Here are just a few Bali Tid-bits mostly from a friends blog, www.theslapdash.com , and from an email.  Jaime and Seth are circumnavigating on small catamaran and we met up in Panama and have stayed in touch via email.  So many people have been concerned about the check-in for Indonesia so I wanted to forward this info on to my cruising friends heading that way and to a few other that might be just entertained.  There is also a section about the price of things in Bali, and it sounds good.  FYI he says he has the dollars converted into Canadian dollars (its not their fault they are Canadians) but I just checked the currency conversion and it seems the USD is the same as a Canadian dollar right now, neat.  You can get a lot of good factual information on their passages plus heir website / blog www.theslapdash.com is an awesome read as they are having an amazing experience and are great writers as well!  Hope somebody finds this useful! -Kirk

(AN EMAIL SENT TO KIRK ON March 10 2010)

Bali is relatively easy to check in to. Send an email to Bali Nautical and ask for a CAIT. Tell them which islands you think you might stop in at. Costs the same if you hit one or all. Give them about 4 weeks to process it. Arrive into Benoa Harbour. Walk across the street to customs, immigration, port authority, etc. Takes all day but they are cool. If you get someone who isn’t cool, give them $2 and they will bend over backwards for you. And enjoy. CAIT is good for 3 months I think and can be renewed. Costs about $250 AUD

(ABOUT PRICES IN BALI FROM THESLAPDASH.COM)
Wednesday December 2nd  2009 (sanur, bali)

We’ve had some requests to elaborate on the prices in Bali. Like any destination, you can pretty much spend as much as you like here. Big 5 star hotel chains are available, as are the posh restaurants that people pay big bucks to be seen in and impress friends or clients. Okay, but to compensate for a good meal? We stand behind our idea that the locals know where to eat. It’s like wine. Every time we stray from our usual mid-range favorites to treat ourselves to a nice (ie, expensive) bottle, we’re disappointed. Think about your own city. Is your favorite restaurant the most expensive? Probably not. A high turnover usually means fresh food and maybe even some ‘on it’ service. The accommodations we’ve chosen have always been in the clean, bright and comfortable category. We tend to drink with the backpackers and locals, stay with the career crowd and, unless we’re after something specific, eat in any place with a mob. So here’s a few examples converted to Canadian dollars for your enjoyment:

Accommodation has cost us been between 9 and 15 dollars a night. Our favorite (and the current Slapdash base camp) is the Little Pond Homestay in Sanur. We are paying 9 dollars a night and have a small pool. There’s free wifi, super friendly staff that we know by name now, and only 10 rooms. We have the run of the kitchen, I make my own coffee, and even keep my beer in their fridge now. It’s 1 minute from the beach and has a ton of restaurants and bars all within the surrounding block or two. You could find a room for 5 bucks a night if you wanted to, but we’re happy to pay 4 dollars extra to feel like we’re at home.

Set menu items seem to be popular here for breakfast. Nearly every restaurant has one that includes eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, a fruit platter and fresh juice. They call it an American breakfast and it will cost you between $2.50 and $4.00. Dinner last night consisted of an appetizer (Calamari), a fabulous entrée for each of us, a bottle of water for Jaime and a Bintang for me; the whole thing cost us a whopping $5.00, which included a tip (we’re like Canadian eh?).

Our boat is resting on a mooring, actually 3. One for the bow, and two stern lines each secured to their own separate mooring. Somebody is watching our boat 24/7 and it’s costing us 3 bucks a day. When we leave the boat we will have someone board it every week to check things out, start the engine, and open the hatches to air out the cabin. The bottom will be cleaned once a month as will the decks and hulls. We haven’t negotiated the price for that service yet, but it will be in the neighborhood of 50 dollars a month.

We picked up our laundry last night. It was washed, lovingly pressed, folded, sealed up in plastic and delivered to our hotel room. That cost one dollar fifty.

The Blade sets us back 4 bucks a day, and our car cost 15 when we had one. Again, you could do a little better if you really wanted to, but we’ve got this cool guy named Budah on speed dial that picks them up and drops them off wherever we are. He always gives us his nicest rides, and laughs and says “no stress” when we call him like 5 times to extend our contract. Without being slick or slimy he makes us feel like we are the most important customers that he’s ever had and for that kind of service we are not going to shop around to save a dollar a day.

Jaime has been on a tireless spa crawl. She’s quite a trooper and won’t let anything stop her from exhaustively researching this subject on your behalf. She has had the princess experience. Hair has been cut and died (twice), her nails chopped and polished, and has been rubbed down and scrubbed with coffee, lavender, kelp and god knows what else and still hasn’t managed to break the 100 dollar plateau. A one hour massage is between 4 and 6 dollars, she’s not here right now (at the spa) to ask about prices for all that other stuff but none of it cost more than 10 bucks, or so she tells me.

I’m the Beer department. So far I haven’t found a single bottle less than 50 cents or more than 2 dollars, but I’ll keep looking. Prices for handicrafts and knock off designer everything depend on your negotiating skills. We haven’t really bought any but from what we’ve seen of them so far it leads us to believe that they are even cheaper than Mexico.

I can’t really think of anything else, so there you go. Your mileage may vary.

(ABOUT CHECKING INTO BALI FROM THESLAPDASH.COM)
Sunday November 29th 2009 (sanur, bali)

Fear mongering is one of our least favorite things and the clearance process here in Indonesia has been extensively mongered. Not surprisingly it has turned into yet another classic example of why you should take every opportunity to either slap, run away from, medically treat, publicly discredit, or ignore the people that you encounter that are suffering from F1N1 (Fear Flu). Together we can stop its relentless spread.

We started hearing hints, rumors and allegations about Indonesia’s allegedly horrible clearance process all the way back in Fiji. Easily more than a dozen different people on boats have tried to warn us off this place because of the corruption and scandal here. The words “Bali” or “Indonesia” were like triggers that fired off a 12 gauge discourse of uncorroborated second, third, and fourth hand stories. They’re like urban legends. You start hearing the same stories over again only with different boat names and always a friend of a friend or something like that.

If a person we like shows F1N1 symptoms then our tactic has been to smile, nod, change the subject and privately forgive them on the basis of assuming that they have our best interests at heart. If a person we really like and would actually enjoy seeing in the [insert name of country-being-bashed by cruisers here] starts showing signs, we administer 400 cc’s of reason, if that fails we tease them, if that fails then sadly they must be put down. In the majority of cases we don’t like the person(s) because let’s face it, fear mongers usually just love to hear themselves speak, have a personal axe to grind, or are just plain boring. This actually makes it easier for us because then we just employ a passive ignore routine followed by an active avoid routine. It’s a good strategy because we really don’t care to see these people again and if their unsubstantiated belief that they will be robbed, beaten, pirated, tricked, eaten or swindled keeps them away from the countries that we plan to visit then who are we to change their minds?

Back to the point. If we hadn’t heard all of this crap about Indonesia I wouldn’t be writing anything right now about the clearance process for the simple reason that it was totally uninteresting. It was no more (or less) difficult than any other hot country we’ve been to. Yes, I spent a half a day suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration while running around trying to find five different government and government associated offices. Yes, I developed carpal tunnel syndrome from filling out a hundred and ninety six thousand copies of crew lists, declarations, and other irritating papers. Yes, I was redirected back to an office that I had just left to get a different stamp or jump through some other maddening hoop at least once. Yes, it cost us some money. An ordinary fifty bucks for 2 visas and 150 bucks for our cruising permit. Well within the range or normal clearance fees. (Are we paying attention AQIS?)

If you are capable of sailing a boat to Indonesia then you are capable of clearing in without being dismembered or hoodwinked. If you want to you can even hire somebody here to do the whole thing for you while you gulp down dollar beers somewhere; an inexpensive strategy (depending on how much you can drink) that I would highly recommend. We would have done exactly that, but I wanted to personally experience the full scope of this ‘nightmare’ so that I would be in the position to publicly relate at least one persons first hand experience with the Indonesian clearance process and hopefully dispel some of the stupid rumors that are running rampant out there.

<<If you read this off of their website you can see the pics as well >>

Ever kicked a hornets nest? Witnessed the resulting blind kill-or-be-killed frenzy, a chaotic frothing blood lust, manic high speed pursuits, dire and sometimes mortal consequences? That’s kind of what driving is like in Bali.

Once we were all cleared in and had Slapdash tucked away in her new little home we couldn’t get away fast enough. We emptied the fridge, shut off the propane and hit the road. Our means of transportation came delivered to the marina in the form of a 12 dollar a day brand new little mini van thing (suburban men that have surrendered their balls and succumbed to the pull of domestic necessity might drive one and try to convince their friends that it’s an SUV). The thing had all the bells and whistles like air conditioning, power this and power that but was curiously equipped with, a tape deck? This caused more distress than the left handed clutch and gear stick (our Beemer in NZ was an automatic) and we were about to participate in traffic conditions that made us wish we were in an armored personal carrier. If I gave less attention to the fact that we were stuck with a tape deck and more attention to which hand I was shifting with, then the answer to the question that Jaime and I were fervently discussing as we rolled towards our first Balinese intersection (topic of fervent discussion: “Which side of the road do they drive on in this country anyway?”) might have been more apparent. Wheel right, shifter left? Then you should be on the left side of the road dummy. Unbelievably, we went through the intersection and the answer to that question was still the center of a heated debate. It certainly appeared as though we were on the wrong side of the road but nobody was swearing, waving, flashing lights, or even so much as giving us a little courtesy toot! Traffic just flowed around us completely unfazed by our contradictory presence. We were like a rock in a stream. We wheeled our rig around and merged into the hornets nest on the other side of the road.

Later, while blatantly flouting some other driving rule, I said something like:

“I sure hope we don’t freak anybody out doing this.”

To which Jaime would reply,

“I think that if you could freak an Indonesian driver out then you would have to be trying a lot harder than this.”

How true.

Using the term ‘sensory overload’ to describe this experience after having been at sea for 16 days would be a gross understatement. We were those white knuckled, jerky, map reading, bumbling tourists that you want to annihilate… at best. At worst we were a danger to ourselves and everyone around us. In North America you grow up learning a system based on rigid traffic rules, defensive driving, and exorbitant fines. In South East Asia the system seems to depend on everyone going flat out, using every inch of road or sidewalk and doing whatever seems to make sense at the time to get where you are going and damn the consequences.

Once we caught on, the roads were our oyster. I loved it. Don’t like your position at the stoplight but have a little room in front of you? No problem, just squish into the space in front of you. The guy in front of you going too slow but there’s no room to pass? No problem, use the sidewalk. Miss your turn and need to go back a half block but are stuck on a one-way? Just use the inside lane you fool. It’s the chaos theory in full effect, but somehow it works! By the end of day 1 we were in full swing, by the end of day 2 we were jealous of the scooters. At first they seemed like suicidal maniacs, but the versatility was more than evident. Basically a scooter in Bali obeys only one law and that’s the law of self preservation. If you can do it without getting yourself killed then fill your boots! Beautiful in it’s simplicity. No wonder there seems to be a hundred million of them. First chance we get we’re trading in this glorified mini-van for a Honda Blade.

The second thing that became obvious to us is that we were not in the Pacific anymore. There is no trace of the cultural similarities that we’ve experienced for the past 18 months. There is no semblance of it in the people, art, music or language. This may sound obvious to most travelers whose journeys are segmented. Taking a flight from here to there allows you to compartmentalize your experiences. Our method has been more of a slow blend from one thing to another, and this is the first time we’ve had a complete and abrupt change from one thing to another (if you can call 16 days abrupt). Okay, Jaime just pointed out one similarity. The big smiles on people that are ready to help in any way that they can and seem genuinely happy to have you visiting their country harkens back to our days in Vanuatu.

With 10 bucks in your pocket you can do pretty much anything in Bali. Get a room because your too drunk to get home, bribe a police officer, pay a taxi to take you half way across the island, get a 1 hour massage and still have enough for a six pack, rent a surf board, feed yourself and a friend 3 square meals, rent a car for a day, or a scooter for 3. It’s crazy. I had this impression that Bali would be something like Costa Rica; pretty cool 20 years ago but kind of blown out and overpriced now. Not at all, some places may be blown out (Kuta), and believe it or not these prices are considered overpriced by Indonesian standards. But the place is cheaper than Mexico, the weather is great, the surf breaks all over the place, and the people are super friendly. How are we ever going to leave?

We spent a couple of nights each in Ubud, Sunur, and even crazy Kuta. Ubud is kind if a sleepy place great for barfy couple-type things like quiet little romantic restaurants, tons of shopping and tame family oriented tours. Kuta makes no apologies for itself. It’s a massive in-your-face retail district with all-night bars, foam parties, lady-boy hookers and a huge beach where you can buy anything from class-A drugs to a bow and arrow. Sort of like Cancun during spring break or an R-rated version of Waikiki, but instead of teeming masses of drunken 19 year old Americans showing off their Fabutan’s and trying to get laid, there are teeming masses of drunken Aussies showing off their tattoos and trying to get laid.

Sanur falls somewhere in between the two and we really felt at home there. It’s not a big snore like Ubud where highlights include looking at rice paddies, buying a painted egg and retiring to your cozy little room (what’s the big deal with rice paddies anyway?) and it’s nothing like the full frontal assault you experience in Kuta, which was kind of like drinking from a fire hose. We have a beach, a small surf scene, a ton of restaurants and a few good bars. You can find something going on at midnight, but still have a quiet room off a side road to retreat to when you feel like it. If for some reason we are overcome with the urge to get absolutely obliterated and dance in foam until the sun comes up then Kuta is only a half hour away.

We’ve upgraded to a scooter. Honda Blade. Jaime is delighted. Now I can get an AJ Hackett-level adrenaline load for like 3 bucks a day. Sidewalks are my friend, parking issues are a thing of the past. We’ve been told multiple times that the way to deal with police here is to try and outrun them. Apparently they are really lazy and probably won’t even follow you, so if you make it easy by pulling over and revealing that you are a well fed juicy tourist you will be hassled for imaginary fines and the local take on this is that you kind of deserve it. Better to try and get away and if they catch you just pay them the same ‘fines’ you would have been charged with in the first place. All the expats here carry a 50,000 rupiah note in a pocket outside of their wallet for just that purpose (didn’t I tell you that this was a great place?).  So I’ve got my 50,000 Rupiah note and have been trying hard to provoke a pursuit but so far no luck. Don’t worry though, if I manage to outrun a cop using nothing but our Honda Blades 108 cc’s of neck snapping power you will never hear the end of it.

Jaime just got back with two containers of food, a liter of water and a Bintang. Cost? Four bucks and that includes the smoothie she had while waiting for the food.

Filed under: sailing

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