Our First Hours in Asia

Kami di sini! We’re here, on the Indonesian island of Bali. After 35 hours in transit from the United States, we finally reached our destination last night: a big, hard bed with very clean white sheets at the small, simple, and unaptly named Familiar Inn in Bali’s sprawling capital, Denpasar.

Our home in Denpasar, a small inn in the owner’s back yard on Nakula Street

We emerged from the airport at about 7 p.m. In the three hours before we were fast asleep, we accomplished some (to us) impressive things:

  • We navigated the swarm of taxi drivers outside the airport and negotiated down the cost of the hour-long ride to Denpasar from $30 to $18. That’s still probably more than we should have paid, but what the heck? A driver deserves a reward for braving Bali’s crazy traffic of honking cars, with only loose attachment to lanes, and zooming motorcycles darting in between. (And we were way too overwhelmed and tired to do any better.) Plus, we had a nice conversation with the driver in his broken English and our feeble Indonesian.
  • We walked along the streets next to our hotel in search of food. We passed through a produce market, just closing up, and a flower market where people were buying blossoms by the bag load (orange marigolds, blue hydrangeas, and other flowers we didn’t recognize) to use in the ceremonial offerings that people put around their homes and shops each morning. No one where we were spoke English, beyond hello, and the names on the food stalls meant nothing to us. So we picked the stall that had the most people waiting, where a man was making crepe-like things and frying them up with various fillings. We picked one that looked interesting, asked ini apa? (what’s that?) and ordered one. We ended up with something that resembled a crispy egg frittata filled with scallions and chicken, with a side of sweet cucumbers, and ate it on the balcony next to our room.
  • We figured out how to use a bathroom where the shower is a cold-water wand in one corner and the toilet comes with a spray nozzle (like the one in a kitchen sink) rather than toilet paper. We asked for paper and were ceremoniously given a brand-new roll so small and thin as to be almost useless, so we resorted to the nozzle instead. The spray is bracing but surprisingly effective.

After that, feeling clean, fed, and intrepid, we fell into a well-earned sleep, and Bali seemed a bit less foreign than it had just a few hours before.

2 comments

Comments are closed.

Bali
Photo Galleries