Back to Asia!!!!!
Asia - home sweet home! Bit of surfing, whole lot of shopping and complete Bali ignorance
Bali.
Feels like home. Really. Immediately I feel warmer (and I don't mean climate), more free, more relaxed and in a strange way safer that in Australia.
I'm so excited to be back "in the jungle", I mean in Asia.
But honestly, I don't think there has ever been such ignorant visitor to Bali as me:
I came here for only 2 days, I stayed in Kuta, I didn't go anywhere except shops, and I don't mean those nice Bali shops, I mean boring everyday shops (to buy all the stuff that I need and/or I couldn't buy in Australia or it was too expensive, from camera, contact lenses, sunglasses, flip flops to Indonesian SIMto card and earphones), I didn't see anything except damn Gang Poppies 1 and Gang Poppies 2, and I didn't even do anything except surfing. Ahhh, good old surfing!
Well, I've been here 2 years ago, all around, so I was not in hurry to see/do anything and anyway I'm coming back in few weeks so I will have some time then, but still it almost amazed me how Bali-resistant I was.
Apart from few fundamentals for traveling in Indonesia, such as flip-flops and anti-motion-sickness pills (for boats and hellish bus rides) I managed to obtain my new precioussssss. Although it was bit more complicated than expected (in Indonesia the fact that you know exact address of a shop, its phone number and you have google maps on iPhone does not at all mean that you will actually find the shop, especially if half of the town has the same name and the numbering is non-existent and shop is nowhere near the address which google maps show), and also my credit card had its moment of silent resistance, finally I managed to buy a new Canon 6D and a lens. After Canon 5D Mark III it’s like driving Skoda Octavia after having Porsche, but well, I have only myself to blame for all this... At least I have Skoda Octavia and not Fiat Punto :-)
Funny thing is that lot of people tell me that I’m obsessed with the camera and that I’m not really seeing the places where I go to, because I’m focused mostly on the photography, but I discovered interesting thing about me. It’s the opposite way. As soon as I got the camera I realized that suddenly I’m much more aware of my surroundings and that I actually look at the place and its various details more than without it, even if I don’t really take the photographs. I guess because my „hunting instinct“ simply dramatically increases my visual sensitivity, so to say. Interesting finding, but it’s true.
After all that bad luck in Australia one might say I'm pushing it to the limit, but...
Q: ...what is Odysseus favorite activity?
A: Travelling between islands and getting ship wrecked all the time!
Sooooo, how about doing some island hopping in country with worst record of naval transport in the world? Not to mention air transport.
YES, tomorrow I fly to Timor (hah, finally some really cool destination), and from there, I SHOULD travel back to Bali via Flores, Komodo, Lombok and possibly some other island. But, knowing Poseidon, I expect that I won't make it even from Timor before some misfortune strikes me again...
