The trip was a two hour ride on the motorbike and boy does that really make your bum sore! We stopped off at Candidasa on the way, another place that people keep telling me I must see. And I nearly moved there when I left Ubud but I'm so glad I chose Sanur. Candidasa is pleasant enough but it's more of a quick-stop kind of place. It has a beach and consists of one main street which doesn't have much else other than restaurants. We took a break here to mark our half-way point to Amed. We ate some crap pizza but welcomed the cold drinks and continued our journey to the east where Bali becomes a very different place.
The views from the winding roads in the mountains were just breathtaking; we bobbed and weaved our way up to where it's breezy and thick with trees. I saw a couple of monkeys sat by the side of the road and I watched people harvesting rice in the land below. I was clinging on with both hands as we rode along so I didn't get any pictures, and I'm not even sure the camera would have done the landscape any justice.
Things are much slower paced in Amed. It's nowhere near as crowded as any other beachtown I've been to. It's a shame that it rained most of the time that we were in Amed because you cannot see the deep blue sea in the background of my pictures.
But guess who managed to come along for the trip this time...
I was so sleepy in Amed because the air was warm, the breeze was soft and all I could hear was the swish of the ocean...Loïc and I took this opportunity to meditate for a little while.
We rode out to town to pick somewhere to have dinner and we made such a wrong choice. It was dark by this point and there were no street lights so we stopped at the only place that had customers. As we sat down and looked around we noticed that the place was full of Czech people who didn't once crack a smile and just guzzled down their beer and played cards in silence. We got some rather miserable looks everytime we burst into laughter or raised our voices - we ended up calling it the House of the Dead. It was full of people but there was absolutely no life. The food wasn't particularly nice and my blood curdled when I spotted a cockroach on its back a few feet away from our table. We decided that enough was enough when a moth landed in Loïc's beer. We quickly threw some money down on the table and dashed for the exit, shuddering as we went.
I was glad to be back in Sanur after a terrible journey home. It chucked it down heavily as we rode back and the wind picked up. There were some nutter drivers on the road and so we had to be extra careful. There was a ceremony going on for a few miles so we got backed up in traffic for a while and had to negotiate our way around a mass of Balinese people marching, carrying fruit on their heads and banging gongs.
I was soaked and shivering when I got back to my hotel, the first time I've actually felt cold since being in Bali. I stood under a hot shower for a good twenty minutes, put some clean, dry clothes on and had a lovely hot drink down at good old Stiff Chilli.
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