Balitime, excellent!

Bali was nice, I recommend it. Although, thinking back, we didn't really do much there, so this might be quite a short blog. Mostly we just hung out by our pool working on our tans, had some spa treatments and checked out the local restaurants. Perfect holiday behaviour, really.

We did take a car into Kuta one day to check the place out and do a spot of shopping. One must fine-tune one's haggling skills from time to time, just to them sharp. The Balinese are generally lovely, calm, unaggressive types but that all changes a bit when they've got you in their shop. Then it's the hard sell all the way, baby! One lady was absolutely astonished that Hulda only wanted to buy one pair of shorts from her and quite offended that I didn't want any shorts at all. Well, until I pointed out that my bottom wouldn't possibly fit into any of the shorts she had for sale. She conceded the point and let us be on our way. It was fun to go out and look at tat and buy a couple of things.

The highlight of our stay in Bali, and certainly the most interesting thing to write home about was our day of adventure. We went on a fun-filled tour around southern Bali. In the morning we went white water rafting on the Ayung river. It only had grade 1 and 2 rapids, so not too strenuous or scary but quite good fun. It's a good thing too, because the other people in our boat were really crap rowers so we would probably have gotten into trouble in a bigger river. Luckily, us Asbjornsdottir sisters have AWESOME rowing skillz! (And we also had a great river guide who may have had some part in us getting succesfully to the end). For the last part of our trip we jumped off our boat into the river and floated downstream. A beautiful sensation.

After a shower and change of clothes we had a most excellent lunch in Ubud. Then, that very afternoon, one of my childhood dreams came true. I got to ride an elephant! Woohoo! It was kind of what I had expected, only slightly more scary. Our elephant was an extremely skittish creature and on a couple of occasions she got startled. You don't really want to be on top of a startled elephant, they're not easy to control and they are absolutely massive! We had to hold on for dear life. It was still amazing, though.

The next day we had very achy muscles. I'm not sure whether it was from the rowing or from holding on to the elephant. Well, folks, that's pretty much it. We only had 5 days in Bali, so we didn't have time to do more exciting things. One facinating (in my opinion) thing that I learned in Bali is that Asta is an Indonesian name. So is Gusti, that was our river guide's name. Bintang is good but Bagus is great. Air is water.

Kisses!