Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Um, can I bet this child here?

Saturday morning, we started our journey to Permuteran to do some diving at the nearby Menjangan Island, at the NW tip of Bali. We ended up staying at Adi Assri – a pretty posh beach resort with 2 pools, bar, restaurant spa and private villas. All the bathrooms in this place were outside – you could catch a tan doing #2 (not that I did). Because we booked 2 dives for the next day, we decided to take it pretty easy Sat night. One of the locals told us about a night market that was happening about 6km away from our resort so we headed there after dinner. We were definitely the only foreigners there! The moment we drove up, people were gawking at us like we were some freakshow attraction. The night market consisted of a bunch of food stalls, clothing stalls and a few sketchy amusement rides that were manually operated. After sampling a few of the wares, we discovered a gambling ‘lane’ at the back of this market. There were a few different games set up with people gambling cash or packs of cigarettes. There were even little kids gambling! Not exactly the safest place to be and I probably made it worse by snapping photos of everyone. Definitely had to stay pretty close to Rollan.

On Sunday, we headed out with our dive company (Yos Diving) to Menjangan Island (about a 30 min boat rode). There was actually another Canadian in our dive group (from Toronto though - booo) which was cool because he was the 1st Canadian tourist I’ve met in Bali. The diving was amazing – we saw a few sea turtles which was the highlight for me! After our 2 dives, we booked it to Singaraja which is at the very north of the island. After eating at KuFC (good fried chicken) we checked into a hotel and headed out to watch the Italy vs. New Zealand game in an Yamaha parking lot with a bunch of locals. It's pretty fun how everyone gets together randomly like this.

Count all the piggys - lunch time?

Entrance to the night market

BBQ'd corn slathered in a spicy butter sauce

Illegal gambling - tsk tsk. Check out the kid raking it in!


Adi Assri - our resort

On the way to Menjangan Island

Catching a game in the Yamaha parking lot