Sorry for the Group Email

After a few weeks of surf and relaxation in Kuta, we ran into Vicky and Thorsten. We met the German couple in Koh Lipe, just before we took the ferry to Malaysia, and it was with them and Tim that we toured Langkawi. Vicky and Thorsten had one week of their trip left before they went back to Germany for university and full-time work, and they wanted to explore Bali.

Kuta, Bali’s top tourist spot, is perfect for a few weeks, but after a while the side of us that evidently prefers discomfort and unpredictability began to complain. So we said yes, and hired a car.

The result was a Daihatsu that was a decade and a half old if it was a day. Its tyres were worn and the first half-turn of its steering wheel in either direction produced no discernible difference whatsoever in the angle of the front wheels. When fully loaded and faced with a steep hill, it required two passengers to walk, and even on a full tank the petrol gauge never registered more than three-quarters of a tank. But it was, as they say, “cheap cheap”.

But it was ours, and we spent three days and two nights touring Bali, during which time Thorsten became wholly adept at leaning on the horn and passing scooters with inches to spare, although I shudder to think that he took his newly acquired (and rather impressive) skills back to Germany. We rode jetskis (which is terrifying and an insurance minefield, but which I wholeheartedly recommend), and visited Ulu Watu, a set of terrifyingly-huge, professional-only waves and even scarier, territorial Balinese photographers.

From there we haphazardly navigated our way north to the central Bali town of Ubud. The journey took twice as long as it needed to thanks to our map, which was a tourist map of the kind stuck lovingly in scrapbooks 18 months after the visited, but not something that was ever seriously intended for actual navigation. It displayed about 40 per cent of the roads actually present on Bali; those it did show often omitted major changes of direction. Petrol stations were marked on, but major navigational features such as, say, rivers, were omitted entirely. It was tough going, and in the end we resorted to using a compass to make sure we were heading in roughly the right direction and simply following the roads that seemed most headed in our direction.

We stopped in Ubud, which marks more or less the central point of Bali. Unlike the coast, Ubud is nestled comfortably in the Balinese hills. Mist rolled in in the late afternoon, and for the first time in months we needed neither a fan nor air conditioning at night.

The next day we headed to Lovina beach, via a rather bewildering selection of wrong-turns, missed junctions and extensive detours. By the time we came down from Bali’s hills it was dark. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to navigate by the illumination of a Maglite, a dodgy tourist map and a compass, but it isn’t easy.

Still, we got there.

Dave recommends GPS more than ever. Or at least Ordinance Survey. This week, I’ve been mostly indebted to the fine chaps at PC Pro, who thought the trials and tribulations of my beloved camera were worth covering. And there are more photos, as ever, in the Flickr set.