Lipah and Bangle

We woke up at Hidden Paradise on August 1 after a night of deep sleep... after putting a little bit of DEET on the neck and cheeks, that is, the mosquitoes were out and despite having screens, the room was open between the walls and the roof so there wasn't even that much point in having screens at all. Keeping a fan on your face is a nice strategy for fending off mosquitoes, but there were none in this place.

We got up, ate our included breakfast, and sauntered down the beach toward the Coral View Bungalows where Dad and crew were staying because there was a big french crew at Hidden Paradise that wasn't gonna check out for another day. The beach in Lipah is much like all the other beaches in the Amed area in that it acts as a host to dozens of fishing sailboats that go out to sea every day. Tourists can rent the boats to go see sunrise or sunset from the sea. We did this ten years ago and had it in mind to go again this time but it just didn't quite materialize. This was not due to a lack of effort on the fishermen's part. They lobbied you pretty much every time you took a stroll down the beach.

We got to Coral View as Mandi, Hilde, Joachim, and Mechthild were finishing breakfast. It was nice to see them after only briefly catching up with them after their airplane arrival the night before we left for Gunung Agung. Johanna and I stuck around and shared mountain stories in German while Nick went on a mission to find us cheaper accomodations. Hidden Paradise cost $50 a night for one big shared room, we felt we could do better somewhere else. After half an hour he came back and said we'd be staying at Tresna Yoga so we packed up our bags and made the walk through town. "Hey Rastaman!" "Bob Marley" "No Woman No Cry" Ok, playas. I get the point. It's all really friendly but you sure do feel strangely judged when people are constantly calling at you like that. Smile and keep walking.

At Tresna Yoga we had two separate rooms. One for 200K Rupiah and one for 150K Rupiah a night. Maybe not a ton cheaper than we were paying at the Hidden Paradise but we had our separate rooms for the same price. The view was quite nice. We were up on the hill, past a maze of stairs that we had to take to our room. This proved to be quite challenging for the next two days because our legs were pretty much shot from the hike.

We got settled and finally got a chance to go snorkeling. I used to snorkel all the time growing up. In Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, France... we always used to vacation somewhere within driving distance from Germany and then Dad would take me and Johanna out snorkeling. I learned to swim with flippers before I learned to swim without them. I remember being scared to be in water without them... I guess it wasn't a terrible way to learn to swim. We used to sit in a little rubber raft for minutes while our dad dove down and retrieved cool treasuers for us to look at. Sea Cucumbers. Starfish. A harpooned octopus.

It was good to be snorkeling again. It had been a while but I quicky became requainted with the drill. One thing was off though, try as hard as I might to remove hair from my mask, I was still getting a slow leak. I finally deduced that it was coming from my mustache and shaved under my nose later that day. It looks a little funny but it worked like a charm.

Snorkeling in Lipah is pretty good. Over the time there we saw: Rays, Flounders, Lion Fish, Eels, Boxfish (so cuuuuute), sea turtles, squid, and all kinds of cool little reef fish. Hopefully in Lombok we can get to where there are some Manta Rays. They used to be my favorite animal when I was under ten years old... it would be nice to actually see one before I die.

Aside from the Sunrises and Sunsets, the Japanese Wreck is the other big destination for the fishing boats. Our kid who used to water the plants at Tresna Yoga kept asking if we wanted a boat ride to the Japanese Wreck. The fishermen on the beach asked if we wanted to get a ride to the Japanese Wreck. Japanese Wreck this. Japanese Wreck that. We were so sick of hearing about it after two days that we never did go seek it out.

Anyway, after snorkeling we just had ourselves a super mellow recovery day and I went to track down some internet. The internet was dial-up. It took about 3-4 minutes to load one simple simple page of email. It was painful. I really didn't do anything but the very essential emails when I was there. Pardon me if I ignored you or was a bit curt. Ir cost 500 Rp a minute. That's about $3.50 an hour. Whatever. I whacked my head on the low door as I was leaving. I was more careful on subsequent exits.

In the late afternoon we did laundry in the bathtub and hung a clothes line of P-Chord in front of JoJo and Nick's room. We passed out early again. Really a quite uneventful day. What the hell am I doing writing so much about it.

Let's see, Thursday August 2 Nick, Johanna, Mandi, and I went to the village of Bangle. We had been up there ten years ago and we have lots of cute photos of the kids of the village. Mandi sadly left the photos in Germany by accident so we didn't come bearing those beautiful gifts. All we had were some pens to distribute to the children.

We kids living up on the hill rolled down at the pre-arranged 10am departure but the old folks weren't ready to leave because it was they day they were due to move to Hidden Paradise. I killed the two hours going to the internet cafe. I wanted to load some of my photos from the camera to the iPod. This proved to be a nightmare because all the computers there were infected with the Glupzy virus. It's a little program that runs at startup and copied versions of itself onto any USB drive that's connected to the computer. It hides all the folders and creates new .exe files with the folders' names. Then it changes the folder options to not show extensions and to not show hidden files. Users get confused and take their drive to a different computer and click on the folder. Oops, now another computer is infected. The internet cafe in Lipah had Norton Antivirus but the virus definitions hadn't been updated in over a year. Oops. I tried to download AVG but it would have taken 6 hours just to pull down 22 MB. Something was wrong there. I spent all my time there researching the virus and not getting any work done. I told them about it and the lady told me that they had noone knowledgeable around and would have to send the computers back to Denpasar if there's anything wrong with them.. I didn't spend too much time trying to fix things. Let those computers be part of a bot net. That's probably what's slowing down their internet connection in the first place.

Noon. We finally depart for Bangle... well, at the time we remembered it as Bangli.. . to much amusement of the locals. They let us say it wrong a few times before tactfully correcting us. It took maybe 1.5 hours to walk up there. From the left and the right children were shouting "Hallo" "Hallo" from the rice fields. Sometimes they were so far away and obscured that we really had to work to see them. What a positive experience.

We finally got to Bangle after a semi-agonizing walk on our recovering legs. We picked up a guide somewhere along the way which was useful because the main sight in Bangle is to tour the Five Holy Springs. Above the village water comes out of the moutain in various places and every spot has a different flavor. The locals see them each as being holy and medicinal. There's a little temple built at each spring. We trekked up the rice fields for a ways and stopped at each spring. Some tasted of iron, some tasted of citrus, and one was dried out for the season. We passed several cows along the way. There was one in particular that was a bad scene. It was tied up under this little shed with an aluminum roof. The roof was rattling in the wind. It was very loose and was just dangling making noise. Mandi went up to it and tried to fix the roof by sliding a piece of aluminum back in it's place and he completely startled the cow. It went apeshit. Paniced. Broke itself free from the shed it was tied up in... Well, really it tore the shed apart and took off through the woods still dragging the post it was tied up to. Poor thing. I hope it didn't hurt itself. I hope the owner found it.

We got back to the village as dusk was settling in. Mandi found the school teacher and got a mailing address to send his kid photos to. There were some kids walking in stilts. It was nice and mellow up there and noone called me Bob Marley. Unfortunately Johanna started to get a stomach bug at this point and we sent her ahead on the back of an Ojek (motorbike taxi) so that she could be closer to proper sanitary facilities. Nick, Mandi, and I walked back to Lipah. It was a nice night stroll with barking dogs and Gamelan music ringing through the valley.