Monsoon Season on North Bali

Um, was I mentioning a while back that it wasn't feeling like the rainy season here? Well, I eat my words. We are in the midst of the monsoon season for sure. Back in Ubud, we would get some seriously heavy (and seriously punctual) rain showers every day about 2:00. They would usually let up by 5:00 or so. Now we are on the north coast of Bali, in a small town (or stretch of even smaller towns) called Lovina. And man has it been raining. Torrential downpours for the better part of the three days we've been here. Rivers running down the streets, waterfalls coming over the roofs, crazy.

So we ended in Ubud on a good and bad note. We had that cooking class on our last full day there, and it was nice because we learned some good stuff, and there were only the two of us in class, so we got lots of special attention. But we were the only two in class, so we had to eat everything we made! Keep in mind we made 5 main dishes! No we didn't eat it all, but we sure ate too much and literally spent the rest of the day not moving any more than necessary. We also at this point had picked up some kind of relatively small bug, so that helped in keeping us close to the room. Nothing too awfully bad, but enough to be uncomfortable. We're still both having lingering effects, but we can see vast improvements in the near future.

So we left the next day, and had a lovely ride from Ubud to the north coast through lush and dramatic mountian scenery. The bus stopped at one of the higer elevation mountain villages, and we were both surprised to actually be cold! We arrived at the bus depot in Lovina only to be greeted with business cards being shoved in our faces before the bus even came to a stop. We were both a bit weary from traveling (and that pesky bug), and both became instantly intolerant of dealing with the touts (as our book calls them). We tried to be as nice as possible, but essentially made a beeline for our planned hotel.

North Bali is known for its black sand beaches and very swimmable waters as the reef is quite far out providing nice calm waters. So we walked out to the beach to get a look, and after beating off the touts, became immensley disappointed. The black sand was nice, and might have made for a nice lounging beach had it not been for the garbage also lining the beach and the brown stream waters (containing who knows what) draining into the swimming area. Needless to say we did not swim, but took a walk along the beach instead, contemplating the seeming hopelessness of the scattered environmental efforts throughout the world. What a battle humans are up against! Not to mention the albatross! (There was an exhibit at the Sydney aquarium about how many sea animals are killed from ingesting plastic from the seas). As we were driving over, we got a good look at one of the "landfills" off the side of the road that was literally spilling into the river. This country was not ready for the influx of plastic that the Western societies introduced.

As you can tell, we hit a bit of a travel wall here,and have spent most of our time just hanging out in our room, watching the rain, playing cards, and reading (and recovering). Really, it's still not a bad life. We've also been trying to plan the rest of our time in Indonesia, and are finding ourselves with extra time that we're not sure how we're going to spend, so we ended up staying here an extra night. We moved today to a place more centrally located and with a pool, so in between storms, we've been able to get a few swims in.

Tomorrow we leave to the very northwestern corner of Bali, where we will stay the night, then the next day catch a ferry over to the island of Java, where we will then hop on a train and head to the base of Mt Bromo, which we will climb (short, easy climb) to get some hopefully stunning, volcanic views.

Hope holiday preparations are going well for everyone!