Chris' Travels

You Gitgit

The waterfall of GitGit.

What a name. I wish I hadn't been in a packed minibus unable to reach my pockets when we drove by. anyway just so you know. the famous twin waterfall of gitgit exists.

So, The Balinese character. Met me on the main road when my bus dropped me off yesterday. spoke very good English. Gave me a lift to the hotel I wanted to go to and was generally overly helpful. But the eyes. the eyes. the eyes weren't telling me me his mouth was. He "looked" shifty. He showed me a lot of necklaces that he sells. explained that he sells them for 4000000 pounds each and would give me an extra special price. Anyway I arranged a boat trip with him and said goodbye. well that was yesterday.

This morning, my new friend, kutard (custard? I'm not really sure) banged on my door at 545 as arranged: I was off Dolphin hunting. Custard hold told me "100% we'll see them". I was sceptical but see them we did.
Imagine for a moment the end of the rolex/volvo/luis vuitton round the world boat race. The winning boat coming inti port surrounded by a flotilla of small ships welcoming home their heroes. Welcome to dolphin hunting Bali style. 50 or 60 small boats all head out about 6km off shore, and travel up the coast of Bali's north shore looking for dolphins minus the race winning clipper43 class 2.
Surprisingly with this much surface boat action the dolphins still showed up. What was surprising was the first time they showed up was RIGHT next to my boat. I say my as I charted it all on my lonesome. Actually what happened after that was a little bit of an anticlimax. That's because dolphin hunting is not an exact science. Instead it's just an old man steering the boat where he "feels" they may surface next.
It was good. In fact it was awesome. These amazing animals were so close, and where surfacing not for food, and I'm sure it wasn't that they "liked being watched" they were surfacing as they fed as that's what they do au naturel. This wasn't Seaworld, Orlando, this was the world, just off the coast of Bali. The amount of people that were watching made the whole thing a little less personal. Likewise seeing boats miss a head on collision by meters after accelerating full speed towards the surfaced dolphins took away some of the romance. but still it was what it was and we didn't get closer than that first pass. (n.b. My photos of the event are poor but when they pop out of the water for less than a second, you come here and try, in fact I suggest you do).
My friend custard took me to his dads house for breakfast (turned out Custard's dad was the "captain" of the boat. They cooked up some bready ricey coconut milky types of food that was good and then for his generosity I bought 6 of custard's necklaces, at a price significantly less than he was quoting obviously.
His dad's house was right on the beach but sadly had an Aby Ghraib feel to the place. not the chains or torture chambers (though there were some closed doors) but very basic. plain concrete blocks, sheet tin roof. Ill fitting doors. It made me glad I'd help custard and his family even a little after the hospitality they'd shown but the best was still to come.
He was going to pick me up at lunch time to see the traditional slaughter of a pig. (It's Blainsese New Year here right now) Not that exciting you say but it was a chance to See something off the Tourist circuit, and those are the things that make a trip. 12 o'clock came and went as did 1 and 2pm I guessed again that old shifty eyes had done a runner with the money I'd paid for the morning and was in a bar making himself happy. I love having a healthy cynicism.
Actually he'd thought I may not enjoy seeing animal murder so instead picked me up three hours late. fair enough.

So I sat there the only farang at his brothers house eating real Balinese food with my hand (the right one of course, we all know what the left one's for) Chatting to his cousins, cousin's children. cousin's children's aunt's sister's brother's children too. they have big families here, oh and several wives (Custard has 2, his "papa" has 4).
Went home to the hotel. slept. Genuinely tried to ear Balinese food this evening, but ended up with a ver boring fried rice with a large prawn cracker and that was that.

By the way I've added some photo's to flickr, just a few to give a taste.

And so tomorrow a new phase, I'll be moving on and will report back on Friday what's going down. And what going down will hopefully not be the boat I'll be travelling on.

Until next time.

posted by Chris @ 11:58 am