What do you picture when you think Bali? Palm trees and pristine beaches? Tourists sipping on coconuts and people doing yoga on the beach as the sun sets? Paradise? I didn't even realize it, but it turns out I had this image of paradise in my head as we touched down at the Kuta Airport. A bit too early, perhaps..
In reality, arriving in Bali was overwhelming. As we stepped through the arrival gates, not only did a rush of hot, humid air hit us like a ton of bricks, but so did probably 10 Taxi drivers. "Where you going? Taxi? Tell me where you go! Taxi! You need taxi!" was all I could hear over top of my continuous "no thank you's". One man literally followed us for over 5 minutes and even sat down right beside me as I changed from my shoes to my sandals. I know this happens all the time in any tourist destination but having this contrived vision of arriving to paradise did not ring true in that moment. When we did finally figure out how to get to where we were going (which meant we had to give in to one of the taxi drivers), we basically gave him directions through our gps on our phone as he drove. We finally arrived in Canggu, an hour north of the airport by 10pm and were totally exhausted.
To add to the slight "let down" of our arrival, our hostel was nothing special (despite being in a very wealthy area). We had booked the most inexpensive accomodation in the Canggu area for the next two nights, knowing that we'd be splurging a bit more later in our trip (we often mix up our accomodations so that we can splurge at times and not feel guilty that we're spending so much) which resulted in a non-air conditioned room with no windows equipped with four mattresses on concrete slabs. Surfer's Dorm House was literally just a place to sleep for the budget surfer/backpacker. We shared the room with another French guy who turned out to be a really nice guy, and another guy who we actually never spoke to throughout our stay (he arrived after we were asleep and would still be asleep by the time we headed out for the day). The first night resulted in a rough sleep with some loud snoring going on from the French guy and the other guy's music blaring from his phone at 5am (which we had to turn off because he didn't wake up). Needless to say, though we were in Bali, we had a rough start to our two week holiday.
We accepted the fact that we were sleeping as budget backpackers for the first two nights and ended up having a great time exploring the Canggu area by bicycles and walks along the beach. This place was a surfers paradise and was a beautiful place to explore. We had originally thought we would try out surfing these first couple days but we quickly realized this place was NOT for beginners. Instead, we enjoyed watching the more advanced surfers tackle the massive waves that crashed in front of us. I was in awe, as I even found swimming in the waves pretty scary. We slept better our second night, and in the end, enjoyed our time exploring this surfers paradise for our first two days in Bali.
Next, we headed back down to Kuta, the main tourist hub of Bali to meet our friends Cam and Julie who were flying in to meet us. We planned on spending two nights there with them before we all headed up to Ubud, Bali's more traditional and low key in-land destination. It was really exciting to meet up with friends from home, but by the end of our time there, we all concluded that we would not recommend spending any more time than a single afternoon in this place. Unless you like name brand shopping, tourist invaded beaches, and locals haggling you to buy things off of them every 20 minutes, this place in not the paradise I thought of when I thought Bali. We mainly just spent time chilling on the beach and catching up with our friends during our stay here.
Next up: in land to beautiful Ubud! I've decided to write a new post on Ubud because I still have SO MANY beautiful photos to go through... it will be hard to narrow down which ones I share! Stay tuned because it just gets better from here...
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