Lovina

Lovina was another tourist zone, but a spookily empty one.  Despite the fact that it was Christmas (traditionally the start of the high season in Bali) the hotel parking lots were empty, and the only people around were desperate hawkers.  Of course, with 5 hawkers per tourist, neither side was very happy with the situation. Lovina is also where I decided that I was ready to wrap up this particular set of travels.  I had been missing my friends more and more as time went on, and I certainly had enough new experiences to chew on for a while.  I had become numb to the newness of everything and it was time to start back home.

This was taken at the top of the volcano caldera on the way to Lovina.  Batur was originally in the caldera itself, but was wiped out when the volcano erupted in 1908.  Needless to say they rebuilt in caldera immediately.  After they got wiped out again in the eruption of 1923, they decided to move to the rim.

The empty grounds of the resort I was staying at.  The listed price per night was $120 (USD), but that dropped instantly to $35/night at the mention of the word "discount".  It's a bad time to own a nice hotel in Northern Bali.

The door to my bungalow.

Sidewalks only appear in tourist zones in Bali, but they're a good investment for the city.  I chose my places to stay based on whether I could walk safely or not.

This was probably the only movie theater in 50 kilometers.  No THX, no stadium seating...heck, they didn't even have Kettle-Korn(tm).

This is a specialty of the warm-climate third world, the building that you can't tell if it's finished or not.  It was a nice spot to get out of the rain, if nothing else.

The picture doesn't really pick it up, but the trunk of this coconut tree had the exact color and texture of concrete.  Even running my hand along it I couldn't be sure if it was biological or geological in nature.

The coconuts in the tree were neat to see of course, but later on I saw monkeys cracking them open by throwing them directly at the pavement from the top of the tree.  I looked up a lot more often after that.

Just another statue in Bali.  It's astounding how many there are.

I don't know what grabbed me about this statue.  It's got a mexican-easter bunny-teletubbie thing going on.

I had decided the night before to come home, but this picture clinched it for me.  Not the picture itself, but the fact that I took it while driving a left-handed manual transmission on the left side of the road in a third-world country with incredibly unpredictable traffic.  There are risky things, and there are stupid things;  taking this picture was both and it was time to go home.