Saturday, January 17, 2009

Yes, my Balanese surf instructor's name is Steamy


We're in Indonesia!!! Kyle is falling behind on our Siem Reap post so I will just go ahead with BALI!!!

Our big splurge of the trip is a week at a surf camp in Bali. We flew from Siem Reap to Kuala Lumpur and on to Dempasar, Bali. It's so amazingly beautiful here with little shrines/temples of banana leaves and colorful tropical flowers everywhere. Bali is full of really friendly and smiley people all of whom drive like maniacs. The surf camp is called Padang Padang surf camp is a wonderful three building compound with lots of hammocks, a pool, an open air dining area and an 8 month old baby named Zoe who is the worlds happiest, most laid back baby.
There are a pair of Australian boys who like to get silly drunk and go to the cheesy club every night but are nice guys. There is another pair of Americans, both beginner surfers like us, who both work in finance . . . but are pretty nice. The instructors are very surfer-type Indonesian/Balinese guys who like to poke fun at everyone. One of theme is named Steamy, no joke.
For Molly's birthday, we went out of a night of dancing in Kuta, the big tourist town. That's exactly what Kuta turned out to be; a very big, VERY touristy town. It sort of reminds me of Honolulu with lots of overpriced Name Brand tropical clothing stores mixed with a few designer stores and a sprinkling of bad American chain restaurants. We went to some cheesy and perfect for birthday celebrating, club named Bounty (at the suggestion of our Aussie surf-mates) and danced. The club included fish bowl sized terrible tropical drinks and Karaoke with a live band. This sounds sort of awful but it was great because the keyboard guy would just take over singing when the song really started to flop.
So our days are spent "surfing", which involves painful amounts of paddling, sunscreen and zinc fit for whiteys like us, a lot of comical falling, plenty of waiting around for the tide to be right a cruising around the island in a van (at 1 million km/hour) listening to proto-typical surfer music. Our evenings are spent mostly in the pool cooling our sunburns before applying liberal amounts of ointment and aloe and to bed early before starting it all over again in the morning. It's great!!

1 comment:

kate said...

Hi, I know this is a little random but I got your blog address from Lindsey McClorg, one of my mom's best friends from forever, because I'm in Bali too, at the moment, though on my own. I'm up in Ubud for now, but considering going up to the north a little bit before I leave around the end of the month. I'd absolutely love to meet up with you guys - don't know what your schedule is like, etc - but drop me a line on my blog (laparisienne.wordpress.com) or shoot me an email.
Best,
Kate