G’day Mate

From the dirty back lanes of Kuta to the fresh aired parks and tidy streets that belong to one of the most isolated city’s in the world…..The city of light’s.

The barrels and Landscape photos are coming thick and fast, although the photography has taken a back seat since the 0.0 tides kicked in on the Bukit peninsula. Racetracks is the name of the game with evenings being spent under the relentless crystal lips that pound down on the sharp reef lurking a few feet below the surface. If I had to mention one reason I keep coming back to Bali, for all of what it’s amazing for, the moments in these photos would be it. There is nothing better then getting shacked, whether it’s in home or foreign seas. What’s realistically about, on average, 3 to 5 seconds spent zooming through a barrel oddly seems like minutes within. Then after the session with all this tube time clocked up you just switch off to everything else around you and look vacantly into thin air replaying the moments back in your head. Sitting down to dinner with friends and trying to pull away from this uncontrollable daydream is hard work.

After landing on probably the world’s best runway (built in the minds of surfers wanting to check the surf ASAP) that belongs to Bali, the first objective was to cross over to Nusa Lembongan and what now seems our home from home, we just can’t get enough of it. It’s been 8 days now and I’m still trying to find a morning/evening to steal a scene from the seaweed farms of mount Agung. I know the volcanoes show themselves during these hours as I have some shots already. There’s always room for improvement though, especially with the files on my card. The mornings so far have proved difficult as there has been too much cloud cover, likewise in the evenings. This doesn’t mean I haven’t taken any photos at all within being here; I’ve been trying my hand at travel photography which is turning out to be pretty exciting stuff.

Yellow folks. After the gruelling task that was shaking off the comforts of Loog Choob, we are steadily going back to backpacker basics again. Krabi town, Ao Nang, Railey and Ko Lanta are the places we have been. Krabi town at first sight a few weeks ago seemed a ghost town and not worth hanging around for, but we keep coming back. The night markets are great. The Sunday gone was a big one, with every Tom, Dick and Harry getting involved. The photo below is the painted man; he just stands dead still at the entrance to the market and lets people paint whatever they want on him. He certainly pulls the crowd. The kids where loving it more than most painting on there names and doodling. One thing that struck me when watching/framing this was that if he did this in any western country, especially England, you can bet your last green queen that he would be covered in all sorts of rude wording and drawings. Not here though. I managed to get this shot with the people walking around him before I somehow stole his show and everyone started staring into my lens. Its funny what a big camera makes people do, usually they find there compacts and snap away next to me like I’ve struck oil or something. I noticed a few business cards where left in his box by restaurants that are based in Ao Nang, his future looks bright.

Bloody hell, we have been on the road a fair bit in Thailand and I’ve just managed to find some time to write an update while on the 14 hour bus trip back to Krabi from Bangkok. 14 hours is a long time, but these coaches are nothing like our English ones. They are really comfortable and the seats recline back a long way to get a good eye lid inspection. So we landed in Phuket which was not our cup of tea really. We booked in from Bali at some cheap beach huts in the north of the island, and it turned out they were in the middle of no where, which is nice if we knew about this in advanced. Lucky they had a restaurant on site which served the best red Thai curry yet, I'm keeping tabs on this. So two nights was had there eating, chilling and getting bitten to death by stupidly big mosquitos. There are some very deep craters in both our feet. Strong deet was brought soon after. It didn’t help that we was right next to a pond and the only blood source around.

Ahhhh Nusa Lembongan, an island east of Bali. Always a welcome break from the non-stop hassling street’s of Kuta. Roughly an hour by public boat from Sanur and your blessed with a quite 100% Hindu island with awesome waves and an amazing unqiue view of Bali. We arrived with the idea of staying at kutu losmen bungalows, as this has been a cheap home stay for the last few times we have visited. But after seeing what’s there now it looked and upon asking, definitely was out of our price range. 600,000rp a night compare to the usual 150,000rp it always was. Lembongan Made Inn on the other hand, was in our budget and what a bargain too. Four brand new, Java built, coconut wood apartments/huts within spitting distance of the lagoon, all for 150,000rp a night. (£10.50)

Ear infection, this was a whole new game to me, my suspicion of the hotel swimming pool being the main corporate for this quite frankly nasty swollen ear ache business was flushed down the drain when I took a copy of surfing lines and read an inside article on Kuta beach and its untreated sewage problems. I believe that most surfers that make the pilgrimage here know of this including myself. Yet still I seemed to think I would be alright and one of the few lines said to Kara was “I’ve never had a problem with it before, so I’ll be all right, right?”