I just got back from a three week trip to Bali. We spent 10 days on Lembongan Island. I have never seen so many large muscled men as I did on Lembongan. Huge upper bodies. I think most people working out at the gym everyday couldn’t get the build most of the men have there.
There are some details below but I will give my best of list first. All information is from the Jungutbatu area of Lembongan.
My favorite restaurant.
Bu Candra. Everything I had was excellent. I especially recommend the “juice fresh”, the best juice on Lembongan.
Another good resturant.
Warung Made.
A few of the expats recommended Chinese House 99 but I found them higher priced and lower quality.
Here are a series of videos I took of a village festival. They are of cockfighting and gambling. The festival was of the winter full moon, I guess of the winter solstice.
The first video below is of the lead-up to a cockfight. Everyone seems to be showing off their birds. This is just before the final preparations for the cockfight. Notice the guy in the black shirt with white lettering. The lettering says “JIBAKU” which is Japanese for suicide bomber. I am sure it means something else in Indonesian.
Here is the wrapping of the leg to hold a knife, called a taji in Indonesia. The knives look fearsome in scale to the birds. The tying is done with blood red string. It didn’t look all that strong once the birds started to fight. It appears the birds handlers aren’t involved in this part of the preparation. The person doing the holding of the bird and wrapping are different from the handlers in the next video.
This video shows the main part of the fight. The bird on the right at the start of the video does get killed by the other bird but I don’t show it in the video. Notice the handler of the winning bird on the left. He keeps his birds feet off the ground for the most part and keeps his bird’s head higher than the other at all times. There was a tremendous amount of money exchanging hands before the fight started.
This last video shows a different gambling game going on before the cockfights begin. Towards the end of the video as the ball is settling into the center shape notice the guy running the game start to shake. The center spot pays double to the betters and this video shows the second time in a row the ball settled there.
On Lembongan.
It is possible to take a local boat from Sanur directly to Mushroom bay. Buy your ticket from the small seller around the food stalls, say Lembongan. If you buy it from the seller that has a proper office next to the street he will sell you a ticket on the boat that goes to Jungutbatu. Children are 1/2 price although they wouldn’t give us the discount.
Stayed at Bungalow 7 . It is the cheapest but there are better options if you want to spend more. We didn’t have an air-conditioned room but a fan. After Lembongan we went to Ubud and stayed at Villa Kerti Yasa in an air-conditioned room. I found out about an interesting scam with air-conditioned rooms. When we first checked into the Villa Kerti Yasa we were told the air-con unit was broken. We insisted on a room that had a unit that worked and the unit in our room suddenly became operational. I didn’t think anything of it until the evening when it stopped responding to the remote control unit. I called the manager who came to our room and fiddled around with the remote and viola, the unit started working again. In the morning the unit again didn’t respond to the remote so I brought it to him again and asked him what I needed to do to get it to work again. He then taught me the sequence to set the universal AC remote to control our unit.
This is a picture of our remote. It seems we were accidentally pushing the “set” button instead of the on/off button. If you push the “set” button it re-sets the remote. Since it is a universal remote it is able to control up to 24 different units. Our unit is #17 in this scheme. To set the remote to #17 this is what we had to do. First push the “set” button till the small “17” that is visible in the upper right of the picture starts blinking. Then use the “temp” buttons to scroll through the display, (the small “17” will disappear and be replaced with a “1”) till your unit number appears. After your unit number appears press the “OK” button and you are ready to go. The problem is knowing what your unit number is. I would guess if the hotel is trying to tell you the unit is broken and it is just a matter of fiddling with the remote you will have plenty of time during the hot night to try all the numbers and see which one works.
Since I am on the subject of scams this should fit right in here. We left for the airport from Ubud, to be more precise Nyuh Kuning, which is just on the other side of Monkey forest from Ubud. We booked a taxi from Ajus Cafe, I made sure to say twice to the driver and twice to his wife we wanted to stop on the way to the airport at at least 2 supermarkets to do some last minute shopping. We headed out to go to the airport, me reiterating our request. Just about half way to the airport the driver stopped at a small local supermarket, we got out and did some shopping but didn’t find everything we wanted so both my wife and I told the guy we wanted to stop at a bigger store. The driver dithered about with excuses about how we were on the wrong road for bigger markets etc. I spoke to my wife in Japanese that there wasn’t really anything we could do and we continued on our way. A couple of clicks down the road I told the driver in English that we would of course go to the airport and pay him but that next time when he agrees to do something it would be nice to his customers if he followed through. He pulled over to the side of the road and said, “Do you want to go to the airport of do you want to stop here on the side of the road.” Threatening a family with two younger children isn’t what I would call good business practices. We promptly got our of the car onto the dark road and started walking. Luckily there was a hotel about a hundred meters down the way and I asked them to call a taxi. If you are staying in Nyuh Kuning I would recommend staying away from Ajus Taxi Service.
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