And so to the North.....

So after 4 days spent in Bali's cultural capital, we decided to head to the North coast of the island to the sleepy seaside town of Lovina. The cheapest mode of transport turned out to be a local shuttle bus, which the very helpful staff at Warsi Bungalows booked for us. It was advertised to take 3 hours, leaving at 11am and would take us across the hills and mountainous volcano areas down to the sea. We were really looking forward to a leisurely drive taking in the fantastic scenery - oh how wrong we were!! The journey began being squashed into a mini van with our bags and those of it's other passengers - 3 very loud French couples. Tom and I were sandwiched in between them all and as you can imagine Tom very quickly began to lose patience and pulled out his ipod and headphones to drown out the noise! I think at one point I could even see a vein bulging on the side of his forehead!! They didn't speak very good English so I resigned myself to trying to understand what they were all talking about (A level French was a very long time ago but I could still make out some of their conversation).

After about an hours driving, we stopped at a coffee plantation to admire the views and to taste the coffee - 'all free' he assured the bewildered looking passengers in the car. So we wandered through the plantation with the driver and found ourselves stood next to two cages which contained the infamous mongoose that creates very expensive coffee. It is fed coffee beans which it eats, ferments in its stomach and then poos out! The coffee beans are then collected, and ground down for drinking. Sound delightful stuff hey?! The poor things were very scrawny and had no water to drink. So thirsty were they that we watched one drink its own urine. One of the French guys that was with us had his water bottle so we filled up the containers. The driver continued to tell us that we could sample some of the coffee if we wanted down on the terrace - none of us took him up on his offer! However, we did try some amazing teas (ginger, coconut, lemongrass, vanilla). Tom put his haggling skills to good use and bought some ginger tea. Then we all piled back into the van to continue the journey.

As we approached the area surrounding Mount Batur, our van was stopped by the police demanding money from each of us to pass along the roads. At this, the van was filled with loud, angry French and English voices telling them we had already paid for our journey and we were not going to pay anymore. It turned out that one French couple were actually staying in the town near Mount Batur and for this reason they had to pay money to do so, the rest of us did not have to. This was met with cries of 'corrupt bastards' from who else but Tom and the French guy behind us reiterating this by repeating 'corruption' (say in a French accent) over and over again! So we dropped them off by Mount Batur, taking some amazing pictures from the van window, as we continued on towards Lovina. By this point we were 3 hours into our journey and were not even close to Lovina!

We continued on through the mountains for another VERY hot and sticky 2 hours before we eventually reached Lovina. The driver pulled off the main road into the driveway of a hotel and told us we could all find rooms here. However, this hotel was a fair distance from the main part of town and not where we wanted to stay at all. The driver refused to drive us anywhere else and out came our bags onto the floor as he parked up the van. After looking at the map, our only option was to walk back up to the main road and along it towards the centre. Not happy is an understatement! We made our way towards one of the guesthouses in our 'bible' (the Lonely Planet guide!!) and Tom went in to suss out availability and prices. It was too expensive so Tom set off on a mission to find somewhere whilst I slumped down in a heap with the bags. Ten minutes later Tom came back with a fab deal on somewhere to stay (some more good haggling was done!!) and a new friend in a local captain of a boat.

So after a fairly sticky nights sleep in our thatched bungalow, we've had a super lazy sunbathing day to try and start off some sort of tan! We've made it to Happy Hour, drunk some cheap Bintangs and eaten some more amazing food (a huge Indonesian sharing platter). I think we could get used to this!! Shell xx