After all the kerfuffle of getting to Bali and the fear of being deported, Indonesia quickly became one of my favourite places and we even learnt a few things whilst we were there:

You are expected to sit down. Always.
“How much is your bus to Ubud?”
“Hello, sit down…”

“Can I buy a Magnum please?”
“Come in, sit down…”

“My friend has just had her head blown off, can you tell me where the hospital is please?”
“Of course, after you’ve sat down…”
(Lyvette never actually had her head blown off, I am just getting the point across)

Indonesian people are some of the friendliest we’ve met, but they find it near on impossible to give you a straight answer…
“Do you sell Pringles?”
“Ah you want Pringles. No problem. They are 20,000 IDR and very good, very good”
“You have them? Where are they?”
“I like them, very nice crisps. Lots of flavours!”
“Where. Do. You. Keep. Your. Pringles?” (Before I get a tube of them and beat you to death)
“Ah. We don’t sell Pringles…please sit down…”

Bali
Kuta
Dubbed the Australian equivalent to Magaluf I’ve grown quite attached to this place. I’m not sure why, especially after I went for a run on my first morning and nearly got decapitated by a flying taxi and then spent the next 20 minutes hurdling scooters that zig zagged down the road and mounted the pavements (traffic in Kuta is almost as bad as Delhi, ‘almost’, being the key word there). Maybe I’ve developed this attachment because it was our first stop in Indonesia and we met up with our travelling posse that consisted of Gemma, the Canadians Cereza and Kristen, Joe, Sweden and briefly the Leeds Lads, it was like a big reunion which lead us on the death march to Sky Garden, an all you can eat and drink bar for under a fiver. I don’t remember leaving Sky Garden, probably because Joe threw two limes in my eye (I swear it hurt more than Tiger Balm), Lyvette lost her fan (which is not ideal for someone who sweats so much she loses water faster than you can blink), I lost my camera and then cleared the dance floor with some epic dance moves (so I’m told) and Cereza ended the night having to listen to everybody crunching Pringles in their beds. The joys of Kuta.

Or maybe the reason for my Kuta attachment was because this is where my surfing obsession began. My first ever surfing lesson started with us donning oversized mens t shirts, previously worn by everyone in Indonesia, and rolling around on surf boards on the sand looking like we were re-enacting my Sky Garden dance moves. Finally after some dynamic arm movements and very professional beach stretching, under the watchful eyes of the 1 million people located on Kuta beach that day, we were allowed to play in the sea. We all managed to stand up on our boards, which made me feel like I’d won the Olympics and from that moment on we were practically pro’s. So we spent the next 2 hours perfecting our surfing techniques and gracefully gliding through the sanitary towels and used nappies that the sea of Kuta had to offer. But who cares, I became a surfer. It’s just a shame I had a nappy dangling from my earlobe and was dressed like I’d raided the XL men’s section of a (very bad) surfing charity shop. Meanwhile Kristen was on the beach getting shot by a man selling bow and arrows.

Ubud
We had to leave Kuta asap – I was in danger of becoming way too attached to the sanitary clad beaches and all you can drink bar in Sky Garden so we awaited the arrival of my friend from home, Neil, who was joining us for a two week holiday and then we left. On leaving we said our final goodbyes to the Canadian girls. Our relationship that had blossomed on a morbidly long bus journey through Laos finally ended with an emotional selfie at our hostel in Bali. Following the loss of my beloved camera I couldn’t actually take any pictures so I just pretended with my camera case.

We liked Ubud, it was very chilled and we kept ourselves busy taking a tour to visit numerous temples, rice fields and drinking coffee that is famous because it comes from luwak poo (a luwak is a cat thing that looks like a monkey). Oh, and we met a lot of monkeys, most of whom were very nice until we met the one that hissed at us and looked like the Dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park. Then his mate sat on my face.

The following day we decided to walk up Mount Batur and so got up at 2am to start our trek up the volcano for sunrise. This was definitely an adventure. I got to wear my head torch (which never fails to excite me), we ate eggs that were ‘apparently’ cooked in the volcano’s steam aka our tour guides kitchen, Neil nearly created a landslide and we could only watch as he caused half of the volcano to slide from underneath our fellow tourists feet and Lyvette held the guides hand throughout the whole of our three hour trek. I didn’t need to hold anybody’s hand going up and down the volcano because a) I don’t like holding hands and b) I’m a surfer now and that’s not how surfers roll.

Gili Islands
For some reason we decided to travel to the Gili’s straight after our volcano trek. What a stupid idea that was (it may have been mine). So we arrived at the paradise islands covered in volcanic ash and smelling like char grilled eggs. Once off the boat we still had the task of finding somewhere to stay…

“Excuse me do you have any rooms?”
“Yes, yes follow me! I have rooms for you!” Perfect, lets follow this guy we thought. “This room is very nice and big. We have swimming pool, AC, wifi”
“Great. Can we take it then please?”
“Ah no, sorry. It’s full. I show you a different place”. So we followed him across the island. “This is your price, very nice. I do you discount. Do you like it?”
“Perfect, ok we’ll stay here, thanks”
“Ah, no. You can’t stay here. I show you another room…”
30 minutes later, after being shown numerous rooms that we couldn’t have Lyvette lost it,
“WHY ARE YOU SHOWING US ROOMS WE CAN’T HAVE?! Show us a room we can have”. To be fair we had been up since 2am, a fly had just landed on her arm and we were sweating like pigs and she no longer had her fan.

Once settled into our rooms Neil decided he needed a massage to unwind from the days antics so he asked the hotel owner if he could recommend anyone for the job and I entered our room to find Neil being straddled by an old man with no teeth that the owner had found at the market…apparently it’s one of the best massages he’s ever had. Then I lay on the beach wiping a tampon across my lips thinking it was my lip balm. That was embarrassing.

We had fun on Gili T. We went snorkelling with turtles where Neil nearly bled to death on some coral, we saw an amazing sunset, I developed an obsession with corn on the cob flavoured crisps, Lyvette continued her love affair with Tiger Balm, Gemma decided to tan so much she looked Jamaican (she’s from Wales, or Surrey – same same but different) and Joe got an ego boost when he walked past some girls;

Girl 1 “Oh look…he’s hot!!” She looks towards Joe
Girl 2 “No he’s not…Open your eyes!”
Girl 1 “Oh yeah”

One night I found Neil with one shoe on playing tug of war with a flip flop with a random girl. It turned out he’d lost a flip flop and so decided to run off in the girls instead, she wasn’t happy when she caught him in the act (as you can imagine) but it was comical to watch. Eventually he gave up and decided to search for his flip flop in the menu cupboard. Because that’s where flip flops are normally stored.

Lombok
We stayed in Sengiggi for a night after visiting the beach there which was the sandiest beach I’ve ever been on. Or maybe it was just the wind, I’m not sure but we left looking like walking sand dunes with sand stubble. From Sengiggi we went to Kuta (there are two Kuta’s – one in Bali and one in Lombok) where we went beach hopping and saw some amazing scenery. Myself and Gemma got excited because we found a beach where we could surf. So we hired a board and that was it, no lesson necessary. I stood up on the board a whole half a time. It was emotional as I just rolled around cuddling a surf board. Where had my surfing prowess gone? On the plus side at least this time there were no sanitary products in the water. Neil still only had one shoe so he had to hop everywhere, which wasn’t ideal when he got red ants down his pants and Lyvette fell in love with a puppy called Shuffles. I fell in love with every surfer I could see whilst Gemma just roamed around looking ridiculously tanned and eating Pringles. And Lyvette lost the moon. Actually lost it. It just disappeared. She loves all things sky related (apart from flying things that come from the sky), sunrises, sunsets, clouds etc and after the appearance of the red moon it then disappeared. This led to Lyvette walking around Lombok every night staring at the sky and muttering to herself; “Where is the moon? Where have you gone? Has anyone seen the moon?! I’ve lost it. Oh god, where’s the moon?!” She became increasingly upset about the whereabouts of the moon. Only shuffles could calm her down.

After three nights in Lombok we decided to take the slow boat back to Bali. What we didn’t realise was that a slow boat could actually be so slow. I could have swam faster, doing breastroke with my legs tied together eating my corn on the cob crisps whilst carrying a surf board and sniffing Lyvette’s Tiger Balm. That’s how slow it was. It didn’t help that the boat left 2.5hours late. It was while we were waiting for the boat that we met the water boy. A boy who was selling water. I was parched and haggled a bottle of water off him. From then on he referred to me as ‘honey’. Once on the boat I was quietly sat reading my book when water boy came along and stopped for a chat;

“Hey honey, you want more water?”
“No thanks, I still have some left”
“Ok honey. I lick your pussy if you like?”
My jaw hit the deck. To my left I saw Gemma’s jaw drop. To my right I saw Neil’s jaw drop. Lyvette was listening to Avicii in the corner. I was speechless and didn’t know what to do. So I crossed my legs. My quick wit had momentarily deserted me.
“Erm…I think I’ll be ok for a few hours”
“You sure honey? It’s a slow boat…”
“No, I’m fine thank you. I think I’ll just…umm…read my book”
“Ok honey. Maybe I’ll see you when you next come to Gili T and you can meet me and Alice”.

Who the f**k is Alice and where did she just come from?!
And off he went swinging his water bottles.
We all looked at each and wondered what the hell had just happened and how that conversation could stem from buying a bottle of water and how that particular topic could be discussed in a manner that was as casual as if we were discussing Sunday dinner.

The rest of the slow boat journey went by fairly uneventfully, except when Neil broke the silence by singing ‘Wonderwall’ at the top of his voice, unaware that everyone on the boat could hear him because he had his ear phones in. In fact the whole of Indonesia could hear him.

We arrived back in Bali 12 hours after we left Lombok.

Bali
Kuta
Back to Kuta, mainly because this is a good place to get transport to and from but also because it was Neil’s birthday and we wanted to go white water rafting and also felt he simply needed to experience Sky Garden.

So Neil’s birthday started with us sitting in a car heading east to the rafting centre. Myself and Lyvette desperately needed a wee so our driver very kindly stopped and told us to enter the building across the road and use their toilet. Only when we crossed a playground inhabited by teenage boys did we realise we were in a school. It was only mildly awkward when we had to ask the teacher if we could use the toilet and all the school boys followed us and waited outside. When Lyvette was inside I tried to do the loyal thing and speak to the boys really loudly so they wouldn’t hear her urinating like a camel. So I was highly disappointed to find that when I opened the toilet door to a group of grinning adolescent boys surrounded by a deafening silence, Lyvette was nowhere to be seen (she’d got bored and gone back to the car) and the entire school had just listened to me having an epic wee. I was escorted to the school gates by the boys and then muttered my thanks and left with an empty bladder.

Rafting itself was fun. Lyvette screamed for the first 20minutes, I got too excited by a leaf and fell backwards looking like a beetle stuck on its back, Neil spent the entire 3 hours with Lyvette hitting him in the eye with her paddle and Gemma had to deal with me getting thrown about and constantly landing on her woo. Post rafting I bought myself a new camera which was exactly the same as my old one, so I was happy. Neil opened his new birthday flip flops, so he was happy because he no longer had to hop everywhere and Lyvette purchased a new fan so she was happy. The only person who wasn’t happy was Gemma because her cash card wouldn’t work, so she couldn’t play out that night and had to spend the next week drinking sea water and licking empty crisp packets. Only joking, we lent her some money and the night ended in pole dancing (definitely not the sexy type), meeting a guy who literally danced the soles of his shoes off and some memory loss.

Lembongan
It was time to leave Kuta again. Before I got too attached and became tempted to put on my lost property surfing attire and show everyone up with my new skills. Plus Kuta only had small bags of corn flavoured crisps, Lyvette had depleted its Tiger Balm supplies and Gemma needed to go somewhere hotter than 35 degrees because she simply wasn’t tanned enough. Neil didn’t care because he had two flip flops.

Lembongan isn’t a particularly big island, in fact it’s quite small and most people choose to explore it by motorbike. We explored it by golf buggy. Because we’re cool. This was great for the first 20 minutes until the wheels of the golf buggy decided that they would only turn right. This wasn’t ideal and proved a bit tricky because every time we hit a left turn we all had to get out and manually manoeuvre the wheels into the correct position. Perfect when you’ve got a traffic jam of bikes behind you. Obviously every turn on the island then seemed to be to the left.

I loved Lembongan, it was one of my favourite places even though everything shut at 10pm something about it had me. We went snorkelling with manta rays which were absolutely huge and pretty amazing to see. Neil wasn’t impressed with the amount of jelly fish located near the manta rays though and he spent the entire time jerking and thrusting around as he got stung. I decided that I would man up and do the honourable thing and wee on him. But then I got stage fright. All the manta rays were looking at me and it was just too much. I was disappointed with myself, I expected more from my drama degree.
Leaving Lembongan was when we had to say our goodbyes to Neil as he headed home, which left three of us and myself, Lyvette and Gemma waved him off up the beach, covered in jelly fish stings but happy that he’d swam with manta’s and still had two flip flops.

Uluwatu
A surfers paradise, I was in my element. It’s just a shame I can’t surf. I think we all liked it here, it was a cool place and on the first night we found 3 Aussie guys who told us about a beach party at Padang Padang beach. They offered us a lift on their bikes but they were going to stop off at another bar first. Our relationships had been sealed, we had acquired our drivers for the night. All of our drivers had curly blond surfer hair and mine had hair that smelt of sea (I simply had to sniff it). He shall now be known as Sea Head. The other bar turned out to be a supermarket with plastic tables and chairs out the front. But it was hammered, mainly with Australians. I’ve never seen such a strange set up in my life, this supermarket was the place to be. However we did get a bit self conscious at one point that we didn’t have curly blond hair that smelt of sea. Or a trucker cap. Or an Aussie accent. But it was ok, we dealt with the situation. It was going well and we were being very sociable (the supermarket crew were a friendly bunch in fairness) and our drivers decided it was time to go to the beach party so they’d give us a ride. That’s when things got a bit awkward. As drivers 1 and 2 (Lyvette and Gemma’s drivers) got to their bikes I realised that my driver (Sea Head) had a girl in tow. Sea Head was going to sell me out to his new girlfriend. This was not a good start to our relationship. I’d been dumped before we’d even left the supermarket.

“Lyvette Lyvette” (I tugged on her bag like a small child) “My driver’s got a girl…”
“What?”
“I just don’t know what to do…how do I get to the beach? You two have got drivers. This is awkward”

Lyvette nearly wet herself and luckily for me Driver 1 let me get on his bike with Lyvette. We got to the beach party and ditched the drivers. Well, I didn’t – the cheating Sea Head jetted off into the sunset with his new girlfriend, completely forgetting about the commitment he made to a small English girl under the oath of ‘Scooter Driving Taxi Services’ that was sealed by my sniffing his hair. So technically I was ditched by Sea Head, but whatever. I’m not bitter. Not at all.

The party was good. Gemma began to look more and more tanned as the night went on and in the end we could only see her eyeballs against the night sky. We had numerous people tapping us on the shoulder and asking us where our friend was from – by the end of the night she was officially Jamaican. We learnt some surf words and I met a Spanish speaking Argentinean (anyone who knows me knows I’m totes fluent in Spanish) and accidently told him his penis looked dead. I was actually trying to ask him where the toilet was. We couldn’t be friends after that. Then we hitch hiked home and Lyvette took scooter lessons off Robert, our next door neighbour. She became a pro and the next day we hired a bike and she drove everywhere managing to avoid all pedestrians (unlike when she hit the woman in India). I only feared for my life 38 times in the space of 4 hours which was progression.

After riding around all day we went to Single Fin for another party, accompanied by Sweden, Joe and a bottle of wine that tasted like battery acid. This is where I stubbed my toe, stumbled and head butted a hot surfer which left me mortified because that’s not how I would usually attempt to chat someone up. I went red and legged it. Into his mates shoulder. Then I treated myself to a real life corn on the cob (not crisps) which was nice until some guy made me try his chilli sauce which blew my eye balls from their sockets and I spent the rest of the night looking like I’d been on drugs. Then we bumped into Sea Head but I couldn’t really see him that well because the chilli was still affecting my eye sight. I knew it was him though because I could smell the sea on his head. That night Lyvette had another scooter lesson and I swapped my dental floss for some organic dark chocolate with cashew nuts in it.
I love Uluwatu. And the swell was totally pumping (surfer sentence – you just wouldn’t understand).

Seminyak
Surfing here was slightly better, we actually stood up again. Boom. Tampons cost £15 for a packet and we got attacked by a flying thing down a dark alley way. It chased us all the way back to Kuta…

Kuta
Oh, look where we are again…Kuta! We decided to spend our last 4 nights here as it was cheaper and closer to the airport. I nearly lost a leg surfing then got attacked by a screaming man on a motorbike – apparently you’re not allowed to walk on the pavement. The world almost ended when Lyvette dropped her pot noodle and the moon finally made a reappearance (much to Lyvette’s delight). Gemma decided that the only thing missing from Indonesia was drag queens. I’m not sure how she arrived at that conclusion either. We said goodbye to Joe, Sweden and Robert. And spent the last few days getting very drunk. Which leads to us nursing hangovers and preparing for a 7 hour flight to Sydney. Naturally any form of long journey has to be done with a headache.

Our time in Asia has come to an end and it’s safe to say we feel sort of lost. We’re not sure how we feel about going to Australia. I have become quite attached to Asia. I feel like I’m leaving a limb behind and I have become a bit of a lush in the past month, just surfing (or pretending to surf) and getting drunk. We have met some truly amazing people and seen some amazing sights. We finally have to say goodbye to Gemma the Jamaican which will be emotional after 4months of travelling with her. I am sort of looking forward to not having sand in my bed though and I really hope Australia has corn flavoured crisps…