After Australia I had decided to stop by Bali for 10-12 days. I arrived in Denspar on 17Jan 2005. Took a taxi from Airport to the Kuta. Checked the hotel recommended by LP as well as taxi driver. Actually the place taxi driver recommended was cheaper and 10 times better than place recommended by LP. It was decent place nothing fancy for $5/night. Weather in Bali was certainly hot and humid. Actually on first and second night I was there it rained a lot, almost like monsson rains in Bombay.

Kuta is certainly full of Aussie and of course the brits either on way to Australia, in search of work or heading back to UK. After my travels in Australia I had gotten used to women wearing half bra and showing the butt crack, but I have never seen so many women with that attire, Kuta was full of them. The bars in Kuta were okay. Visited Paddy's bar which was bombed by the religious idiots, it was nice to see it back in business. Since I was single guy walking around after the usual offer of "Transport" I was offered weed, massage, massage by very young girl by almost every guy on the street.

After spending one day doing nothing I decided to rent a car with a driver to drive around South Side of Kuta and visit some really nice temples, rice fields and "active" volcano around Bali. The driver dropped me off at Ubud, where I stayed at really nice hotel called Hotel Saraswati, it was bit more expensive than my usual $10-15 hotel/hostel. I paid $45/night but it was certainly worth it. The hotel had nice swimming pool, offered very good breakfast, the rooms had good A/C. I certainly had better luck in Bali and three friendly girls from Sweden checked into next room! We went for couple of nice dance shows one telling story of Ramayana (the Balian version), which was fairly close to Indian version. The dance and costumes were very similar to Kathak dance in southern India. We also found a great Jazz cafe in Ubud went there couple of nights, food there was very good and the music surprisingly good. It looks like lot of ex-pat folks come here to play music. Speaking of ex-pats Ubud seems to have huge number of folks that have moved here from Australia and UK. At the Jazz club met a dot-com couple from San Francisco, they sold their home in Mountain View and moved to Ubud. The guy teaches in local school and wife exports small amount of handicraft to US. I certainly loved Ubud and can see why people move here, although it does get really hot during the day. But you can certainly have comfortable life here if you have saved away US$100k...

After six days in Ubud decided to change my flight to Delhi and got about a week in Thailand as I wanted to go diving in Thailand. It was a bit hard to say goodbye to beautiful Swedish friends. I had gotten a bit tired of constant afternoon window shopping. Why do women love

window shopping

so much? These women used to spend about 3 hours shopping and end up buying useless stuff for about US$2-5 after 3 hours of shopping.