Saturday 12th February
Oh my god we made it to Oz!
Before leaving Bali we ventured out on the moped yet again for a final foray around the island.
We had heard that the active volcano was a site that couldn’t be missed and as it was only an hour and a half away (according to Google maps) we figured it made sense to tick that one off of the list whilst we were in town.
Two hours later we met a very kind gentleman in a traffic jam in the middle of Dempasar who kindly informed us that we were now 2 hours away from it and that unless we wanted very sore arses we should quite frankly give up.
In true British style I nodded and agreed intently before heading off in the direction he told us not to, in search of a volcano that may or may not actually exist and could potentially have just been superimposed on photographs to attract tourists to the remoter parts of the island.
The problem is this, when driving in Bali you will inevitably reach an intersection, luckily the intersections have very large signs, unluckily a lot of the signs say the same name but point in different directions.
We reached one junction that had a sign for the same town pointing in all three directions, it was in fact the town that we needed but despite seeing the same intersection on numerous occasions and despite following a different route each time, we still failed to find the elusive town.
Who wants to see a volcano anyway, we would much rather see an expensive health spa and restaurant complex, which was lucky as that was exactly where we ended up on our tour of the island, for an overpriced very late lunch and a much needed rest of our butt cheeks.
It did afford us the opportunity to look at a proper map of the island again, only this time to discover that we were a little under half way to the "volcano viewing platform", which was still a full hour from the actual volcano.
If we were to set off now we may catch a glimpse of it by mid march, however as time definitely wasn’t on our side we decided to head in the vague direction of our hotel fully expecting to inadvertently find ourselves at the volcano anyway.
Unfortunately this wasn’t to be but the day did give us the opportunity to see lots of heavily blurred Indonesian villages as we whizzed passed them and at the very least we would still have the bruises on our arses for weeks to come, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
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