Okay I’m just going to start this out by saying I said in the last blog, which was 4 weeks ago, that I was going to update this weekly until we leave. 4 weeks. Zero blogs. Not the best look. Honestly that’s my bad. Regardless, in the one month since I last wrote, we have actually been doing some pretty cool stuff. The main thing was the Northern Roadtrip. Just some guys on motorbikes ripping along the Bali coastline. Our first stop was Amed, where we were up before the sun fishing for mahi-mahi. We weren’t having much luck until our zen master of a captain hooked a “small” fish, and was willing to give it to one of us, but as Mark had injured both wrists in a skateboarding incident days earlier and Kevin was feeling the effects of sitting in the tin can boat in rough seas, the responsibility of reeling in this beast was forced upon me. Unwilling to say no, and knowing that even if I had the captain wouldn’t have understood me, I took the rod. As soon as I got the rod, the fish started breaching the surface like a great white going after some poor seal. I’m used to catching Sunnys with hotdogs so when I first saw this, I was shocked that a fish could do anything remotely interesting like that. I loosened up my grip for a second. Big mistake. The fish, which I can only imagine must have been some sort of marine version of the Tasmanian Devil, proceeded to pull so hard I nearly fell out of the boat. After a 10-minute fight, the fish was close enough to the boat for our captain to get it on board. We headed back to shore with some breakfast. We cooked the fish up with some locals on the beach, then proceeded to feast.
After the cookout, we headed to the base of Mt. Batur. The ride to Batur was incredible, culminating with a trip up a borderline illegal grade of incline. The town at the base of Mt. Batur is situated on Lake Batur, and the views in the valley are absolutely stunning. We posted up in a hostel for the night, reluctantly agreeing to be woken up at 3 am to walk up an active volcano. By 5:45, we were at the top, seeing Lombok’s volcano Mt. Rinjani in the distance, with the sun rising above the horizon behind it. The hike and sunrise was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced. We hiked around the rest of the peak, seeing steam pour out of various point on the volcano. We were back at the hostel by 10:30. We ate and immediately went to sleep for essentially the entire day. We woke up at around 4, and headed up to Singaraja, the largest city in the North of Bali. After spending a night there and going for a much more relaxed fishing excursion, we headed back to the Bukit Peninsula.
The following week was the study week, where we sat at the pool for 5 hours a day all week. A familiar face arrived this week when our friend landed last night. After staying up until 6:30 and finally catching up, I went to bed knowing my language exam was only 2 hours away, followed by 3 grueling days of finals. The first day went as well as they could have given my physical and mental state at the time. This afternoon we decided to show Fox around the island and show him some beaches, from Balangan down to Uluwatu. And that leads us to this very moment, where I am writing this so I don’t have to do school work. I may just write blogs every day this week as a means of procrastinating.
Good on ya.
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A Guy Abroad 