A few things I learned…
- Indonesia is the 4th most populated country in the world.
- Folks in Bali are terrifying drivers, yet somehow polite and far more skilled than American drivers.
- Monkeys are assholes.
- “Bali belly” will mess you up. One of our friends was hospitalized.
- It’s a stunningly beautiful country driven almost entirely by tourism, but sadly is battling things like pollution destroying their ecosystems (we saw lots of trash on the beach in Sanur).
- Smuggling drugs into Bali will result in imprisonment for life or even death by firing squad – that’s not a myth, they can and have killed people for this. 😲
- They have beautiful textiles and very calming music.
- We learned Indonesia overall is struggling to resist religious fundamentalism contaminating their government.
- Almost every local we interacted with in Bali was very kind.
- Their lobsters are a much tougher meat (different species) and their steaks are imported and awful. I probably should have avoided meat, in hindsight. Also, everything has rice in it.
- There are stray dogs everywhere and locals seem to value cats more than dogs judging by the number of cat vs. dog figurines in their shops (no dog figurines anywhere, which seemed odd; we’re dog people so we wanted one). Interestingly, the few stray cats we saw all had their tails docked. We were theorizing the locals did this to off-balance the cats to protect their native bird populations.
- There are wooden dildos in every shop – wooden sex toys are big business in Bali apparently.
- You’ll quickly notice all the tourist shops on the island are apparently supplied by the same manufacturers (government monopoly maybe?), and you have to haggle with shop owners over price – they can and will rip you off. Especially the currency conversion businesses, careful with them.
- We felt safe on the island; yes, they’ll try to scam you often, but we never feared any violence and that type of crime seemed nonexistent over there.
- Everything on the island is extremely cheap by European or American standards.
- When it rains, it rains.
- Being in a plane riding coach for 16 hours is no easy thing. And the time difference is a killer for the first few days.
