touchdown

December 5, 2024

the flight #

After a rather busy pre-trip month in Melbourne, we both made it to Melbourne Airport, bags packed and ready to go. No real hiccups at the airport, thankfully. After having a final goodbye pint of Carlton, we hopped onto the plane and began the 6-hour flight to Bali.

The view of the landscape over South Australia and the Northern Territory was pretty stunning, especially during twilight. What was a little frightening was as it hit nightfall, we saw many clouds in the middle of a lightning storm - seeing lighting from above is not something I had on my bingo card (you can see it in the video below, at around the 21s mark).

the airport #

I Gusti Ngurah Rai Airport was bit of a wakeup call as to where we were - immediately we were being harassed by locals and I had made the mistake of trusting one of the airport guides (who was behind customs, mind you) to take us through security. We ended up giving him an oversized tip for his ‘help’ in carrying our bags about 30 metres. Lesson learnt. After trying to connect to our roaming data, we gave up and took one of drivers at the airport up on his offer to drive us to our hotel. It was 10.30pm and we were tired and just wanted to get to our room. The drive there was fairly effortless, and we checked in with no issues.

the first evening #

After putting our bags down in our hotel, we decided to venture out to grab a few essentials and see the street. This was late Wednesday evening, and most regular shops (or warungs as they’re called in Indonesia) were closed. A few late night bars were open, but we found ourselves being waved down every 3 seconds for either a motorbike ride or a ‘massage’. We walked about 15 minutes to Kuta Beach, and we definitely had mixed feelings about it. On one hand, with so many trees and chairs and boats, it’s a visually very complex beach and the waves were crashing down hard which made for an interesting backdrop. On the other hand, the beach was pretty filthy, and there was various amounts of plastic bottles, cups and other rubbish strewn everywhere. I did expect this of Kuta Beach, but it’s another thing seeing it. After having a cigarette, we decided to route back home via a M Mart (Indonesia’s version of 7/11) to pick up some more water and snacks. All and all, an easy enough start to our trip. Stay tuned.