, followed by a poached egg, bacon, and beef sausage. Plus apple juice.

After breakfast we parked ourselves under the shade on the sun lounges by the enormous and very pretty pool, had a few swims, read, etc. for a couple of hours.

Mum, my sister and I then wandered down the road to the Bumbu Cooking School to see if my sister and I could book in for a class later in the week. Unfortunately, they only operate the cooking school on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday, so we got put on the waitlist for Wednesday (we fly home on Thursday). Here’s hoping — it looked really interesting, starting with a market visit at 6 am, then breakfast, then cooking until 2 pm when we eat the meals we’ve prepared (some 15 or so dishes!).

We also booked massages etc. for later in the day at the Joy Spa about 20 metres from the resort’s entrance.

Back to the resort for (fruit) drinks by the pool, then at 2 pm us girls went over to the Joy Spa for our treatments — I’d booked a 1-hour full body massage (ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!) plus a 1-hour reflexology foot massage (also great) plus a pedicure (got flowers painted on my toenails — too cute!). Mum had a mani/pedi, and my sister had a half-hour reflexology foot massage plus a pedicure. Even Mum got flowers on her nails — go Mum! 😉

Hour-long massages were AU$6, hour-long reflexology also AU$6, and the pedicure was about AU$5. Unbelievable. Equally unbelievable was the massage. By full body, they mean full body — everywhere was massaged except the genitals. And at various times the masseur climbed up on the table to get better purchase on the spine etc. The massage was SO good, I’ve booked another one with Inda (my masseuse) for tomorrow (Sunday) and Wednesday (just before we fly home on Thursday). At AU$6 each, they are a real bargain.

Back to the resort to shower and change for dinner. We’re eating at the other Bumbu restaurant tonight — it’s meant to be quite an amazing experience and the food is supposed to be to die for (NOT literally!).

The weather here is just perfect — warm to hot, but with cooling sea breezes constantly keeping the worst of the heat and humidity at bay.

Later…

Dinner at Bumbu was BRILLIANT! The food was amazing and very plentiful. First we were served with tiny prawn cracker type things with a HOT HOT chilli dip (yummo!). Then for starters we had one serve each of chicken satay sticks and beef satay sticks (20 small sticks altogether), plus all the lovely sauces to go with them.

We’d ordered four main dishes to share and boy, was there more than enough food! We had grilled chicken with roasted coconut sauce, chicken with spicy coconut sauce (like a Thai curry), grilled pork spare ribs with a Bali BBQ sauce, and baby roast suckling pork with crackling. The grilled chicken and the suckling pork were unbelievably moist and tender, the meat on the ribs just fell off the bone, and the array of accompaniments was amazing. For drinks, Mum and Dad had Bumbu’s home-made lemon squash; I had a minted lime squash, and my sister had a mango, banana and tangerine fruit juice. We even got free transport back to the resort! Total bill including taxes, gratuity charges etc. — AU$86!!

I like how the security guys at the hotels and resorts stop the traffic to let the tourists cross the road and to let out cars into the traffic. No-one seems to mind these constant interruptions and the traffic still flows pretty smoothly.

My sister and I flew Garuda to Bali, leaving Perth around 2:15 pm and landing at Denpasar some 3 and a bit hours later.

The flight was uneventful — both for turbulence, and passengers. The average age of passengers by estimate was about 50, so the Australian yobbos I expected were few in number, if present at all. That was a the first pleasant surprise. The second pleasant surprise was the quality of the meal we were served. We both had the beef and rice, which was a lovely spicy beef rendang. Yummo. One of the most flavoursome airline meals I’ve ever had — most airline food is bland in the extreme to cater for every possible taste. The Diet Coke I had tasted quite different to the Australian version — possibly made with different water or with a different sugar source?

The only downside to the fight was the two toilets for about 160 people in Economy. At one stage the queue to the loos snaked at least halfway down the plane. The decision for me (a first-timer to Bali) was to go to the loos on the plane an hour or so before landing, or wait until we land and punt that the loos at the airport would be clean, assuming we didn’t have a long wait at immigration and customs, or wait until we got to the resort (possibly another hour from the airport). I opted to stay in line and wait my turn.

We had left early and therefore arrived early and as we were the only plane in, clearing immigration and customs was super quick, which means Mum and Dad and the driver weren’t there to meet us. We waited about 15 mins or so for them to arrive — we had no way of letting them know that the flight had been rescheduled, so we didn’t really expect to see them when we landed. It was about 27C and just balmy. The smell of incense wafted through the air, but no other less-exotic smells common to many Asian countries.

By the time we left the airport, it was dark and so I had no clue where we were going (except for the map in my head).

My parents’ 2-bedroom apartment at their timeshare resort is quite lovely — at least, what I could see of it in the dark. The apartment is really spacious and both bedrooms have en suites. Everything is spotlessly clean and very Western. Even on the drive to the resort I was surprised by the amount of Western chains I saw — KFC, Macdonalds, Starbucks, Burger King etc.

We had dinner at one of the restaurants in the resort — the ‘Jacaranda’. I had beef rendang (again!), with extra chilli as it wasn’t spicy enough; my parents both had sizzling sweet and sour pork; and my sister had satay sticks. We had the most delicious fresh fruit drinks with dinner — mine was mango, papaya and pineapple (AU$2 each). We also shared a large creme brulee between the four of us at the end of the meal. The total for all our meals plus drinks, plus dessert cane to AU$40 — for four people.

My first impression of Bali — lovely weather, very very clean, no smells except the occasional wafting of incense and frangipani, and quite Western.

Other notes:

Garuda check-in weighed our carry-on bags (which my sister and I had carefully packed so that we didn’t need to go to baggage claim!). It seems there’s a 7 kg limit, and we were both a tad over, so we had to check our bags anyway. Reason — a 10 kg bag falling out of an overhead locker would really hurt someone. My response? And a 7 kg bag would do as much damage falling on your head!

Also, only those flying Garuda Business class can access the lounge. Garuda doesn’t have its own lounge at Perth International Airport; it uses Qantas’ lounge. I’m a lifetime member of the Qantas Club and my sister is also a member of the Qantas Club, but we couldn’t use the Qantas Club as we were flying Garuda Economy. You can’t even buy a day pass (effectively a 2-hour pass), like you can with Alaskan Airlines and other US airlines and Virgin Blue in Australia. Qantas/Garuda are doing themselves out of money by not allowing you to purchase a day pass (both Alaskan and Virgin Blue has a $30 one-day pass — easy money for usually 2-3 hours access!).