Kuta, day off

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My brother arriver yesterday evening and my mum and Gilles very early this morning. We are now all together in Bali for 10 days. Tomorrow we will start travelling around Bali so today we have a look around. Because of the dense traffic and our lack of knowledge about the fact that we were not sure if we could rent a scooter straight away we decided to take to bicycles provided by the hotel. They are definitively not the best one… First of all they are small, the gears don’t work on all of them we can’t change the height of the seatpost and the breaks are really light. Nevermind, Balinese people will pay attention to us, we expect!

We have been visiting the Seminyak again and found a nice place for lunch. We did some shopping (especially Gilles) at a market and went back to the hotel painfully. The hotel is great, the staff is so nice but their bicycles are in very bad condition. They did not even gave us locks haha :-)

Later this afternoon, we came back on a second tour with Max and Gilles. We spent an hour or two cycling around to find a car to rent. It’s quite tricky because most of the time there is only a tiny sign saying “rent car” and when we are in the middle of the traffic it’s not that easy to have eyes everywhere. Finally we managed to get fairly new car to rent for 9 days at 200.000 rupiah per day. This is a good price from what we read in the guide book. The guy was nice. We could see the car (it’s not always the case). He will come tomorrow early afternoon directly to our hotel from where we will start our trip. Nice!

At the same time I wanted to find an inner tube for my bike. There is a lot of scooter repair shops along the road but none of them sell or know about a bicycle shop in this area. A guy told us that there was one about an hour from where we were at that time which was a way too far. I will have to find one before I start travelling again because the last two Schwalbe inner tubes I bought are far too small. If I got another puncture I won’t be able to repair them.

Today I’ve experienced my first trade as one of my thong was definitively broken. We found a shop, I chose a new pair and asked for the price. The guy proposed me 400.000 rupiah. What!? That means $40 AUD! Are you crazy?! I said 40.000. He said 200.000. I said “no, no, 40.000”. He said 150.000. I said, ok 50.000. He said 100.000. Finally Gilles came to help and I paid 70.000 for a fake pair of Havaianas thongs. I’m pretty sure I’ve still paid the tourist price. This guy would truly rip me off if I had accepted his first price. I will have to push myself to trade better and better each time if I want to stay in my budget because I feel I’m going to spend event more money than in Australia.

After that we came back to the hotel and prepared our trip for the next 9 days. See ya!

2 thoughts on “Kuta, day off

  1. Nobody pays the price as sellers says, Always 5 ~10 min extra time needed for bargaining. Sometimes I can’t be bothered and leave, then quite often they chase after me for my price… I like fixed price like supermarkets, so easy.

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