Tropical Heat Tour: Bali Part 17

At 11:00 am, Elena, Katia and I boarded a shuttle van up to Lovina, a town on the North Coast of Bali. We passed through a seemingly endless amount of small, rustic villages up through the foothills, and got a good view of some lovely rice terraces, not to mention Gunung Batakaru and Danau Bratan. I even spotted the market and hotel where I stayed up there last time. In one village, there was a really old heavyset woman walking topless in the street, holding a fan in front of her face and teasing some schoolkids a couple of hundred feet away. You never know when things will get kind of raw. A while later, I asked the driver to pull over, as I felt cramped up and I really needed to stretch my legs. Finally, after about two and a half hours, we arrived in Lovina and rented rooms at the Bayu Mantra, a really nice hotel with sparkling clean rooms right near the beach.

Since I only slept six hours the night before, I was completely wiped out, so I took a nap for four hours, from 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm. Then I woke up with a headache and, although I was still super tired, took a short walk to look at the black sand beach. It’s actually more like a dark greyish brown and it’s filled with a bunch of flotsam that washed up from the sea, plus loads of garbage. Then some local guy rode me on a motorcycle to a moneychanger in the center of town. After I forced down a bland omelet for dinner, I noticed my room key had slid off the cheap-ass wire keychain and slipped out of my pocket. So, the hotel owner made me pay $5.00 for it, which is more like $15.00 to him. Yep, imagine paying $15.00 to have a copy of a key made in the United States. After that debacle, which was mini-disaster number four, I hit the hay early, because a case of low grade Bali belly (diarrhea) I’ve had for the past couple of days was getting worse.

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Words and photos ©2012 Arcane Candy.