Padangbai
The bus trip to Makassar was long and winding, and our driver was a passionate, conflicted man. He could never decide which he loved more, the gas pedal or the brake. Fortunately there was a conductor on the bus, and he was well-prepared for the chronic nausea that resulted. He had a pile of small black shopping bags to hand out to sufferers. One simply needed to ask for “plastik.”
On a particularly twisty bit of road, with the sounds of vomiting all around us, Roxane finally succumbed to motionsickness. I followed the example I had seen on our last bus and made my way to the rear to throw it out the window. My luck was bad, though – with all the trash filled gutters we’ve seen all across Indonesia, the one time I want to throw a bag of puke out the window of a moving bus, we’re on the equivalent of Main Street, Sulawesi. All around were sparkling sidewalks and well-tended yards. I just couldn’t bring myself to drop a barf bag in someone’s yard, so I waited by the window until we crossed a bridge. I swung and threw . . . And heard a wet splat as the bag hit a strut at thirty miles per hour. Oh well, the next rain will clean it up.
The ride got easier after that, and we watched the architectural transition from Torajan style homes to the more practical but still elegant Bugis houses of the south. From the bus terminal there was a surprisingly long ojek ride into Makassar proper before we reached our hotel. Our drivers balanced the scooters surprisingly well despite each having a large Westerner and a large Western backpack perched awkwardly on the back.
From Makassar we flew to Bali. When we left here we swore never to return to Kuta, where the traffic and agressive hawkers made our last stay unpleasant. Also, leaving the airport, we were determined to skip the expensive taxis and catch a bemo. Once we got walking, though, we were enjoying ourselves too much to stop, so we just kept wandering north and wound up, naturally, in Kuta. From there it was easy to catch a bemo to downtown Denpasar, and then another, and another, and another. Each time we changed vans the new driver tried endlessly to convince us to hire him to take us all the way to Padangbai for a higher price. each time we refused, but with all the transfers and all the arguing it took quite a long time to arrive, and we were exhausted.
We didn’t expect much of Padangbai, a little port town whose only claim to fame is as the departure point for ferries to Lombok. But when we arrived, we were so charmed by the peaceful beach with its line of fishing boats and a vegetarian restaurant that we decided to stay an extra day.
The next morning we started by wandering around town. It didn’t take long to see most of the place, and we were just finishing up near the town gate when Roxane spotted a little staircase leading up into the woods. Naturally we climbed it. The stairs continued long after we thought they’d stop, and led us high onto a hilltop where we finally arrived at a cellphone tower. Disappointed at first, we continued around the side and discovered the trail continued onto a ridge. We followed this little path for hours, expecting at any moment it would peter out or descend back to Padangbai. We crossed grazing land, met two women and their cow, saw a family temple, and finally came to another cell tower! From here we descended the east side into another bay entirely, Labuhan Anuk. From the hill we could see bulk freighters crawling in to a long pier, and the huge white spheres and tanks of a petroleum transfer site and we figured this was purely a working harbor. But when we got closer, we saw a big group of tourists swimming from an offshore platform and getting towed around behind a speedboat. Indeed, when we finally reached the bottom of the hill we found this bay was another, even smaller, tourist attraction.
After lunch we returned to Padangbai and went snorkelling at Blue Lagoon before dinner. The next day we boarded a Perama boat for the five-houe trip to Gili Air, off the Lombok coast.