Bali - getting there is half the fun (pt 2)....

Well, once we were here, we had to have some way of getting around. So, we decided to rent a car. Oh, what fun this turned out to be! The car itself was OK, but then we had to worry about getting around. Now, Bali isn't exactly designed for the tourist to be able to get around easily - the attitude seems to be "ah, don't bother your poor little tourist head about getting around, just stick to the beach and the tourist strip, and if you need to get from A to B, take a taxi. Leave driving to the locals". One village looks pretty much the same as another (yup, and the Adolf Hitler award for cultural sensitivity goes to....), with no signs saying where you are, and the general rule with road signs - where such things exist which is infrequently - is that they have to be placed right behind a tree/wall so you can't see them until you're right on top of them. We did have a map that came with the car, but I was half tempted to bring it home with me,as I'm sure it'd be just as handy to get around Dublin with it as it was to get around Bali with it. What we wanted was a road map, like an OS map maybe, with proper road signs, placenames and street names. What we got looked sort of like the sort of tourist map you'd stick up on your wall when you get home as proof that you were there, but you wouldn't really use. Unfortunately, we were using it.

After a while my impression of the person who drew the map was "more enthusiasm than accuracy", around the level of a leaving cert geography project. After another while, I began to suspect that the artist was in fact Stevie Wonder. No way of telling main roads (where such things existed) from secondary roads (or tertiary roads - yes, there are words worse than our worst irish country roads!). Roads/road junctions on the map where no road seemed to actually exist, and vice versa (as in, we'd hit a T-junction on a stretch where the map said it was just one straight road). Villages on the map where no villages existed, and villages which didn't exist on the map. Villages on the wrong roads or with their names spelled wrong. The map wasn't the only difficulty tho. The balinse attitude to road signs was that they were put up wherever they felt like it, and forget about the rest (shur the locals know where they're going anyway, right?). Then, where these rare beasts did exist, it seems a tree or bush was planted in such a position that the sign was covered so you couldn't see it until you were right on top of it. As for name signs for villages, well, forget about it too. The only way I knew where we were a lot of the time was by trying to catch the name of the place on the front gate of the local temple as we went past!

Despite all of these "challenges", we managed to get where we were going nearly all of the time, altho sometimes it was by dead reckoning (as in, "well, the sea is over there so we have to turn right here") or just stopping and asking someone. I also discovered what Joey had meant when he said that whenever he let Nina drive him to Bandung, he just closed his eyes and ignored everything that was happening on the road. Nina seems to have some sort of pathological aversion to staying behind any other vehicle for any length of time, and her overtaking maneuvers normally included the beeping of some horn, either hers to try to get the guy in front to get out of the way before we hit the bend ahead, or of the oncoming car as we swerved back in to avoid it just in the nick of time. Have you ever overtaken a car which was itself in the process of overtaking another car? Well, now I have (well, as a passenger anyway). After the first few "interesting" overtakes, I decided that if it was my time, it was my time, and if I'd managed to survive Garuda then the chances of me living through the holiday were hopefully still good!