Tip for all Travellers: never arrive in a third-world country without a visa, no knowledge of the currency or the exchange rate, no accommodation booked and on top of that no idea where the main backpacker area of the city is, no idea of the local time, and far too many bags to carry comfortably.
To say the least, getting from the airport in Denpasar to our hostel in Kuta Beach was quite possibly one of the biggest headaches of the entire trip.
After a long and tiring night of flights, Ali and I arrived exhausted at the airport in Denpasar, Bali. It was early afternoon and we were happy to finally be off the plane and at our destination. After grabbing our luggage, we headed to the visa area of the airport in hopes of getting a visa upon entry. Of course, we had no local money. So, I left Ali with the bags and headed to an ATM. I had no idea what type of currency they used in Bali or the exchange rate. The numbers on the machine were super confusing and the exchange rate a fellow traveller told me made absolutely no sense when I looked at the numbers on the ATM. It took me quite a while to realize that 1000rp on the bank machine actually meant 1 000 000rp. Quite confusing. After I realized that I took out 2 000 000rp (8900 Indonesian Rupiah = $1 CAD) and bought us a couple visas.
After that was over, we headed out of the airport to try to figure out how to get to Kuta Beach. I ended up getting a cab and the driver was quite a horrible person. He laughed in our face several times and was quite rude. He left us with a very terrible first impression of Indonesia. He also tried the typical moves of dropping us off at sketchy, dirty hotels to try to get us to stay there. He got mad when we told him we wanted to go elsewhere. Eventually we got to where we wanted to go – the main backpacker street in Kuta Beach – Poppies I. We spent the next hour walking around in search of a place to stay. Most places were very terrible for the price, but we eventually found an okay place, not great.
NOTE: finding accommodations in Southeast Asia is not like finding accommodation in Canada, or Australia or some other modern country. You cannot book things online, you cannot call in advance, you cannot go to hostelworld.com and book a hostel like you can in Australia. Instead, you need to just show up and hope that someone will approach you or hope that you will somehow magically stumble upon a clean cheap place. It is quite possibly the most annoying thing.
After checking in and getting settled in, we decided to explore Kuta a bit and find some food to eat. We headed down to Poppies I – a small lane in Kuta that has cheap shops and restaurants. We found a cheap place to eat (we paid about 20, 000rp or $2.50CAD) for a meal, then explored the city a bit and used the internet.
The next two days we stayed in Kuta Beach. We discovered we really did not like Kuta that much. It is a very touristy, kind of trashy area. The tourists there are not very nice and often come for a week’s vacation from Australia. We spent our days doing laundry, eating, hanging out in Starbucks, and surfing.
We rented surfboards for one of the days. It only cost 40, 000rp each to rent for an entire day (approx. $5 CAD). The beach in Kuta is famous around the world for its surfing. Thus, a lot of good surfers were there and the water was crowded. The surfing was very intimidating and it was hard to stand up without 10 people around you trying to do the same thing. We spent about 4 hours surfing, got TERRIBLE sunburns on our backs and legs, and were unable to sit down for days.
After a couple days in Kuta we really wanted to leave. Thus, we booked a mini-bus to Ubud and spent the main part of our time in Bali there.
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