Wombat, Wallabies, and Kangaroos

Clearly the whole "write tomorrow" thing didn't happen, but better late than never, right? This past weekend was pretty exciting. Friday afternoon Paul and Kate took us to something called "Nearer to Nature" where we got to play with some native Australian animals and learn a little about the aboriginal culture. We got to pet a wombat, hold some kagaroos, and watch a wallaby jump around. The woman who showed us the animals takes care of abandoned animals. They all stay at her house and she takes care of them until they are old enough/strong enough to be returned to the wild. Sounds like an awesome job, right? I want kangaroos jumping around my house all day.  Anyways, here are some pictures with the animals...

Wombat!

Jocelyn petting the wombat

Kangarooooo

Wallaby!

A baby opossum...kinda looks like a rat 

After we played with the animals we went and learned how to make axes the traditional, noongar way. I don't have a picture of one but, basically, you find a stick (should be about a foot long and thicker than your thumb) and you heat it in the fire, and then you take the ground resin from a plant (I forget what it's called) and put that resin on the hot wood and then heat it again, put it in the resin again, heat it up, etc. until the resin is really thick and then you put the stones in the resin and continue the resin process until the stones are firmly stuck to the stick. Pretty cool.

Making the axes

The orange stuff is the resin

Our guide (Zach) then took us on a little hike through the woods where he showed us a plant that, when you rub it with water, makes soap and found us some wild carrots. We tried the carrots and, strangely, wild carrots are spicy. After the tour, Paul and Kate took us to Dome, which is a little cafe/restuarant where we had dinner, and then they drove us back to campus.

The rest of the weekend was pretty relaxing. I stayed in for the weekend and (attempted) to do homework. Sunday I tried to do work but decided to go to the markets in Freo instead. Even though I tried hard, Saturday and Sunday were pretty unproductive but, fortunately, Monday was a good work day. Tuesday I had my internship which is finally starting to come together (yay!). Although I'm still stressing about it a little bit, I think people are expecting something a lot bigger than it will be....and we don't even have a venue yet, so that's a little worrying. But it will all get figured out soon, I hope.

Anyways, off to get ready for class.
xxx


P.S. I turn 21 in 7 days :)

I don't think Bali could have been more amazing. I was expecting to go to Bali and have a good time and experience some cultural things but....wow. Words cannot describe how much I loved it. I wish I could go back right now and can't wait until I have the time/money to visit again somebody. We (8 other students and I) spent nine days in three very different places - Kuta, Sanur, Ubud. Kuta was, by far, my favorite place, but I'll go through each individually.

Kuta

Part of the hotel

So we spent 3 nights here at a hotel called Dewi Sri Cottages. I think we paid $20 for an absolutely incredible hotel - beautiful grounds and pool, good food, kind people, and a great location right in the heart of Kuta. We got to Kuta around noon on Friday the 23rd, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, and decided to roam around the city. Honestly, it was a little overwhelming at first. It was ridiculously hot, there were people everywhere trying to pull you into their stores and sell you something, and traffic was crazy and hectic (it's almost as though they have no road laws), which made crossing the street an adventure the first time. We spent the first couple of hours exploring the streets, checking out the shops, and saying "no, thank you" every 5 seconds. We got back to the hotel and decided to lay by the pool for the rest of the afternoon. I can honestly say Bali was the first time I've experienced culture shock this past semester. Australia was very easy to adjust to for me , but the first night in Bali was the only time I've wanted to be in the comfort and security of my home in Virginia. I'd like to think I'm a pretty cultured person and that I've traveled a fair amount in my life (Kenya, Tanzania, China, etc.), but experiencing something so different on my own and, more specifically, without my parents was something I hadn't done before and I think that's what really got to me. Thankfully, that overwhelming feeling only lasted the first night and wasn't feeling that way the whole trip.

The hotel pool area

This was a funeral we saw on the first day. They were marching the bodies to the ocean, burning them, and then throwing their ashes in the ocean.

The second day, we explored Kuta some more and did a ton of shopping. Everything was so cheap. I bought six shirts for the equivalent of about US$20. Oh, and our taxi ride to the hotel, which was almost an hour long, was $6...crazy, right?! Coming back to Australia and having to spend $60 for a 25 minute cab ride definitely sucked. So we spent the first half of the day shopping and then hit up the pool again cause it was crazy hot. That night we went to some of the bars for the night. The bars in Kuta are insane. First, they're huge. One of them (The Sky Garden) was five floors and each floor had it's own type of bar (for example, on the floors was a sports bar and then they had a VIP lounge on another). Crazy. Second, they had crazy deals all the time. Drink were so so cheap. Third, they played great music and everyone had a great time. We went to another bar called The Bounty, which is also huge. They had live music, a karaoke bar, and a humongous dance floor. Sadly, I took no pictures of these places :(

Legian Street in Kuta

Random side street in Kuta

Beach at Kuta

 The third day was a beach day. The beach was pretty huge and definitely different to US beaches, mainly because people hassled you on the beach to buy things. Kind of annoying, but I think at this point we were pretty used to saying "no, thanks" all the time. Something we found a little weird was that men would go around to the american/australia/not indonesian women and take pictures of them sunbathing. While it's a little creepy, we attributed it to the fact that Bali (Indonesia in general) is very religious and women don't normally dress like we do (short shorts, tank tops, etc) so to see a girl in a bikini was something...different (?) for them. Anyways, the day at the beach was really nice and relaxing, AND I didn't get sunburned. GO ME!

The next day was our last in Kuta, so we spent the first part of the day doing a little more shopping at an incredible art gallery we found. It's called "Kaka" and it's on Legian so if you ever go to Kuta you should check it out :). After the art gallery we took a cab to our hotel in Sanur.

Sanur


Our first night in Sanur consisted of going out do to dinner and hanging out by the pool for a couple hours. Sanur wasn't very big and didn't have much going on, which was a huge contrast to Kuta, but probably needed seeing as most people were up until 6am on our last night in Kuta...whoops.

Our hotel room...it was huge.

Again. Pretty good for AU$16 a night

Beach in Sanur

Our first full day in Sanur was another beach day. We literally spent the entire day on the beach just tanning and relaxing. The beach was really nice, but when it was low tide you could walk forever and never get to water above your knees, which was kind of crazy. After, we went back to the hotel, showered, went out to dinner, and hung out at the hotel for the night. The next day we woke up early and headed to Ubud.





Ubud

The pool at the Sehadewa

The pathway to our rooms

The hotel

Trash was everywhere the first time we went to the markets

The markets

Ubud was what I considered to be the
cultural part of our trip. While Kuta was definitely a place to experience, Ubud was full of temples, rice paddies, waterfalls, and so much more. Our first day we dropped our stuff off at the hotel (the Sewaheda Resort and Spa) and walked around. We walked to the markets, which were a 20-30 minute walk from our hotel. We thought Kuta was overwhelming but, damn...these markets were insane. There were hundreds of little stores, which meant even more people trying to entice you to buy their jewelry, dresses, shirts, and other souvenirs. All of us walked in intending to spend over an hour shopping and all ended up walking out 10 minutes later because we couldn't handle it. Maybe it was because it was raining or because it smelled of trash or because it was late in the day so children were out begging for money or maybe we were just tired, but none of us could do it. Instead, some of use decided to go to the Monkey Forest for a couple hours.

More of the markets

I wasn't too keen on going to the Monkey Forest at first because monkey's kind of freak me out, but these guys were pretty cute. A lot of them liked to jump on people and one of them tried to open up someone's purse and go through it, which was pretty funny. You could buy bananas from the people working there and if you held the banana above your head the monkeys would literally climb up your body to get it. I didn't do it, but a couple of people in our group did. So we spent a few hours there then headed back to the hotel to shower and get ready for dinner. I would put in a picture of the monkeys but I'm having a real problem formatting everything today sooo I'm just gonna skip on that...sorry, guys.

We had booked an elephant tour for the next day, so we woke up early and our driver took us to ride some elephants! The ride lasted about 30 minutes and it was pretty incredible. They're huge animals but also so docile and so sweet. While it was fun to ride the, it was also pretty sad to see the conditions they lived in. The majority of the day they were tied up in chains in a tiny concrete building and, during the ride, they had to walk on concrete paths the majority of the way which is obviously not natural to them. I don't regret going on the ride, but they definitely could have lived in better conditions. We sat at lunch and you could see the elephants tied up and for the entire time we ate one of the elephants was trying to get out of his chains. That broke my heart, it was so sad to see. It's hard to justify doing something like that and paying to support it but it's also  hard for me to sit here and say (and to hear other people say) that it's such a terrible thing when I've gone to zoos and circus' my entire life. Despite the bad treatment (and my mixed feelings towards the whole thing) it was still an amazing experience.

After the ride we got to feed them!

andd we got to pose with them 

They also had this random honey bear at the elephant tour.
This picture was taken right after she licked my face.

So we fed her and in other pictures I have you can see
 her  putting her paws around me. So cute.

We originally thought that the elephant tour was going to be an entire day event, but we were wrong. So after the tour we quickly got organized and had the hotel get us a van so we could explore Ubud more. We headed to the Elephant Cave which had both a Hindu and a Buddhist temple, which were both beautiful. There was also a jungle temple we took a hike to. We didn't really see the temple part of it, but the view and the scenery was gorgeous.

Where we hiked to

After the Elephant Cave we went to a waterfall and a temple. Our guide said the waterfall was a "small" one in comparison to others in Bali, but this one seemed pretty big to me. At least compared to ones in Australia.

The only picture of the temple I have,
my camera died soon after this was taken.

waterfall

So again, after all the touring we went back to the hotel, showered, and went out to dinner. The next day the majority of the group rented motorbikes and drove through Ubud  and toured on their own. My friend Cara and I didn't feel too comfortable doing that (seeing as people are mad when they drive in Bali) so we decided to go on a bike tour. We were picked up by our guide at 8am, taken to a place where they make coffees, teas, and spices. We then were taken to pick up our bikes and rode for a little over two hours with our guide downhill through rice paddies and villages. I had a ton of fun on this tour and I don't think I've ever said "hello" so many times in my life. Every time we went through a village children would come out and say hi to us. But the tour guide was very helpful and knew a lot.

My ability to be descriptive is clearly fading and I'm struggling at writing the rest of this entry. But basically, we did the bike and went out to dinner that night. The next day we headed back to the markets and braved the chaos that makes the markets so memorable. We shopped (a lot...way more than I planned) and then headed back to the hotel for a few hours before we made our way to the airport to catch our flight home.

We did some stuff today (Friday) but I'm too tired to write it out so I'll do that tomorrow.
Again, this post looks like crap cause pictures hate me, so I'm sorry if there are a bunch of spaces and blank spots and the photos look disorganized, but I can't figure out what to do to fix it.

Write tomorrow.
xxx