Bali, Indonesia

Bali was not what I expected. I was expecting it to be loud, dirty, overcrowded with traffic but also stunningly beautiful. When I got off the plane the airport was nearly empty, outside the street was quiet. I was expecting throngs of taxi drivers, porters and hotel owners bidding for my patronage. Instead I got a nice quiet bench beside a neatly manicured garden to sit down at. This might not be too bad! Then I went to Kuta.

The popular beach town of Kuta is loud, dirty, overcrowded with traffic and stunning, but not necessarily with beauty. Vendors constantly call out their promises of a good price, a morning price or a good-luck price if you would just take a look at their wares or buy a massage. To call them persistent would be an understatement. Several times they would grab my hand or my arm to pull me into their shop. This is where the motorcycle accident paid off as I would feign immense pain as I clutched my arm and showed my bandages. Apologetically they would let go and leave me alone, embarrassed they had hurt me. Smitten that I'd avoided one hard sell, I would perform the act all over again several times within each block. Crossing the street is not to be taken lightly here as taxis quickly jam together and motorbike drivers weave in and out of the cars. I stayed at a hotel right beside the Bali bomb memorial. I believe it was in 2004 when Muslims from nearby Java planted a bomb in a popular nightclub here killing several people from all over the world.

The Balinese are predominantly Hindu. You can't throw a rock in any direction without it going over at least one shrine or temple. They are everywhere! Next to houses, businesses, rice fields, inside homes and businesses, even taxis and buses! Daily offerings are placed on the shrines usually consisting of rice, flowers, fruit and sometimes money or candy. Incense is also very common. The smell permeates the streets and shops.

There isn't much to do in Kuta other than shop, party and play on the beach. I'm not much of a shopper and I didn't feel like cleaning sand out of my cuts everyday so I decided to leave town and head to the "cultural" town of Ubud. Maybe I'm not up to date on Balinese culture but Ubud is a tourist town. It's nice, there are several art galleries, boutiques, restaurants and who'd have guessed... temples. It's quieter than Kuta and seems to draw a more relaxed, if not older, crowd of tourists.

I stayed a week in Ubud studying the Indonesian language and exploring the area. One day, I rented a motorbike to go visit a temple recommended in my guidebook. Gunung Kawi Tampaksiring is a temple carved out of the sides of a small stream valley. On the way there I passed a valley of terraced rice paddies. It really is a sight to see! After visiting and taking a few pictures I headed north to see what I could see but it started raining! I pulled into a small roadside food stall and tried to wait it out over some mie goreng, noodles with vegetables.
Not long after I finished two other people came in out of the rain. When they drove by I'd hoped they'd stop and that they also spoke English. Success! They stopped and came in to have something to eat and wait out the rain. Olivier is from France and Handa is from Sumatra. They are friends and they are living in Bali now. We had a great time talking about everything from blond jokes to United States politics and whey they heard it was my birthday soon they insisted that they arrange everything and I come to Kuta for the party. Wonderful! They stayed with me in Ubud that night since the rain never stopped and it was getting dark, and left early the next morning.


One of the main sights in Ubud is the Monkey Sanctuary. Being a fan of monkeys I decided to go visit and see the little guys... I no longer like monkeys! I've never seen something so little strike fear into the hearts of more men than I did that day! There are hundreds of monkeys in the forest and many times I found myself surrounded by them. Pretty cool huh? Yeah, until they start fighting and screaming and demanding you give them whatever is in your hands with their fangs showing! I decided to enjoy them from a distance, and watch non-suspecting tourists go through the range of emotions from excitement, nervousness and then fear as the monkeys approached, climbed on them and then started pulling at bags, purses and water bottles. That was a much better way of enjoying the sanctuary!

Under the Sea

It's official! I have now scuba dove! It's fun! It's relaxing! It's challenging! It's interesting! And everything is so new! Like a lot of hobbies SCUBA is very social, in my certification class in Cairns there were about 15 students and on the live aboard boat we total 37, 31 divers and 6 crew. I passed my dive medical exam despite my injuries. The doctor gave me instructions to keep it clean and rinse with freshwater after each dive. Getting into and out of a wetsuit was a bit painful but it was all worth it. Once I was in the water there was no pain at all, even if there was, it would be easy to forget with all the fish and coral to look at.

The course I took is a 5 day Learn to Dive course. The first two days were spent in Cairns learning about the equipment and theory of diving, then for the next three days we went out on the ocean, living on a boat on the Great Barrier Reef! Our instructors warned us the schedule for the next three days would be little more than eating, diving and sleeping. The first day out on the boat my class went on two dives in the morning working on attaining our open water certification. It's difficult to explain the feeling of diving. The compressed air you breath is very dry, it's louder underwater than I expected it to be, a lot louder. I found diving relaxing though, focusing on my breathing, moving slowly and looking out for Nemo and his friends was quite enjoyable.

At the end of the first day while all of the students were watching from the top deck, the already certified divers were preparing for a night dive. It was so spooky! Sharks were circling behind the boat right where the divers were jumping in. As the divers descended, the beams of their flashlights eventually faded out until you could no longer see them. I couldn't wait for when we could go on a night dive the next day.

Day two was an exciting day since it was the day we'd gain our certification and be able to dive unguided. We still had two dives to complete and perform some skills in the water, by noon we were all certified divers! For my first fun dive I chose to go with my dive buddy whom I knew didn't use much air. I wanted to spend as much time underwater as possible and I'd gained the reputation in class as the one who uses the least amount of air. Our dives up to this point had been between thirty and forty minutes long. On our first fun dive, my buddy and I stayed under for fifty three minutes! It was a blast, even though we kind of got lost and didn't know where we were going most of the time. I noticed that without a guide, I didn't see as much because I was always concerned about where to go next or where my buddy was instead of just following the leader. Over the next few dives I worked out how to navigate better underwater and it made it much more enjoyable when I knew where I was.

Night dive! Just like the last one, sharks were circling the back of the boat as we jumped in. We descended to the bottom and made a loop through the coral and back to the boat. The reef is interesting at night, I'd like to do more night dives. Little shrimps were out on the coral peering up at us with their orange eyes, the soldierfish who are tucked away in holes and under shelves during the day, are swimming about at night. We came across a painted crayfish too which is like a lobster. It's antennae were huge! At one point I was following Oscar, our guide, through this hallway of reef. He shined his flashlight under a big shelf and there was the biggest green sea turtle I've ever seen! It was bigger than the leatherbacks I'd seen in Costa Rica! He was sleeping and had to be over 7 feet long. His tail was as big around as my arm! I couldn't believe it.

We didn't see much else as we made our way back t the boat. We held on to a bar that had been suspended about 5 meters below the boat. Oscar pulled out a plastic pop bottle and began rolling it between his hands and crinkling it, twisting it and bending it. It made a very loud sound underwater, it was a deep, loud rumbling sound... and it was attracting sharks! We couldn't see the bottom and our visibility was limited to the faint glow of the boat's floodlights from above, coupled with our flashlights. Oscar pointed to the edge of our visible limit and I could just make out the green eye shine of the shark. Then it disappeared! Pretty soon it came back again and left again .It was getting closer and closer, staying longer and longer. It was a grey reef shark about two meters long. I was focusing on it with my flashlight when two others came up underneath us! Whoa! It was so fun! As we ascended to the boat ladder the bigger one came closer. I was following it with my light when it turned and came towards me! Ahh! It wasn't enough to get me swimming towards the steps but it definitely got the adrenaline going. That was a really fun dive!

The first dive the next morning, my seventh, took the cake. I had a new dive buddy for this dive, Adam, also from America. Where do I begin? It was very early and we were in the water just as the sun was rising so all the night-time stuff was still out and the day-time fish and turtles were coming out too. We saw the usual things, Christmas tree worms, some really good clown fish in anemones and then a shark! A black-tipped reef shark just swam past and Adam didn't see it! I was trying to get his attention but I didn't want to miss the shark so I kept my eye on it while swimming backwards to grab Adam. He missed it in the end which I thought was a bummer, we probably wouldn't see another one right? We went around a corner and I took a course about 3 feet above Adam and there was a turtle eating! We could have gone right past it. After Adam snapped a couple pictures of the turtle we went around a mound of coral and there was a white-tipped reef shark sleeping on the sand! Wow! We watched it and tried to get closer and closer until finally it woke up and slowly swam away. A little further away were some other divers coming our way, something wasn't right though, one diver looked funny. As it got closer I realized it wasn't a diver at all, but a turtle swimming gracefully towards us! I thought, "This couldn't get any better!." I was wrong again. Only a few seconds later as Adam was taking pictures of some blue staghorn coral I just happened to peer between two towers of reef and I could just make out the outline of a sleeping shark about ten meters away! We swam over to it and watched it for awhile. It was bigger than all the others at about 7 feet long. Sharks look pretty peaceful when they're sleeping. Their gills move a little bit and they open and close their mouths slightly but generally they just lay on the bottom. By this time it was time to go back to the boat and eat breakfast. Nobody could believe everything that we saw in that single dive!

All in all, I went on nine dives, ate some great food and met some interesting people. I'm not ready to sell the farm and make my living from diving, but I am looking forward to diving some more. I would especially like to go with some friends of mine, and maybe, just maybe my parents will dust off their certification cards they got way back in the day and we can be dive buddies someday.

Crash and Burn

After saying all my "goodbyes" and packing all my things I rode north to Townsville with Jodi's parents. They are living with their daughter and son-in-law, Michelle and Matt while their house is being built. They have a great stretch of land outside of the city and are surrounded mostly by scrub. The advantages could be missed by most people but I understood them fully. My thoughts were confirmed when Matt called me to help remove a carpet python from the garage one afternoon. If snakes aren't your thing, every morning several white cockatoos land in the yard to eat the chicken's food.

I had been looking forward to visiting the local aquarium and Billabong Sanctuary in town. Jodi's husband, Grabs, my co-worker and mentor and the crocodile farm, called his friend at the sanctuary ahead of time to let them know I was coming. I walked around the zoo in the afternoon waiting for the crocodile shows to start. When they finally did, I was the only person left at the zoo so I got my very own personal croc show. They do a great job of demonstrating the athleticism of these otherwise seemingly lazy reptiles. The big males leap nearly 8 feet out of the water to grab the food presented from a stick!

My favorite part of the day though was the behind the scenes tour. In the prep room there are walls of snake cages filled with native species. Blackheaded pythons, womas, water pythons, carpet pythons and the venomous snakes, taipans, browns and tiger snakes. My dream came true when they said I could get any snake out that I wanted. It would have been easier to ask which snake I didn't want to get out! I proceeded to get pictures with snakes I'd only seen in the pages of Reptile magazines and zoos back home. It was a very fun afternoon.

Earlier that morning I went to the Reef HQ aquarium to get a preview of what I might see the following week SCUBA diving. There is a large, underwater tunnel you can walk through and see different sharks and a sea turtle. I really wanted to see the sea snakes but what I was most surprised about were the flashlight fish. I didn't know what flashlight fish were but I stood there mesmerized in an area of the aquarium where the nocturnal species exhibits are, watching these green lights swimming in the water. It was unreal!

That afternoon Matt and I went for a motorcycle ride at the track behind his house. I knew I was out of my league on the 450cc Yamaha but after a few laps on the track I began to get a little braver and go a little faster. I liked coming out of the corners fast, it was fun. Matt was sitting on the quad watching me as I drove by with a grin on my face that seemed to grow bigger and bigger with every lap. Then I bit the dust. I planted my foot improperly on a corner and accelerated at the wrong time, sending the bike one way and me the other. It's precisely at this point during an accident, the point when you realize "This is going to be bad," that I was flying through the air telling myself to roll when I hit the ground. I didn't listen.

Not wanting to worry my host, I quickly jumped up and picked the bike up as Matt came over to access the damage. We laughed about it awhile, as blood dripped off my fingertips that were held behind my back. Once I assured him that I was okay-but that the day was over-I showed him my wounds, some of which I hadn't even discovered yet. I had slid along the right side of my body so I did a number on my hand, forearm, elbow, tricep, ribs, hip and knee. We went back to the house and I laid in the bathtub for a few hours slowly cleaning the gravel out of the cuts. We were all concerned about whether I'd be able to still dive or not in Cairns.

After everything was clean, and I'd had as many painkillers as Michelle would give me, Margaret came over to patch me up. Margaret and her husband are former missionaries to Papua New Guinea and now she works as a nurse just up the road. She was nice enough to come over and bandage me up and invite me to the fellowship dinner they were having that night at church. Now, I've been known to do a lot of things for a free meal but I've never wrecked a motorcycle for one. Although the dinner was really good and I was glad I went, I think there are many less painful options out there!

The following day I got an early bus to Cairns, my final stop in Australia. I was nervous about whether I'd be able to dive, about going to Indonesia injured and about leaving Australia when I'd had so much fun here. It's only a few hours from Townsville to Cairns, but it sure felt like a long time.