Kuta Beach

We bid farewell to our tropical fish friends and left Jemeluk just as a huge tropical storm hit. It was our last full day in Bali, and we would have preferred to spend it swimming with the fishies and lounging on the beach with the large Germans one bungalow down from ours, but we had a super early flight the next day and needed to be close to the airport. Just as well, because when storms hit Bali, they hit hard, and it was good to be in a car. I have never seen rain like that before, streets started to flood and the car's windshield wipers got a work out. We were headed to Kuta Beach, a place that we had wanted to avoid due to it's reputation of foreigner debauchery, but unfortunately it was the closest city to the airport. To reach Kuta we had to take a car from Amed to Padangbai, where we took an incredibly scary motor bike ride through the pouring rain to reach another shuttle to Kuta. Of course as soon as the motor bike ride was over, it stopped raining.

Kuta was an interesting place, I liken it to what I think Cancun would be like, but I've never been there so that is a guess. Full of muscly Australian frat guys, skinny teenage girls in very short skirts and a full range of other undesirable speedo-ed foreign types, all sitting on the beach and/or drinking an excessive amount of alcohol. Very different from our large German friends and the quiet fishing boats of Amed, but it was fun to be there for a day and see what it was like for ourselves. Kuta is famous for surfing, and the waves were pretty great. We spent a long time playing in the waves and swimming in the ocean, which was lovely. The surfers were also really fun to watch, most were quite good. We walked around the town that evening which was excessive in every way possible. Giant shopping malls, giant hotels, giant Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., this was not the Bali that we had been loving for the past weeks. We went to bed at a decent time as we had to get up at 3 in the morning, and of course when we got up we discovered that the town was still alive and everyone was still out at the clubs. We actually got in a traffic jam for about half an hour on our way to the airport. Our taxi driver was also trying to watch a world cup match and would linger in front of bars to try to catch the score, probably causing more traffic problems The clubs looked like a lot of fun, but by 4 in the morning most of the people still up were very partied out and we were glad to leave them behind for our next adventure, Singapore.