Detained in Bali for another week

The bureaucratic problem quickly turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. I had been told I had to remain for four days in Bali. Disgruntled but not defeated, I booked a flight out on the forth day, but when I arrived at the office on that day, my hopes of catching my plane were quashed by just three words from a stern faced officer behind a pane of glass. "Two more days". The extra postponement had several effects. It necessitated the cancellation of a flight to Sulawesi at great expense and a rebooking at even greater expense, it forced me to decide where i might stay for an extra two days in Bali, and it augmented my hatred for the staff at the Bali Immigration Office to a nearly murderous level.
The long and short of it is that I spent an extra week in Bali than I had planned.

Ubud, surrounded by jungles and rice paddies and steeped in the odd Balinese style Hindu religion, is the culture capital of Bali. My days up there were characterised by lazy walks around the countryside, visiting temples, and watching traditional Balinese dance. One of the temples i visited was named Goh Gajah, which is built into a natural cave in the rock and is believed to have been scratched from the rock thousands of years ago by a giant spirit. In person, it felt less like a mystical portal to the spirit world than a human scale ants' nest infested with human tourist ants. It was an extremely small space anyway, and after I pushed through the throng of scurrying tourists and ended stooping at the back of the earthy crevice, i couldn't help feeling a little underwhelmed.
Most tourists remain in the main enclosure with the Goa Gajah cage, but the park has some stunning grounds, and covers a huge space of sloping jungled valley with a wide river at it's centre.

It was while I was clambering upstream that i found these less well known ancient caves built into cliffs on the riverside:

They certainly aren't mentioned in the guidebook, which is probably why they're happily void of tourists. As spooky as they look, I couldn't betray my curiosity and soon found myself wading through strong currents of chest deep water to enter them. Inside the water is cold and stagnant, the only sound is the echoing hiss of running water from outside, and beyond the first few metres everything is pitch black. I could only navigate my way through the tunnels by running my hand along the damp walls and low stone ceilings. Several times I felt wind sweep over my torso as a result of what I later learned were sweeping bats. Try as I might to make a mental picture of the caves, I had had too little experience of blindness, and so I made a second journey to the caves with my camera using flash photography to navigate.
It was still difficult to map the caves, since my vision relied on half-second long camera flashes which did more to blind me than to leave an impression in my head. But after a few minutes, my inefficient reconnaissance tactics had revealed to me the rough structure of the tunnels. There were two doors to the cave. The large one was presumably the main entrance, through which a corridor of cold, chest deep water ran for fifteen metres or so into the cliff , ending at a stone bank from which raised steps led to a little platform of rock. There were narrow cutouts in the side of the corridor that led through more chest deep water to the side doors.

Stone platform at the back of the cave

Eventually, shivering as much for fear as from the chilly water, I hurried back out of the caves, scrambled up the bank and began making my way through the jungle to the car park. On my way I met an eldery Balinese lady who told me the caves were used hundreds of years ago as a hermitage for meditation. She said ancient yogis used to spend one month and seven days meditating on the stone platform to cultivate the spiritual energy that is apparently abundant in this area. During their time they were permitted to do nothing but sit, not even eat and drink.
I like to think I'm an openminded person, and I'm sure that some people are capable of feats verging on the supernatural, but I'm sceptical about the chances of survival for anyone who starves himself for a month and seven days in a dark damp cave. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that that's what the side door was for; perhaps one of the yogi's attendants used to sneak in from the side while the spirits weren't looking and offer him a sandwich every now and again.
I spent a few more pleasant and relaxing days in Ubud, including an evening at the local Legong dance show. In this traditional style, the dancers are trained to use their facial expressions and fingers to convey the story of the dance as much as their bodies. It was very entertaining and strikingly different to the style of the inebriated Swedes and Australian tourists that I had been subjected to the week before in Kuta. Perhaps though, you have to be something of a Legong connoisseur to truly interpret the meaning of all the finger movements. The finale of the dance involved the man below, who wore an odd mask of an old man and sat on the step at the back of the stage waggling his fingers at me for about ten minutes while a xylophone was beaten rapidly and out of time. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

It was after my culture rich experience in Ubud that I was given the infuriating "two more days" command and was back on the road deciding what to do with myself. I was still nurturing fond memories of gliding over the waves on my surfboard in Ulu Watu some weeks before. Okay, I'll concede that a more accurate description of my previous antics at Ulu Watu woudl be thrashing about helplessly through viscous breakers, standing briefly on wobbly legs and then almost instantly being torn off the board by torrents of water and hurled into the seabed.
Either way, surfing was extremely entertaining, and I decided to go further south than previously, to Padang Padang. This is a small town with a gorgeous beach, and a worldwide Mecca for the surfing crowd.

I stayed in a block of rooms with four hardcore surfers, and by that I mean people who spent six months of every year in the water. Most of them were Australians, all of them had scars from head to toe from battling with the surf and the coral, and all of them had tattoos.
The most notable example of the body art was on Craig, a wide eyed and lively Australian man with "SURF OR DIE" scrawled across his chest in huge,graffiti style script. Craig was perhaps the most keen of the surfers, who seem to have visited every notable surfing destination on the globe and had stories of bigger and bigger waves from each location. A few years ago, on a Christmas eve in his hometown of Sydney, he decided surfing exclusively in the sea wasn't supplying him with his enough adrenaline, and resolved to climb out the window of the inter-suburb bus and surf through the night on the steel roof.
Predictably, this didn't go very well, and although he loses the story at this point, witnesses claim they saw a body flash past the window and then a bump. Miraculously he was alive, although he lost a lot of skin and crushed his ankle. When you bail in surfing, always remember concrete is less forgiving than water.
But if you were already aware of the stereotypical surfers addiction to adrenaline, perhaps you weren't so knowledgable about their intense loathing for body boarders.
The subject of body boarding endured a lengthy focus of our conversation around the table on evening, each surfers offering a seething remark or story about being cut up in pursuit of the wave of their dreams. As an excuse for this contempt, one surfer offered the following explanation. In the natural world, humans evolved from mammalian ancestors who crawled on their bellies. Even in the lifespan of the modern homo sapien, the juvenile practice of crawling along the floor is discarded when we learn to walk as toddlers. The natural conclusion is that standing on a board, according to sound darwinian logic, is the natural progression from body boarding and surfers are therefore better people.
Craig let the congregation know that he once had to "teach some body boarders a lesson" after they got in the way of him and his surfing buddies in Australia. I pressed for further details but was told to "leave it at that. I taught them a lesson they wouldn't soon forget".
The subject of conversation fluctuated over the night, and it wasn't until the next day while I was reading a book on the beach that I remembered Craig's ominous words. I had seen a troops of body boarders prancing towards the sea with their boards under their arms. They were heading for the area where I knew Craig was surfing.
I toyed with the idea of warning them, but wasn't sure what to say. I'm afraid I simply turned the other way and re-engrossed myself in the novel without a passing thought for the potential bloodbath unfolding on the waves behind me.

East Java and a week in Bali

The train pulled into Jogyakarta station at approximately 4 am. The cramped chair, chattering locals, wailing children and an intrusive horde of cigarette and snack sellers at every stop through the night had kept sleep well at bay. I nearly fell out of the train onto the platform in a confused state of sleep-deprived delirium.
I am well aware that the sensible thing to do at the time would have been to check into a hotel as soon as possible and permit my tired brain a few hours of blissful unconsciousness. In hindsight, it was exactly because my brain was so tired that I decided, with the help of a tourist office on the platform, that it would be a good idea to go on an early morning tour of Jogyakarta's famous temples.
Little more than an hour later, I found myself on an uncrowded minibus with a chemical engineer from Munich and a group of Indonesian tourists from Jakarta. I was able to get forty or so minutes of sleep before we rolled into Borobudur car park.
Borobudur temple is a 8th-century Buddhist monument, and since its creation has retained the title of the largest Buddhist temple in the world. The monument comprises six square platforms topped by three circular platforms, and is decorated with 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues.

Almost as striking as the temple itself was the celebrity me and the chemical engineer were afforded simply because we were white. The overwhelming majority of tourists at the temple were children on school trips from other parts of Indonesia where they had never seen a white person in the flesh before. We were constantly swarmed with awestruck adolescents asking in broken English if they might take a picture with us, since white skin and Caucasian features are fundamentally linked with movie stars and famous musicians.At first the attention was flattering, but it quickly became irritating, and on the way back towards the minibus I began behaving like a flustered Hollywood star pushing through paparazzi to reach the privacy of my trailer.
Immediately after a quick breakfast of fried cloves of garlic, we were on the road and I indulged in another forty minutes of sleep before we reached central Java's second most famous religious monument: Prambanan.

This 9th-century Hindu temple consists of several huge towers surrounding an even huger 47m high tower in the middle. The temples contain statues of the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, while relief panels around their outsides tell the famous story of the Ramayana, and a less famous story of which i've forgotten the name. The latter was rife with Kama Sutra engravings, and the hundreds of oversize sexual organs and impossible positions reminded me of the adolescent graffiti scrawled all over the maths textbooks from School. I wondered if this temple had been left to the Sculpture schools class clowns.
Prambanan, with its tall spires, looked extremely similar to Angkor Wat, Cambodia's famous 12th-century temple. Further inquiry revealed that King Suryavarman II visited Java to study and copied the idea when he returned.
To be honest though, there's no way of knowing for sure whether the temple on view today is similar to the temple that aroused Suryavarman's jealousy some 900 years ago. Central Java is the most seismically active area in Indonesia, and the temple has been brought to rubble and rebuilt several times since then, most recently in 1918 after years of earthquakes and several coats of volcanic ash had all but hidden the temple from view. Dutch colonialists had been carting off sculptures for their gardens and locals had been using the stone rubble for construction materials elsewhere, like grave robbing from an Eastern Pompei.
Whatever the temple used to look like, it was a very impressive sight, although the central tower of Shiva has a very obvious tilt to one side like the leaning tower of Pisa, caused by a recent earthquake in 2006. If one thing can be concluded from a tour of the temple, it's that central Java isn't the right place for architects who dream of longevity.

3am two days later, and I was in the middle of a difficult trek up a mountain in Mt. Bromo national park, which is essentially a single gigantic volcanic crater with several smaller (but still massive) volcanoes inside it. The difficulty of the trek wasn't really a result of the terrain as much as it was a result of the lack of light. Neither I, nor my three Cumbrian trekmates had remembered that there's no light before dawn and had all forgotten a torch. We trudged on, cursing and tripping as we stumbled across invisible potholes or stubbed our toes on invisible rocks, determined to reach the viewing point before sunrise at 4.30.

To our surprise and elation, we made it just in time to watch the sun emerge shyly from behind the high ridges behind us and wash away the thick mist that had filled the giant crater. Standing in the centre of the plain was Mount Bromo, steam pouring out from it's smouldering centre. Mount Semeru looming in the background, and it had recently started erupting again. Every twenty minutes a cloud of ash and steam burst from it's summit. All the active volcanoes could easily have fostered a sense of unease, but it was difficult not to relax with such an awe inspiring view.

On the way back down the hill, we were blessed with the light of the sun and were able to see the paths we had walked. As we suspected, they were covered in holes and debris, and much steeper than they felt while we were blindly walking them. However, our struggle paled into hilarity when we saw the steep farming land built on the slopes of the mountains. Farmers here must have worked out a way to defy gravity, working every day on the punishing mountainside gradients.

Twelve hours, three minibuses and a rumbling ferry later, we arrived in Sanur, a touristy coastal town on the east coast of Bali. I stayed there for four days with the Cumbrian lads I met at Bromo, spending most of that time stretched out languidly on beaches and kayaking through the surf in the warm waters of the east Indian Ocean.

We soon moved to the West coast, even more beautiful and even more packed with Australian tourists, who spent their days surfing on the famous Kuta beach or otherwise drinking Bintang beer on the sand. It is a curious thing that all over Southeast Asia tourist feel compelled to by clothing adorned with huge labels of the beer they drink there, but in Bali this is taken to an extreme. There isn't a group of Australians in Kuta who don't have at least two Bintang garments between them. It isn't rare to see a smiling Aussie sitting on the beach simultaneously wearing Bintang shorts, a Bintang vest and a Bintang hat sipping on a bottle of Bintang from a Bintang beer holder like a mindless living advertisement for the beer company.
It isn't really fair that I make fun of those walking reminders of Bintang's Bali beer monopoly, since I indulged excessively that night in the ubiquitous beer in celebration of Jonny's (middle right) birthday.

It isn't cheap to drink in the clubs and bars of Kuta, hence why we did most of ours beforehand. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) we arrived already drunk into town and found out that the tourists of Bali were only too keen to buy Jonny all the Bintang he could drink in honour of his birthday.
Often, he couldn't drink it and simply passed on the unrequested beverages to the rest of us, who quickly found our uninhibited selves on stage on the second floor of a popular club, breakdancing to Run DMC with some employed dancers. This celebration was brought to an involuntary halt by the bouncer, who watched Jack smack his head on a low iron beam and perceived that I very nearly tumbled into the bar beneath us in a futile attempt to do "the worm". I maintain that I was in control, but my negotiating power was limited in the broad shadow of the 6'5" hulk demanding we leave the stage, so we scuttled away obediently and took our dancing talents elsewhere.
The Next day, the 100m stroll to McDonald's for breakfast (or lunch, more accurately, since it was afternoon) was a challenge for all of us.

Yesterday, we enjoyed a final sunset over Kuta beach before all going our separate ways, one home to Cumbria to quench the growing desire we all share for mother's cooking, real milk and real chocolate, the other two to Thailand to continue their travels, and me to some as of yet undetermined location in Indonesia.
I had met them in the last two week of their two month stay in Indonesia, and they gave me invaluable information and advice about what to do in the vast subcontinent. I attempted to get to Sulawesi, the spidery shape island in the north, but was let down to hear that I would have to remain in Bali for four days for my visa to come through.
Instead, I motorbiked to Ubud, Bali's culture capital, and I intend to cycle around the temples and craft shops here for four days while the irritating bureaucrats in the south tear their way through red tape in my name so that i can stay here a little longer.

Here's a joke in their honour:
What does an immigration officer use for contraception? His personality.