Relaxing on the Beach.

I reached Bali around 5PM, and booked an official airport cab to my hotel for about $10. I'd found Semawang Beach Hotel's listing through Hostel world, but it's a proper hotel with individual rooms, beds turned down every day, and soap and towels provided. There was even a television in my room, though I don't know if it worked, since I never plugged it in.

Semawang is actually a tiny neighbourhood just south of Sanur, on the south-eastern coast of Bali. On the south western side of the island lies Kuta, the 24-7 funspot with surf-ready waves, nightlife, and a constant party made up of young surfers from Australia and around the world. Sanur was described to me by Don and Lacey as "Kuta in a Cardigan"--laid back, with plenty of little boutique shops and good restaurants, life in Sanur is all about the beach resort mentality.

Between Saturday, when I arrived, and Tuesday, when I climbed aboard a bus for Ubud, I did gloriously little. I walked the tiny storefronts, haggled for a few gifts for friends, and wandered the sandy, calm beaches. Sanur has a big breaking sand shelf about 100m from the beach proper, so the waves are barely more than a ripple when they reach the shore. The distant crash of the big waves on the shelf and the rush of the little ones lapping the sand is calm and relaxing, and the temperature seems impossibly perfect most of the time.

Semawang Beach Hotel is the kind of amazing, tucked-away place that deserves to be full of people, but is so valuable specifically because it always seems to be empty, and the owners and staff are so happy to see you, you start to wonder if there is anyone there at all. They serve a wonderful continental breakfast of toast and fresh fruit and thick, strong coffee (or tea or papaya juice, if you request it), and in addition to a wonderful book shelf full of left books in English, Dutch, and French, they also have a miniature pool table with balls roughly the size of a spherical Egg, and even a tiny pool on the roof, with little Hindu statue fountains. It's barely larger than a hot tub, but it's great for washing off the salt when you get back from the beach.

The restaurants in the area are quite good. Donald's serves an excellent Soto Ayam (a sort of chicken soup with boiled egg and noodles) and there is a fantastic place called Little India right at the end of the main beach road, where I had absolutely brilliant Chicken Tikka Masala.

On my first day in Sanur, I had spent some time wandering on the beach.

In the process, I inadvertently scammed a kid out of about twenty cents while negotiating for sunglasses.

See, what had happened was. . . I'd grabbed my room key, a towel, and thrown on a shirt and swim shorts, and stepped into my flip flops. The plan was, wander the beach, swim if I felt like it, maybe buy some ice cream or what have you. So I didn't bring along my wallet, I just stuffed all my spare change in the same pocket with my room key. This way I didn't have to worry about losing anything valuable, I figured.

The largest coin value in Indonesia is 500 IDR. Roughly speaking, it's a nickel. Everything else is bills. So you can shove 18,000 rupiah in your pocket and feel like, sure, that's probably enough to get what you want, unless you want a full meal or something. More importantly, if you just grab the pile of bills and shove them in your pocket, you might forget the total, and think you're carrying 25,000 rupiah or so.

In truth though, you're carrying around like, $1.75.

So I get a block down the beach and the glaring, burning sun reminds me that I'm in need of new sunglasses. So as I'm wandering, I run across this little hut, where a kid of probably 17 tries to strike up a conversation as I'm strolling past so that I'll buy his random crap. Just so happens, his random crap includes sunglasses--Adidas and Oakley brand (and I'm the king of Denmark), and so when he asks if I need sunglasses, I realize I do.

He offers me a pair for fifty, and I ask him about a different, cheaper pair, for which he offers thirty. I counter asking for him to sell me a pair for twenty, and after some back and forth he cuts 1/3rd off the price of the cheaper ones.

So we agree to the deal, and I go to pull out my money and discover I've got 18,000 on me. I feel pretty bad about this. Bad enough that I turn out my pockets to prove to him I haven't hidden the rest of my cash on my person as we quibble about what happens next.

My suggestion is that I don't buy the sunglasses (untenable of course, he wants this sale) and go get the money, and I'll come back and buy the glasses when I go out for lunch. Truth is, I would have too, they're durable, hilariously they bear the Oakley O, and they're $2, I'm fine with that. Of course, he doesn't like this option because he figures I won't come back (fair enough, that would probably be most people) and he wants me to give him the 18k now, take the glasses, and bring him the other 2k later (untenable, I hate owing anybody money, last of all some random kid who sells sunglasses on the Bali boardwalk).

After a lot of quibbling he finally decides that since we're such good friends, him being from Georgia, after all (Denmark and Sweden both, actually), he'll give them to me for 18,000.

Oops. Lesson reminded: always carry as much cash as I agree to pay, and then some.

On the same walk, I passed near a rather large shade tree, and as I'm going a middle aged Indonesian woman darts from under a big shade tree towards me, with the now familiar greeting of "Hello Mister, you want massage?" This last is usually called out in a singsong cadence that I can't write out phoneticaly, but it's both charming and annoying as hell at the same time. Walking on the beach in Bali, you get asked this question by a woman about every fifty feet. There are 4 million people on this island, and it seems like 1/4 of that number are masseuses, and another 1/3rd are taxi drivers.

Thing is, she's actually quite nice compared to the others--she's polite, persistent without being pushy, encouraging without whining, and she tells me the price is 50,000 Rupiah. Now I'm not planning to get a massage that day, I'm planning to cut inland to the main drag of shops and restaurants and walk back to my hotel that way, but I promise her that if I come back by her little booth, and I want a massage, I'll come to her and her sister "Linda" (which one was called Linda, or if they both answered to Linda, I never figured out).

It's inconsequential since that probably wouldn't be her real name if she's a Balinese native anyway--the Balinese only have four common names: Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut. These correspond to "first borne" through "fourth borne" respectively, and they loop ("Wayan Balik"--Firstborne again) when they reach five. The only variations in these names are related to which Caste you're part of. Probably 90% of the Balinese natives you meet will have one of these four names.

Anyway I promised "Linda" or "Linda's Sister" that I'd come to them if I wanted a massage.

So the next day, having been asked so many times in the past 36 hours if I wanted a massage that I was pretty sure I wanted one even if I discovered that Balinese massage involved getting struck with a tack hammer, I decided to visit their little operation. So I repeated the same process as the previous day, I walked up the beach until I reached the Lindas. They greeted me warmly and I confirmed the price, and then told them I was going swimming, and asked them to look after my stuff. The Balinese are an incredibly cool people, and I really don't think it would ever cross the mind of a legitimate business man (or woman) to pilfer from the money you left sitting with your sunglasses and room key and towel while you swam. It appears beyond them. They become very focused on closing the deal, and I honestly think many of them would probably not steal the money, even if they could do it without getting found out, specifically because doing so would keep them from earning it off you when the deal finally went down.

Regardless, I was only carrying about 120,000 rupiah that day anyway. So I left it all on a chair near their tiny table of bottled water and their three massage tables, and swam around in the calm, clear water of the Indian ocean for a few minutes. Clear, unfortunately, does not mean free of detritus, it just means it is much easier to see the detritus at hand. Sanur's beaches are beautiful, but there is a good deal of seewead, even in the shallower areas, and it breaks constantly, leaving little floating seaweed tips strewn out in long lines created by the waves. They look like a bunch of kids on their first day in marching band, vaguely oriented and all facing the same way, but always a little out of line and constantly wavering as each tiny wave rushes in.

So I swam for a few minutes, ignoring the seaweed (the stuff on the surface didn't bother me as much as the stuff I swam over, which I like when I'm snorkeling, but which always makes me jumpy when I'm swimming blind) and then came back to the massage area.

Afterward, I went back to the Lindas and followed their instructions, they washed the sand from my feet to keep from getting the table gritty, and then one of them gave me a massage that felt like it lasted three, maybe four hours. She massaged my back and shoulders and arms and legs and feet and hands and fingers and toes and neck and forehead and jaw and even the bridge of my nose. In reality, it probably took a bit over half an hour.

It was marvellous. The Aussie who finished on the other table while I was halfway through mine said he felt like he "could just float away" and while I wouldn't go that far, I could see his point. I found out later from other people's comments that I'd stumbled across two of the cheapest and best masseuses on the beach, most places charging more like 60 or 70 thousand for a similar service.

On an amusing side note, the previous day, I had decided to shave my beard. I wanted it to grow back in, but I didn't want to pay to have it trimmed and I didn't bring a beard trimmer. So I shaved the whole thing off, but left the moustache, because (a) I thought it still looked better than being completely cleanshaven and (b) it looked kindof hilarious.

Apparently, this was a mistake. In the next twenty-four hours, I would be asked if I was looking to meet a girl by not one, not two, but three different men. Apparently traveling alone with a moustache in Bali = sex tourist.

The last straw was as I was paying up for the massage, when the very sweet and incredibly skilled masseuse in whose hands I had just spent the last half hour, like clay on a throwing wheel, asked me--in a voice that barely carried to my ear--if I wanted a "special massage". I declined her offer with as demure a smile as I could manage, and went straight back to the hotel and shaved the damn moustache.

Overall though, despite more than a few pushy shop keepers and the spate of offers for an Indonesian girl, I really liked Sanur. It was quiet and cool, the people were friendly, the food outstanding. I decided that my time in Bali would be restful--a vacation within a vacation--so I decided that after Ubud, I would come right back to Sanur and relax for a couple more days.