The surf side of Bali

    We flew from Yogyakarta to Denpasar with Garuda Air and took a taxi to the Hotel Amaris in Legian. This area is the surf center of Bali and very popular with Australians. The beaches all seem to run into each other from Kuta to Legian to Seminyak and you can stroll for miles if you’re so inclined. This would usually be right up our alley but Doreen has developed a real concern about sun exposure so our usual beach walks have been curtailed significantly.    Besides which, though the waves may be very enticing to surfers (and obviously so from the number of boards in the water and around town), the beach itself is not all that appealing. It’s definitely not the North Shore of Oahu. It looks great from a distance but, up close and underfoot, it is a light, sooty color and you come off the beach with very dirty feet. The sand is also strangely resistant to being brushed off. At low tide, the beach is very wide and you have to walk a long ways to get into waist-deep water. It reminds me somewhat of the beaches in northern Queensland or Daytona Beach in Florida.
    We went some time strolling the shops along the main road as Doreen looked unsuccessfully for batik material that she could buy for her quilting. The only batiks available were as sarongs. She did, however, find a couple of beachwear-type dresses so all was not lost. We also picked up a cell phone in Seminyak for use in Indonesia. It’s an unlocked phone so we should be able to buy a SIM card for Singapore if we need one.
    We did have some good meals particularly a lunch at Sang Ria and a dinner at Warung Patrick. Our last night we ate at Mozarella’s-by-the-Sea. Great food, great setting. Not the greatest sunset. The place is so underlit that, when the sun goes down, they bring flashlights with the menus so you can see the choices. Breakfasts were included with our hotel package so we ate there. The eating area was lined up along the pool so the ambience was a little unusual. Only one morning was anyone swimming laps.
    The food was pretty good once we got used to the routine. The first morning we took the omelet pieces that were displayed. Bad choice - cold and all stuffed with so many vegetables (including onions) you could hardly taste the eggs. We learned to wait a few minutes until an employee showed up who would cook your eggs fresh. Much better. Lots of fresh fruit and juice.
    The hotel itself was just a step up from a hostel (though a rather big step). Clean, modern look with an excellent staff. A fairly nice room but small with two twin beds and one chair. We had problems with the wall safe and when the desk sent somebody to fix the problem he blithely said the instructions printed on the safe were wrong and showed us the correct procedure for re-setting the password. I don’t understand why they don’t change the instructions. How often do they face this problem? Or are we the only paranoid travelers who use these room safes?

The best and worst of Java

    Sitting in the hotel room in Yogyakarta waiting until it’s time to check out and go to the airport to wait for our flight to Bali. The past two days have been interesting, frustrating and fascinating. We took some time on Thursday to wander around the Malioboro area of the city. This busy street is lined with little shops seemingly all selling the same merchandise and catering to tourists. Incidentally, most of the tourists are other Indonesians. With a population in excess of 230 million, there are a lot of Indonesians on the move. The airports and planes are crowded and the streets are teeming with humanity.
    The sidewalks are crowded with goods, vendors, shoppers/browsers and touts. The streets are crowded with cars, scooters, tik-tiks of every description and buses. Everything is in constant movement. Strolling is a chore and crossing the street is an adventure. Traffic amazes me. For all the crowding and lack of lane discipline, we’ve seen no accidents and no examples of road rage. The city may be grimy but there’s certainly a vibrancy in the streets.
    Yesterday we toured two of the major religious shrines in the area - Borobudur and Prambanan. Borobudur is huge. It starts out as a square with sides measuring 112m and goes up and in. There are four square galleries to start, then three circular ones and the final stupa. The carvings are impressive. It predates Angkor but its bas-reliefs are very similar. We had fun checking out the Buddhas which had been part of an ‘Amazing Race’ challenge. Incidentally, there were originally 504 Buddha statues on the site but some are missing and some are headless.
    We went early (picked up at our hotel at 5 am) but traffic was already a problem at that hour. When we left the site, crowds were still building. As with many tourist sites you exit through the gift shop. In the case of Borobudur, the ‘gift shop’ is a seemingly endless maze of tacky stalls. There didn’t seem to be an alternative exit which would let you by-pass this eyesore. We then stopped briefly at Candi Pawon, a small temple with interesting grounds.
    After a brief stop at a silversmith shop so the driver could see a ‘friend’, we made our way to Prambanan. It is the finest and largest Hindu sanctuary ever built in Indonesia. The style of this complex was more similar to Angkor. There are a series of temples in a vast courtyard. The three large temples in the centre are dedicated to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. By this time, crowds have multiplied and Doreen is having problems with her foot so she decided to imitate Buddha and find a tree to sit under.
    One of the interesting encounters we’ve had the past few days has been participating in a school project. Yesterday, on the street in Yogyakarta and today, at Prambanan, we were approached by groups of students who had been assigned the task of interviewing a foreigner. I wonder how they recognized us as foreigners? The group leader, in each case, had a list of questions (not exactly the same) and recorded our answers. Then they asked to pose for pictures. There were five other people in our tour group and, when we checked later, all had been approached multiple times. The students made a good impression. I hope we did the same.
    The drive back to Yogyakarta was just as bad as the drive from Borobudur to Prambanan. Traffic is horrendous, especially at stop lights. It’s not unusual at a red light to have five cars and eight to ten motorbikes jostling for space and all waiting for the green light to head for the available three lanes of highway. Then, there’s a period of give and take as traffic sorts itself out until the next red light. Of course, some bikes don’t bother waiting for the light to change. Several times our driver used the left turn lane to edge up so that he could make a right turn when the light changed.
    Most of the intersections have timers as well so that traffic knows how long before the lights change. The longest red light we had was 90 seconds and the shortest green light was 16 seconds. I’m not sure the timers have a calming effect on traffic. I’m sure they wouldn’t in Toronto. I can just picture the red light runners looking at the clock counting down and stepping on the gas rather than the brake.

Who designs these hotel rooms anyway?

    We’re here in Yogyakarta at the All Seasons Hotel. It’s a lovely, fairly new building with an excellent staff. The place looks great. Our room is nice and large with bright colors and wood trim (an IKEA look to it). The entry area and bathroom have eight-foot ceilings but the main room has a ten-foot ceiling so it has a feeling of real spaciousness. The bathroom has a great shower and the first square toilet I’ve seen. That goes well with the rectangular washbasin.
    But then you start to unpack and you realize there’s very little space to store things. There are a couple of shelves in the entry area for storing bags and shoes and there’s a shelf beneath the TV that functions as an office center. But that’s about it. There’s six feet of dead space above the bag shelf behind the door but it’s just blank wall. Potential storage. Wasted space.
    There’s a six foot area above the shoe rack where they’ve placed a hanging bar. That would give you plenty of space to hang things if only it were available. The problem is that they’ve run some plumbing pipes or electrical wiring or something and the resulting projection takes up most of the space. The hangers provided by the hotel can’t fit the space so you’re left with about a half-foot of usable space on each end. I guess you could try hanging clothes on a 45 degree angle. Or, five feet of ties or belts.
    There are only four electrical outlets in the room (all singles) and they all have assigned duties–lamp, clock, fridge, kettle. If you want to charge your computer, phone or camera battery, you have to start unplugging things. The only plug that isn’t in constant use is the one for the kettle but it is also the most inaccessible one.
    I mentioned at the beginning how bright our room was. That feeling lasted until night fell and we had to turn on some lights. The light level is good enough for watching TV but not nearly bright enough for any serious work. We haven’t been watching much TV. Again, fancy, decorative lighting touches but not practical lighting. It doesn’t help that burned-out bulbs haven’t been replaced.
    We’ve been seeing similar deficiencies in other hotels we’ve been using. The Dorsett Regency in Hong Kong was a lovely hotel but the room was small and had little space for luggage. The shower door did not do a good job of keeping water inside the shower area. The Grand Swiss Bel-hotel in Medan was another up-scale hotel with a large room. It had a fancy bathroom with a problem shower. It also was looking a bit shabby.
    Rasa Seni was nice looking but it has serious maintenance problems. The room was not clean, the mini fridge wasn’t working properly and there was little or no effort to control the bug  population. The Nagoya Inn gave us a nice, big room with a separate foyer/dining area. It had a fancy, marble-like bathroom with the shower centered in a large bathtub. But then they tried to enclose the shower with a chintzy, short curtain on a curved metal rod (think hospital room). It was impossible to contain the water which flooded the bathroom floor.
    The place we stayed in Ibioh Beach was, according to the owner, only a month old (I have my doubts). Arpen is a small businessman who’s just branching out into rental property. He’s built this two-unit bungalow and has plans to expand. His lack of experience in the tourist industry was quite evident. The unit looks good from the outside and has a nice balcony. It’s a nice, bright room with a large bed.
    However, half of his storage unit is already broken and he showed no sign of intending to fix it. There were no sheets/blankets on the bed - I guess it’s so warm he doesn’t think they’re needed. There was only one towel in the room and, although he kept promising to bring another, he never followed through. Doreen eventually went next door to the second unit (unoccupied) and took that towel. He provides a large water container which is good because the water from his well did not look drinkable. We also noted the absence of a mini fridge.
    The bathroom had a nice tile floor but a very small sink and no shelving. When you tried to turn the water on/off, the entire tap assembly moved so you needed to use both hands. The shower was not a separate area and wa ter from the shower (cold shower only) sprayed everywhere. That’s probably why there was no toilet paper in the bathroom (though that might also be a result of cultural differences since many Asians think our use of toilet paper a disgusting habit).
    How hard can it be to design a functioning, useful hotel room that people could use without complaints? And how difficult is it for hotels to implement adequate maintenance procedures?

How to waste a week

    Pulah Weh was almost a total waste of time, effort and money. We left our Hong Kong hotel on Friday morning. The rest of the day we spent sitting around airports or sitting on planes. We arrived in Medan late that night. We did have an interesting conversation in the Kuala Lumpur airport with Evelyn and Tony Soo, who live in Kuala Lumpur and were going to Singapore for a wedding. We exchanged Facebook and e-mail information before their flight boarded.
    Saturday was more time in an airport, on a plane, in a taxi, on a ferry, in a taxi until we arrived at Rasa Seni. Sunday we spent twiddling our thumbs at Rasa Seni, transiting between there and Nagoya Inn and twiddling our thumbs at Nagoya. Face Time with Travis and family was a welcome break. What strides communications technology has taken in the past few years!
    Monday we twiddled our thumbs at Nagoya until the taxi arrived at 11 to take us to Ibioh Beach. We had the rest of Monday and all day Tuesday to explore the area (it takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end of the village to the other so we went back and forth several times). We finally got our snorkel gear wet on Monday afternoon and Doreen took some pictures. The entry/exit area was rocky but manageable, the fish life was plentiful but the coral was non-existant. It was a welcome break and we enjoyed our time in the water.
    We decided against an excursion to the other side of a small, off-shore island to an area called the ‘Coral Garden’. Doreen had read on-line that there had been significant coral bleaching in the area (after we had committed ourselves). Given the cost and the fact that we didn’t want to be packing wet gear, we passed. Instead, we sat by the water and contemplated nature and existence (and twiddled our thumbs). The tedium was relieved by watching a couple of local kids at play.
    We also had some great conversations with Joe, an American from Portland, Oregon who has been living and working in Asia since he graduated from the University of Washington. He’s  currently finishing his research for a Master’s in applied linguistics so he had some interesting observations about the culture, language and mores of the southeast Asia area. I think he was as grateful as we were to find somebody with whom to converse in English.
    Wednesday was back to the grind. Taxi at 6:30 am. Ferry at 8 am. Taxi to the airport in Banda Aceh. We did get to stop by one of the monuments to the tsunami which devastated this area - the ferry boat that ended up 4 km inland, an awesome display of the power of nature. Then it was another series of wait, fly, wait, fly, taxi until we finally arrived at the All Seasons Hotel in Yogyakarta at 9 pm. So, six days for an hour in the water with no coral. Oh, well.
    Transiting through the airport in Jakarta, the capital city, was interesting. We had checked in for both flight in Banda Aceh in the morning so we didn’t have to pick up our bags. We also had our gate number and seat assignments. We confirmed with the airport desk upon arrival and went to our designated gate area (A2). There were a lot of people waiting and, since this was the domestic side of the airport, announcements were made only in Indonesian. This caused Doreen some consternation.
    About half an hour before we were due to board, there was an announcement and a large group of people got up and went marching off down the hall. Not our flight. About 20 minutes later, they opened the boarding gate and a very large group of people came marching down the hall and through the gate. Again, not our flight. We found a couple of young Indonesian guys who were booked on our flight so we thought we’d use them as signposts..
    More waiting. Boarding time came and went. Fifteen minutes late, the boarding gate opens and an announcement is made. We watch the young guys and they’re not moving. Down the hall comes another very large group, through the gate and onto the plane. Doreen’s getting a little frantic by now and decides to speak to the counter girl about our flight. She’s told that our flight is now boarding but it’s been changed to gate A7. They just haven’t announced that yet. I pass this information on to the two young guys and we head off down the hallway to find gate A7. I don’t know why they have you wait in one area and board in another but it sure produces some last-minute scurrying.
    The 737 we’re on is configured for 213 people and there are no empty seats. Everybody seems to have at least six pieces of carry-on (so much for the airline’s weight limit). I’m amazed at the ability of the cabin attendants to cram all this stuff into the overhead bins. By the way, it wouldn’t do to travel on this airplane if you were anywhere above average size. I’m barely 5'11" and my knees were jammed up against the seat in front even sitting up straight. Thank God it was only an hour-long flight. 

A failure to communicate

    I grew up in a unilingual part of Canada and learned only English. I studied French in high school and for two years at university but it was an academic exercise. I was an A student at reading, writing and translating but there was no emphasis on speaking the language. My Latin was actually better than my spoken French. Doreen has a similar story. She still feels she passed the requisite university French course only because the prof was also her badminton coach.
    We just never developed an ear for languages and remain envious of those who have. But it’s much too late to teach these old dogs any new tricks or languages. The end result is two world travelers who depend on the language skills of others to help them get by. At times our lack of language will rise up and bite us in the rear. This is one of those times.
    When we’re traveling we try to master a few words/phrases in the language we’ll need, especially thank you and please. There are so many dialects in Indonesia that we’ve never managed that. It was no problem last year in any of our stops especially Bali. This year is a different story.
    The taxi driver who took us from the ferry to the hotel spoke very little English. There are three people at Rasa Seni, two men and a woman who seems to be the cook. We’re not sure if one of the men is the owner/manager but no matter. Between the three of them they probably have about eight English words they understand. Of course, that’s eight more than the number of Indonesian words I understand. Trying to ask questions, get directions or discuss options was an exercise in frustration for all of us.
    After breakfast, we packed our bags. We went to the desk to ask them to call a taxi for us but there was no one around. We tracked down the cook but she spoke no English. She did find  the other worker and we tried to explain that we’d like to get a taxi driver who spoke some English. Our  hope was to use the driver as an interpreter and explain why we were checking out earlier than planned and that we had already paid a deposit that more than covered any expenses we’d incurred. No need for a refund.
    When the taxi finally appeared, the driver spoke less English than the hotel guy. I went off to get the luggage and left Doreen with the three Indonesians. When I got back with the big bags Doreen was on the phone. She passed the phone to me while she went to get her carry-on. What ensued was worthy of an Abbott and Costello sketch.
    When I said, “Hello”, the voice on the phone said, “Hello, this is Verena.” (The lady Doreen had exchanged e-mails with for weeks) To which I replied, “Hello, Verena, this is Frank. I thought you were in Bali. What can I do for you?” The rest of the exchange cycled through a series of “Hello”, “Yes?”, “What can I do for you?” I finally handed the phone back to the driver no more enlightened about what was going on.
    The taxi driver recommended the Nagoya Inn and Doreen reacted favorably to the name so off we went. When we arrived we faced the same problem. The two women at the front desk did not speak English. However a young man showed up and his English was adequate enough to discuss our need for a room with air conditioning. We settled on a superior for 500 000 IDN a night. At least we have somewhere to spend the next three days.
    The room was lovely and large but a bit shopworn. We had just started to unpack when there was a soft knock at the door. The young man profusely apologized but there had been a terrible mistake. This room was available for only one night as there was a group coming in on  Monday. In fact, there would be no other room available either as the large group had booked the entire hotel. At least that’s what I think he said. Bottom line, he would help us find another hotel for Monday and Tuesday. Which he did. And Doreen approved the choice.
    Everybody wants to be paid in cash. Even the hotels don’t take credit cards. So we’re running out of Indonesian money. In the afternoon we went for a walk around the neighborhood and found an ATM that accepted our card. Now we’re 1.5 million richer. We should be able to buy a couple of candy bars with that. At least we didn’t get lost!
    The main knock against this hotel in on-line ratings relates to the presence of a mosque next door and the call to prayers five times a day. We heard several during the day and I was awakened this morning by the first one at 5 am. In our case, I’d add the food or, rather, the lack thereof. Or at least the lack of any choice. The Nagoya Inn seems to be a hotel that caters to Japanese businessmen from Monday to Friday and is empty on weekends.
    We had an omelet for breakfast yesterday before we left Rasa Seni. For lunch, Nagoya provided us egg sandwiches. For dinner, we had an omelet again. For breakfast this morning, we had scrambled eggs. At least at Rasa Seni, we had the opportunity to toast our own bread and select different spreads. Here, our meals have been brought to our room and the tray collected afterwards. I don’t even know if they have a dining room. Maybe having to leave after just one day isn’t a bad thing.

Disaster

    Doreen’s been doing most/all of our trip planning through the Web for the past few years. She spends a lot of her computer time surfing travel web sites and monitoring travel boards (when she’s not playing Free Cell or, lately, Bejewelled). Though she grumbles a lot and mutters to herself, things generally work out and we’ve had some wonderful trips without many glitches. Sometimes we get lucky and good turns into great like our time at Octopus Resort in Fiji which still ranks as one of our best weeks.
    Sometimes things don’t work exactly as planned and the experience is somewhat less than we’d hoped for such as at Kuberka Gita on Ils des Pins in New Caledonia. At rare times it’s an outright disaster like Nananu Island Lodge, also in Fiji, where we bailed after just one night. Now, it looks like we’re into a repeat of that experience.
    The flight into Banda Aceh and the ride to the ferry went well but we had to wait three hours for the fast ferry. We rode inside for the one hour trip to Pulah Weh, listening to the noisy air conditioner. Our first inclination of a problem was the car provided by the hotel for our transit. To call it an old beater would be a compliment. We shared the ride with two other passengers going to their homes. The driver used their fares to get gas so he could make the trip.
    The hotel is well outside the city. Doreen chose Rasa Seni because it has a/c and is close to some good snorkel areas. It’s a lovely spot with a small, palm-fringed black-sand beach and about a dozen cabins. The guy behind the desk gave Doreen a form to fill in but couldn’t explain how it should be completed. Instead, he showed her a form filled in by a previous guest and told her to follow that. We checked in (at least I think we did) and were shown to our room. The two guys who helped spoke very little English so we weren’t sure what was going on. Doreen asked about the lady who’d handled our bookings and was told that she was no longer with the hotel. In fact, she was no longer even on the island, having moved to Bali since our last contact in mid-April.
    As we began to unpack, problems started to surface. One would think that a hotel would have prepped a room for an arriving guest but not here. There was no toilet paper in the bathroom and, when we asked for some, we had a hard time getting the message across. When we went to transfer our clothes from the suitcases we found the shelves needed to be wiped down because they were not clean. The place looked like maintenance had become a distant memory.
    I decided to boil some water and have a cup of tea (coffee for Doreen). I don’t know what they have for electricity but I’ve never seen a kettle take so long to come to a boil. No TV. No Internet connection. No other guests.
    Dinner is served at 7. No menu. No choices. What you get is what you get. The first thing we get is a home-made vegetable soup. It’s quite tasty but who wants hot soup when the temperature is in the mid-80's. There’s also a glass of water on the table and the water glass is almost as hot as the soup bowl. We have difficulty getting across the point that we like to drink cold or, at least, cool water. Finally, the hot water is replaced with a glass of tepid.
    The entree is a barbequed chicken leg with white rice and some veggies. The only utensils are a fork and spoon. It’s difficult to eat a chicken leg without a knife and not get your fingers greasy. Then we notice that there are no serviettes on the table. We have another hassle trying to get across the point that we need something to wipe the grease from our fingers. What we finally end up with is a plate full of what look like opened packages of small tissues. This isn’t going to work if we can’t communicate with the management. They don’t seem to have a clue about how to run a resort and Doreen doesn’t think she has the energy or patience to teach them.
    We’ve decided that we’re leaving in the morning. We’ll take a taxi back into Sabang and check out the tourist bureau for some alternative. When we bailed on Nananu Island we ended up at Raffles Hotel near the Nandi airport and discovered the wonderful snorkeling at Mana Island. Maybe we’ll be just as lucky this time. At any rate, we’ve decided we can’t spend four days here.

We're not in Canada anymore, Toto

    It’s two days and three countries later. We left Hong Kong yesterday morning, took an Air Asia flight to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, sat around the KLIA for eight hours, took another Air Asia flight to Medan in Indonesia and stayed overnight at the Grand Swiss-Belhotel. In the morning, we took a Sriwijaya flight to Banda Aceh, caught the ferry to Pulah Weh and took a taxi to the Rasa Seni Hotel.
    Hong Kong was somewhat disappointing. I’m glad we took the time to see a little of the city but it won’t make my list of places I’d like to re-visit. We have another day here at the end of our trip and we’ll see some more things on the Kowloon side then. Like most Asian cities we’ve visited, Hong Kong is teeming but it doesn’t have the same vibes as Tokyo or Seoul or Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. Maybe it’s because we’re not really interested in  the shopping.
    Hong Kong isn’t as clean as Tokyo and it doesn’t have the swarms of bicycles. It’s as gritty as Seoul but it doesn’t have the swarms of scooters. Generally speaking, Hong Kong streets are clogged with swarms of double-decker trams, double-decker buses, smaller 16-passenger buses and red-and-white taxis. Not so many private cars, though we did see some Rolls Royces, Porsches and even a MacLaren. And people. Lots of people. Almost all Chinese. Go figure.
    We didn’t get to ride the Metro (they don't have nearly the extensive subway system as the other cities) but we did spend a lot of time on public transportation. It’s a great ride for a tourist but it must get old quickly for a resident. With narrow streets clogged with traffic, getting anywhere is a slow process. When we went out to the Happy Valley racetrack on Wednesday night, it took us just over 90 minutes. The other side of depending on public transit is the lack of control. We took the bus out to Stanley on Thursday and it was a great ride. There were some terrific views along the way but no opportunity to stop and take pictures. Of course, the road is so narrow and busy, I doubt you could stop even if you were driving your own car (not that I would even consider driving in these conditions).
    Our flight out of Hong Kong was delayed because Air Asia was concerned about a couple of passengers who had checked in but not boarded. When they couldn’t track down the missing passengers, they had to unload their luggage. Drunk in an airport bar or potential terrorists? Air Asia is a point-to- point budget airline so we had to collect our luggage in Kuala Lumpur and then re-book for our next flight. Air Asia doesn’t open its counters until two hours before flight time so we had to shlep all our bags around the terminal. And we don’t travel lightly.
    The Kuala Lumpur airport hasn’t changed much since we first saw it. It certainly hasn’t gotten any more interesting or any less frenetic. When we finally arrived in Medan late that night, we discovered that the hotel had neglected to send their shuttle. We spent the extra time trying to ignore the taxi touts who couldn’t seem to grasp the concept of ‘waiting for pickup’. At the hotel, we (and our luggage) had to pass through a scanner at the hotel entrance. The next morning, while waiting for our ride to the airport, I noticed security checking the undercarriage of an arriving car with a mirror on a long pole.
    One final note. Many of the consumer goods we take for granted in Canada are also available in Asia. Cell phones, iPads, BlackBerry’s, mp3 players seem to be ubiquitous. Everybody seems to be wired. But there are differences. Case in point - I saw lots of Lays chips in the convenience stores and the most popular flavor seemed to be ‘seaweed’. BTW, many of the convenience stores were familiar brands–Circle K, 7/11, etc.