Sunshine Coast

By the time we were leaving Bali, we had enough of travelling and wanted to settle somewhere (meaning Gold Coast) but after a bit of a debate, we decided to go to the Sunshine Coast first because I was curious and it was close enough. I expected something like the Gold Coast but smaller but it felt completely different. Like one of our many smaller stops between Sydney and Gold Coast.

Noosa. The most popular place.

It was touristy all right but less for twenty somethings and more for families. We lived in the most "unimportant" place between Noosa with its shops and beaches and its national park and Maroochydore (I am not even going to look it up) which is the biggest town complete with a shopping mall.

Sand castle.

There was nothing to complain about, everything was nice but it seemed to me to be lacking something spectacular or having its own character. I don't know what I expected. The national park was nice. The shopping mall was good and had an interesting twist in that it was divided in two by a river. The salsa party we went to was dissapointing. This was balanced out by Diana finding a Zumba trainer which became one of her favorites.

Viewing point at the edge of the national park.

We stayed for a week there and that was OK. Now we know what the Sunshine Coast is all about and will go to live there once we are old and retired.

An impossibly wide tree.

Base 30 - Penestanan

Once there were cocks. Literal ones. And they woke us up every morning at 6. Then came the chickens. They joined in in a sometimes synchronized choir or sleeplessness. Then came the builders who built a small house next to us with a speed that put my game-building to shame.

There were two houses being built. This was the one farther away.

Our room was beautiful with a generous balcony, a small but useful kitchen, a big, confy bed and an open air bathroom. Our hosts knew almost no English at all but they were friendly. We dealt mostly with an older woman who was apparently the owner, her sister who carried our 25kg luggage on her head, and her two daughters. Although both daughters were in school age, they never seemed to go to school. They were busy cleaning up and working. That's probably how it works there but still I found it sad.

Ze bed.

Ze view

Ze kitchen

Ze open air bathroom

We stayed there for four weeks and after a short while they figured us out. We ate nasi goreng for breakfast and one day Diana asked for more vegetables. A few days after that, every time I got my breakfast it was "SPECIAL, VERY BIG BIG". I also had to laugh every time and thanked them.

Relax like Buddha

In the end it was a very nice stay, tainted by the noise for the first half of the day. The neighborhood outstanding, the coconut juice was flowing... ah, those were the greatest times. But we had to go back "home" to Australia and the looming danger of the volcano didn't help.

Penestanan

I am not 100% sure if Penestanan is part of Ubud or not and if they grew together. I am also too lazy to look it up. The last time we were in Ubud, we visited because there was a hotel and a yoga school there that were recommended to Diana when she was in Thailand. The girl there told her that Yoga Barn was too commercial and the other school is better. It turns out that the Yoga Barn is too commercial and Intuitive Flow is smaller, more personal, more consistant in the quality of its tutors and they take more more often to correct you if you do something wrong.

Intuitive Flow.

The rooms at Yoga Barn were very nice but the one in Intuitive Flow were outstanding. I took part in two Yoga Classes. One of them were the kind of exercises you would expect, focusing on stretching, breathing and balance. The other was one where you lie down and gradually learn to sleep without losing your awareness. I fell asleep losing my awareness in a matter of minutes. Diana was laughing at me for days.

Light is always a major part in good photos.

While living in Penestanan Diana spent a lot of time in the yoga studio and I spent a lot of time programming my game and looking for jobs in Australia. We also went to the gym and Diana introduced me to Squash. In the beginning she let me win and later I let her win. But don't tell her that. I was making too many points in a row once and she wanted to give up. We probably never played a real game the whole time we were there. And we played a lot.

It looks like something out of Tomb Raider.

Other than that we explored a bit more of the restaurants in every direction, tried some new delicious food and went to walk on a trail where most of the photos were taken. Because our hotel was further away from everything, we also had to learn driving around on a scooter, constantly defying death. We also went to a place that most people seem to think is reduntant in Bali: a sauna. But it was nice there. They had a pool to cool down and of course other people from Germany.

The most vertical trees.

Our room and neighborhood was an adventure in itself. We will go into that next.

Base 29 - Canggu

OK, this is probably going to be one of the most content-free posts I have ever written. My hazy memory tells me that I did have some things to write about this place but my memory also fails to deliver. Bad memory!

Bed.

As is tradition in Bali there is no sidewalk at the side of the road. What made this neighborhood more dangerous than anywhere else is that often at the sides of the road there were no shops or whatever, just a wall or a drop to a rice field or some kind of open drain so you couldn't step sideways even for a bit.

Terrace.

Although the room was not bad, Diana hated it there because we had no privacy. There were other people walking in front of the room to get to their own rooms and so she didn't have anywhere to meditate about life and the universe as we know it. As soon as our German friends left for Germany we left for Ubud.

I added a blurry photo of the yoga place close by to make the whole thing a bit less boring.

Sorry!

Canggu

Back to Bali. But this time in the city in order to perhaps have a beach we could go swimming. Only we couldn't because most of the time they had big waves and red flags, which says that swimming is forbidden. We were told repeatedly that Canggu is beautiful but we didn't see it, presumably because we weren't in the center of it. I still managed to do some good photos.

The greenest green ever.

This post and the next one are going to be really boring. What should I write? Let me see ...

The cloudiest clouds or something?

There was a yoga school/retreat/restaurant nearby but everything except the yoga thing were luxurious but prohibitively expensive there. I went once to do a Ying Yoga class and because the trainer spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, I had to constantly think about sex during the whole duration.

I don't even know. Let me be!

I also had birthday while we were living there. Diana told me she made a reservation for McDonalds and she was so serious about it that I believed her for a while. In the end, we went to a Greek restaurant called "Nostimo" which had shockingly authentic Greek food, although they told me that they never had a Greek working there. It was like in an alternate reality.

I have a rule of not making photos of my food but I made an exception.

After our friends from the Germanies left us, we left Canggu as well.

That's all folks!

Base 28 - Gili Air

We had a bungalow and it was modern and nice.

The interesting thing happened when I lost the key. It was past midnight and we couldn't find the housekeeper or the owner, so after running around for an hour (covering half the island) trying to find the keys, Diana had the idea for us to steal borrow some yoga mats from the yoga place in order to sleep in the balcony. Which is what we did.

This bungalow had a bed

While we were taking the mats and cushions on our way out, I was surprised and loved how nonchalantly Diana went to another room and looked for some blankets with me standing around in the middle of the light with goods in my arms that were illegally taken. We brought everything back the next night without anyone noticing.

and a decent view.

Sleeping in the balcony was hard, but romantic, but even harder when the sermon started at four in the morning with a duration of two hours. The day after, the housekeeper told us that we had the only key. We went to look for them for another round, then went back, then the owner eventually woke up, climbed through the open-air bathroom ("I am Spider-Man") and opened the door from the inside. Then he changed the lock.

I bought a necklace made out of coconut shell from him.

Gili Air

The Gili islands which belong to Lombok and not Bali are lauded as some the most beautiful places you can visit. Gili Trawangan is the biggest one although they don't have much of a difference. It is the one attacting the most party people. Gili Meno is the smallest and most quiet. Gili Air is the middle one and the one we went to because it was supposed to have a decent yoga place. It also promised serenity due in part to the island not having any motorized vehicles. It was all donkeys, bicycles and some electric bikes.

No serenity for me!

Serenity on our first day.

It was all nice enough. We had some great walks, went to some nice bars and restaurants, ate some really tasty food. Sounds like everything you might want but my expectations were too high. I wasn't able to swim anywhere because the sea was very shallow and very full of corals and stones that were downright dangerous if you didn't take care. There were too many bars making lots of noise and most of the time they didn't have enough space between them to find some quiet spot. I don't understand why the need for loud house music or a band whose members count for as many people as the customers in your restaurant. And then you have some very loud bands in two restaurants adjacent to each other. Who the hell thinks this is OK?

No cars.

If all this wasn't enough, we soon found out that while Bali is an island whose style is mostly defined by Hinduism, the rest of Indonesia is ruled by Islam. This meant that every day at 4 o'clock in the morning, we would be woken up by an islamic sermon telling us through bad speakers how to live our life in a language we didn't understand. People who hate islamic countries should be forced to live in one for a couple of days and their hate will turn into compassion for their fellow human beings who have to endure this kind of shit every day for their whole life.

"Make a photo of the Devil" - Diana

Ahem! I sound mostly negative but our experience with Gili Air was mostly positive. The yoga school that Diana originally wanted to visit (H2O) proved itself dissapointing after the first visit. Luckily she found another one (Mandala Blue) that was very good. I wouldn't know. Apparently Fly Yoga is fun.

I'll try it next time we are there.