Day 3: Journey to Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Finally, time to get out of Kuta and get to the yoga/spa/Eat Pray Love town of Ubud. Just an hour and a half away from Kuta, you’d think it was a different world. Still touristy? Yes, but in a different way.

It’s slightly up in the mountains, so the air has a bit more of a moist-woodsiness to it than Kuta.

But I get ahead of myself. We arrive in Kuta at the Perama bus station and ask for directions on how to get to our accommodation. This is going to be the first real test of our backpacking skills.

Test 1: The gravel between where the van lets us off and the paved driveway.

It requires either a backpack or a deadlift. Pallavi cannot lift her bag, so I lift both bags and take them to the driveway. I didn’t think this was a big deal. Apparently its quite hilarious.

Test 2: Walk to the accommodation.

We get the directions and look at the map. It looks simple enough. Take a left, then take a right, and go straight. Perfect, right? Not so perfect! The sidewalks here are made for pedestrians with perfect walking capabilities. The slates are broken in some places; tipped at a 45 degree in others; and in some places just scooter parking.

So, we decided, it’s time to break out the backpacks. And 1 minute later, we decide the sidewalk isn’t nearly as bad as the backpacks are heavy. Pallavi puts hers back into rolling form; I, however, decide I am going to hoof it with the backpack still together as a reminder – don’t pack so much stuff!

The actual walk itself was beautiful. It passed by the monkey forest, dense with trees and hiding Hindu temples. It passed by the neat line of arts & crafts shops. But it really was the San Francisco style hill and the pauses between darting from the parking lane (where we were walking as the sidewalks were still questionable) into traffic and back to the parking lane so that we could pass the parked scooters safely and continue trekking up the hill that did me in, and I too, had to turn my backpack into a roller once more.

But, after a bucket of sweat, but 0 tears, we made it, put our stuff down, and went out to explore and find a good, backpacker style, Balinese meal.

This town really is absolutely delightful. There are rice fields tucked like city squares, with shops surrounding them on all sides. The streets are neat & tidy. It is like being in an artsy-town, stone lined sidewalks, narrow one way streets, scooters & cars on one side, parked scooters on another. We didn’t really see too much though. By the time we found a great place to eat, we sat, had a beer, and somewhere halfway through the beer, the heavens opened up and it poured with rain! Great thing we were inside – and it took a whole additional beer before the rain stopped. By that time it was dark, and we decided to just chill and do more of the touristy stuff tomorrow.

What do you do as backpackers without any responsibilities? Let’s see.