And on to the honeymoon! We 'mooned on the Isle of Bali, part of the great country of Indonesia. We were there for 10 days, and during those 10 days, we probably walked about 100 miles. We get to Bali, it's late, and all we have is a “Lonely Planet Guide to Bali” book that was written about 10 years ago. Turns out the date of publication on stuff like that is actually rather important. So, we take a taxi to an area that we'd found while thumbing through “the book”, and, eventually, find a place to stay. “The book” ended up listing prices for things (including places to stay) at roughly half of what they were in reality. That took some getting used to, and it took a few more trips to the bank that we had anticipated. We stayed the Lombok area for 2 days, which were spent mostly walking up and down the coastline. Weather-wise, it was actually a lot chillier than we had expected. We were both (unconsciously) expecting the weather to be a lot like Thailand was a few years ago—so hot that the ocean water doesn't actually feel cold enough—but Bali was overcast and slightly rainy pretty much the whole time we were there.

After 2 days there we decide to take a boat to another island, one (we hoped) would be less....how do I say....tourisy, crawling with street vendors and hawkers, and developed. I almost lost our breakfast on the boat ride to Nusa Lembongan,, which is something like 20 miles off the coast of Bali. Once the rain stopped, I got on the roof of the battered wooden boat we were riding, and felt better. I also saw a shark! Just a little one, though.

Lembongan was a lot better than where we'd been staying. It was much less crowded, more conducive to adventuring. We got totally lost on the way from the bay where the boat landed to the area with places to stay (Mushroom Bay area, in case you're curious). We were being followed by a vendor with an umbrella (we think he was hoping it would rain so he could rent it to us?), so we just kept walking, and ended up on dirt roads and paths between cow fields and stuff. We ended up at the back entrance to a deserted temple above the town. But, we got to where we wanted to go, and got a cottage with aircon. All but one of the places we stayed had outdoor bathrooms, which were so cool I want one. All the plumbing—the bathroom sink, the shower/bath, the toilet, etc., is all “outside”. There's a roof over the toilet, but the shower and sink just have high walls, and no roof. This place had that.
Lembognan is much smaller than Bali, but it's still big enough, and undeveloped enough, that we thought we should see if we could rent a scooter to get around and see stuff, so we went to a vendor who was yelling at us about renting a scooter when we'd been on our way to breakfast. We asked to see the scooters he was renting, and he just pointed over to one parked by his shop. He wasn't renting scooters, he was going to rent us his scooter for the day. Which we gladly took. No pesky paperwork, no messing with licenses or paperwork or passports or even helmets. We gave him the money, he gave us the key. Yay! So we scooted around for the day, and had a lot of fun. We would see cool looking places off in the distance, and try and get there. We ended the evening as the only patrons at a cafe set on a cliff above the sea, the sun setting over Bali over by the horizon.

We learned the hard way that, in Bali, not only do they not make food until you order it, they usually don't buy the food to make until you order it. So it was in this case; the cook/owner sent his wife off down the path on a scooter to buy the ingredients for our supper. This means fresh food, yes, but we had the bad habit of waiting until we were hungry to find a restaurant, which means by the time our food came, an hour later, we were so hungry we couldn't even carry on conversation anymore, we'd just stare off at stuff. We also typically only ate 2 meals a day, which probably didn't help.

2 days there on Lembognan, then back to the main island, mostly because there was no ATM anywhere near, and we were running out of cash. That whole Lonely Planet thing again. We ended up staying in a very nice area, with lots to see within walking distance, but we managed to find a “guest home”, rather than a cottage. A guest home is more like a youth hostel. Like a complex with small apartments. A cottage is your own little house. We didn't really mind, though, cuz there's no way there was anything better in the area that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Really nice resorts just across the street. We'd cross the street, and walk through, and end up on the boardwalk and beach on the other side. It was while we were at this place that we bought a comb and scissors and I cut Nelle's dreds sitting out on a pier. People stared. In spite of the fact that our room had a leak, and there were never new towels or sheets or anything, and there was only one, blazingly bright florescent light in the place, we stayed there for 3 days, one day longer than we'd stayed at any of our past places. It really was a nice area, and the room was pretty cheap, so we figured we'd do the last 3 days at a nicer, more expensive place, and justify it by staying in a cheaper place first. Good idea.

The last place we ended up was right near Nusa Dua, which is the most poshest area of Bali, with the biggest, most over-the-top, expensive resorts on the island. They're all in a row, and the resort we stayed in the last 3 days was the first one after the row of Club-Med-style resorts. And it was totally great! The room was huge, there were fresh bottles of water in the fridge, the aircon was great, the people came in while we were gone and replaced stuff, and (gasp) there was cable TV! We watched a lot of TV for the first while we were there. We were so tired of walking for miles and miles, and bartering and deciding where to go and eat and everything. The place had a few lounge chairs out on their little stretch of beach, breakfast was included in the price of the room (it's nice to get up and not have to figure out where to walk to for food. And it was buffet-style!), and there was a nice grocery store a little bit down the road. We ended up buying bread and jam and oreo's and some other essential food items, and we'd eat breakfast, eat a late lunch/early dinner, and eat snacks in front of the TV. Actually, there wasn't that much on TV worth watching (as usual).

Our flight out left in the evening, and we had to be out of our room by noon, so we ended up watching Die Hard 4 and Transformers at a mall to pass the time. Both were quality entertainment, for the record, although I'd be more likely to rent and re-watch Die Hard. Personal preference. The flights to and from Tokyo and Bali are both listed as “direct flights”, but on the way back they always (apparently) “stop off” in Jakarta, which is definitely not in a direct line between Tokyo and Bali. I suspect it has to do with Bail being a fairly small island and not wanting to top off every 747 that flies out. So we had to sit around in the middle of the night in Jakarta for 2 hours. Boring.