Are we clean enough to enter Bali?

Monday, May 18

This morning we left the hotel at 7:15 am for a ½ hour ride to the airport.  (Shopping at the Hong Kong airport is excellent, so for anyone traveling through, allow enough time to browse.  There are no bargains but there’s an excellent selection of every conceivable brand of luxury goods, superb travel bags and gee-gaws, plus a MUJI-TO GO store.)  We caught a 10 am flight to Denpasar and are now in business class “upper deck” in seats (pods really) directly behind the pilot.  Before take off we chatted with him and checked out all the instruments and levers and dials – from a great distance away of course.  We had barely pulled away from the gate when we took off.  Bali is roughly 2,500 miles from Hong Kong and the flight is 5 hours.  Bali turns out to be in the same time zone as Hong Kong, which is 12 hours ahead of New York. 

As an aside, we’ve been reading about election results in India and are happy the Indian National Congress party did so well.  This bodes well for India’s economy and for our own future travel plans.

We arrived in Denpasar around 2:30 but didn’t emerge from the chaos of the airport until an hour later.  Because of the H1N1 virus that has been going around, everyone is taking precautions to prevent any outbreak in their area.  So the Bali airport is outfitted with several “HUMAN DISENFECTANT MACHINES” that travelers must pass through upon entry.  This made for a rather hectic entry as groups were segregated and led to different machines.  Carry on baggage had to go through one machine which appeared to soak them in some kind of spray.  I was worried about my camera and laptop, but what could I do?  Then I had to step into a machine that looked like an airport metal detector and put my hands on two pads and then suddenly the machine starts spraying like crazy going from my feet to my shoulders.  I am happy to report that Scott and I are now thoroughly disinfected and are safe to be around. 

Bali’s tourism business must still be doing well. There were hundreds of people with us waiting on line to get our “visa upon entry”.  This process must have taken another ½ hour at least.  Finally we collected our bags and met CHOY at last outside the airport.  He took us on a ride through busy Denpasar (one t-shirt shop after another at first glance).  The route through Denpasar is a two-lane street.  Everywhere people are on motorcycles, weaving and passing all around us.  It looked like a tiny fragment of the old architecture still exists here and there, with new architecture filling in around it.  Clearly this is a tourist town where surfers and beachcombers come to party.  Choy says that many Australians come here.  But he says there are two kinds of Australians, one that comes to Denpasar to “party”, and the other that goes up to Ubud and looks down on the Denpasar crowd.  Thankfully we’ll be heading up to Ubud later in our trip.

We checked into the Kumala Pantai Hotel around 4:30pm.  After a brief rest we found ourselves in dire need of water, so we decided to walk along the beach for a bit and then head to a nearby shop where we could stock up.  The beach walk was interesting – I found a different crowd than I’d be expecting.  Lots of tattoos on both men and women, many women in bathing suits far too small for them playing paddle ball, many men looking too hard to look like yogi or something, doing yoga poses on the sand. There was a tiny surf and many people trying hard to take advantage of it.  Haven’t seen a crowd like this since Rockaway Beach.

We walked around the hotel to check it out.  There are paths winding around the various buildings, with “ganesha lights” illuminating the way.  There are two large pools and our room looks out over one of them.  Had a light dinner at an outdoor restaurant at the hotel and went to bed early.