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Archive for March, 2007

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Bali I

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Jan 26-28

After spending the last five months in fairly Westernized countries, we felt like we’d been on an extended summer vacation and were anxious to challenge our travel skills in a new culture. We were excited to be heading to Southeast Asia and had been told that Bali would be a great introduction to the culture and we weren’t disappointed. Since the terrorist bombings against tourists in 2002 and 2005, the tourist industry in Bali has been devastated and has yet to recover and we were amazed at the quality for money that we got when we were there. At first, however, things didn’t seem to go so well. Our first experience with corrupt officials occurred when the immigration officer in Bali asked Claude for a tip while he had his stamp poised over Claude’s passport. Cool as a cucumber, Claude replied, “I’m sorry, we don’t do that where I come from.” I guess the guy was just fishing, because he just shrugged and stamped his passport anyway. Since our flight from Darwin arrived around midnight, our first view of Kuta, the tourist capital of Bali, was the taxi ride to our hotel, the Balisani Padma (booked online). The streets of Kuta were clogged with motorcycles and partygoers and we were soon hopelessly disoriented in a maze of narrow streets and alleys. Finally, our taxi came to a halt in the middle of a narrow alley and could go no further, thanks to a huge pile of dirt that was blocking the way (street repair). The taxi driver leaned back and said, “Your hotel is about 100 metres that way and around the corner – you can’t miss it.” I looked at my sleeping kids and the thought of humping them and our backpacks around this dark, strange city at midnight did not appeal to me. “No way!” I insisted, “There’s got to be another way to the hotel – find it!” Our driver gave me dirty look and rolled his eyes before reversing out of the alley. We spent another ten minutes winding our way through one way streets before he finally deposited us on the doorstep of the Balisani Padma. [read on]

Farewell to the Land of Oz

Friday, March 30th, 2007

Jan 19-25

We arrived in Darwin and checked into our hostel, Frogshollow Backpackers, at 4:30 on Friday afternoon and Claude went straight to a used car dealer to get a quote for our car. The guy gave him a lowball offer of $1500 (yikes!) but was then nice enough to tell Claude that he’d probably have better luck selling it privately by putting an ad in the Saturday paper (the office closed at 5PM). So he raced to the newspaper office and got his ad in at 4:55PM; the clerk was not impressed that she had to type it in manually since he’d missed the deadline. Our phone started ringing at 7AM the next morning and by noon we had gotten about 15 calls and had two buyers bidding against each other. In the end, we were able to sell the car to a nice Filipino couple for $3100 and only lost $1000. This meant that our car only cost us $15/day while we were in Australia – not too shabby! [read on]

Alice Springs to Darwin

Monday, March 12th, 2007
Jan 15-19 Once again, no pictures, just visit our web album. My only regret as we left Uluru was that the weather had been cloudy and rainy while we were there and, while that made for slightly more tolerable temperatures, we weren’t ... [Continue reading this entry]

Outback Adventures II

Monday, March 12th, 2007
Jan 13-15 In the interests of time (I've got a lot of catching up to do) I'm not posting any photos in this blog and you can view all of our Outback photos at our web album:
[Continue reading this entry]

Adventures in the Outback

Monday, March 12th, 2007
Jan 8-12 After leaving Adelaide, our first stop was Rawnsley Park Station, a working sheep farm that was one of the original settlements in the Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide. Over the years, the Station had attracted ... [Continue reading this entry]