while i don’t really give a shit about most of its inhabitants, i do care a great deal about our beloved mother earth. you know it’s amazing how peeps who try to cure the earth always fucking disappear into oblivion, but regardless i think we should all fight to clean up our precious dying earth and make it green again.

so recycle your cans, switch to biofuel, kill an evil ceo, ban styrofoams, or just plant a tree.  either way whatever it is that you do, happy earth day! 

while we have this 3g mobile internet for our temporary dis-office-ment we often find it very unreliable. one minute we can download at 30kBps another minute we can barely browse at 20kbps (notice the different b’s). besides living in bali means you probably wouldn’t want to stay in too much, you want to be out there in the sun, on the beach, or at any of the various cafes and restaurants out there. so we set out on a wifi hunt, me driving and vie having her laptop on her lap scanning wifi signals along the aisles of kuta.

we found quite a few, but taking speed, value, atmosphere, view, ambience, etc. into consideration, the big winner is the kuta food court. it’s right off the beach just next to minimart and if you come around 5pm and stay a while you can sip a nice drink watching the sunset between the trees. it would be a lot nicer if the food court was wider than long so there’s more view, but it’s almost always empty anyway (low season maybe?) so you can just pick a table closer to the road (which makes you closer to the beach as well) if you want to catch the sunset. drinks are fairly cheap and food is good, and the open air setting makes it all just perfect, but most importantly wifi is free and it’s decent fast (not saying a lot for bali but oh well).

after about two weeks of house hunting we finally found us a new home. it’s just off the border of kuta/denpasar and it’s within a secured housing compound. the korean lady who’s currently renting it is moving out for a bigger house, so we got a pretty sweet deal for 8 months. the house has 4 bedrooms, two of which the four of us will use, one for our guests, and another one for our office or game room (hard to decide). it has a decent swimming (or maybe just dipping) pool that can easily fit 10 for a small beer party, and a cozy gazebo next to it. there’s even a small fish pond with a cute little fountain in the front yard.

we’re moving in in about a week, in which time we’ll be busy cleaning and filling the house with whatever furniture we can find with whatever money we have left.

on another note we made new friends today, chris from germany and his fiancee. we hung out over dinner at the kuta food court and had a blast, but we had to cut it short cuz a good friend was having a fight with her tenant and we had to come to her rescue.

we left jakarta en route to bali on march 9. we made a couple stops along the way, 3 nights in semarang, and another night in surabaya. we heard a lot of stories before we left about how bad the road condition is and how everybody was worried that we won’t make it to bali safely. negative people. we knew they meant well but for some reason most indos got everything backwards. when they hope for something good they would instead wish for something bad not to happen. anyway, moving on, in semarang we met with our friend yanto and wahyu. yanto was supposed to drive with us to surabaya and then to bali but his piece of crap church bureaucracy prevented him from going. God bless those idiots.

we had a pretty great time in semarang. we loved the city, people were friendly and there were a lot of cool things to see and experience there. one of which was the old dutch railway office dubbed the lawang sewu. it means thousand windows for it had many. now it stands abandoned and it quickly became a tourist attraction because of its ghost stories. we went there on our second day in semarang and found no ghosts. the guide tried to trick us by telling us to shoot this hallway with our cameraphones. then he showed a white flying face on the phone, which turned out to be light flare from the windows at the end of the corridor. bastard. you know you only see ghosts when you believe in them.

then we went down to the dungeons. the guide didn’t want to go with us, he said there’s another guide at the entrance that can show us around, but i figured he was just chicken. so we went down to see this old water prison where the dutch and the japanese used to leave prisoners there half sunk in the water with steel grates above their heads spaced out just enough for them to stick their heads out for a breath of air. i thought it was pretty cool, not the cruelty, the place all dark and all, and how they built the small corridors and these little cubicles where they kept the prisoners. there was one cubicle where they chopped people heads off, and i swear i could almost still smell the blood.

we left semarang on the 12th. heading to surabaya was cake even though there were minor disturbances along the way. the roads were bad but they weren’t 1/10th as bad as these negative friends told us. they should just fuck themselves and stay where they are until they die. and that’s prolly what they’re gonna do anyway. people here just don’t have the word “traveling” in their vocabulary. they like to live where they were born until the day they die. sound familiar?

surabaya was horrible. bad traffic, bad structure, bad people, bad atmosphere, bad everything. there’s nothing to love about this city. even the hotel was bad and it was accor managed. we even got diarrhea there.

we left first thing in the morning. driving to banyuwangi (where to harbor is at the east end of the java island) was a long drive, but it was a beautiful drive. we especially enjoyed this area called sluke. they had green beaches spread along the coastway and it was pretty fucking amazing. there’s also this steam powered power plant and it was humongous. having this thing for massive man made structures i had a pretty great time passing that by.

the ferry ride from banyuwangi to gilimanuk was pretty much transient. vie didn’t want to get out of the car and we were surrounded by other cars and big buses so i was getting a bit claustrophobic but we were there before i knew it. didn’t see much along the way tho, just the butt of the car in front of us.

it was around 5pm when we hit gilimanuk. still another 3 hour drive to kuta after a long 7 hour drive from surabaya but at least we’re in bali already! i almost fell asleep in the ferry but as soon as we got out i was all into getting our asses to kuta. so after a 3 hour drive and getting lost in the way a little here and there, we hit kuta. we stopped by warung italia to feed our growling tummies and had what seemed like the best italian we had so far. then we spent another half an hour driving around kuta/denpasar trying to find the townhouse where we’re staying.

that sums our trip here, we’ll write more about life in bali in a few…

i don’t know why these victoria’s secret angels are standing there naked, but i know what’s missing in the picture. me!! lol. i don’t think vie would mind either, in fact she might wanna be there too. anyway feast your eyes cuz you’re staring at alessandra ambrosio, izabel goulart, miranda kerr, adriana lima, karolina kurkova and selita ebanks without their clothes on.

full image via holy taco