Yeah, Bedugul is amazing, also the road up to it, really exhilarating. I will have to come back to Bali and climb Agung. Now temporarily stranded in KL on the way to Papua. I’ll be in Papua till January, so if you decide to go there I would gladly help you with info or contacts 🙂

I love Bedugul! Strawberry Hill is one of the nicest places to stay on the island, I think, particularly for the mountains. Whereabouts are you living now?

Ha, If you do take them, don’t pay more than 50 000 rupiah. The bastards are asking 200 000 at first.

Yeah, of course, I mean, if those people are too lazy to even explore the island, too bad for them. It’s a bit like landing in rue Saint-Denis, staying there for a week whoring and doing drugs and then declaring that Paris is but a filthy town full of aging hookers. Kuta for me is a kinda functional place- the shortest ride to the beach from Denpasar (and Ubud probably). Carrefour is there nearby, Galeria… But for living in Bali, I guess most sane people choose some other place. I miss Bali already, especially those winding roads up to Bedugul, those misty mountains, food. Good luck on your next stay there 🙂

Yeah, I’ve heard of women sunbathing not just in bikinis but actually topless by the mosque.

Kuta has its pleasures, I’d agree, notably Waterbom and the Bali Galeria, and Seminyak’s great for Italian food. I think why I’m so anti-Kuta is that whenever people slag off Bali, which I love, and where we will soon be based, they’re talking from a brief experience of Kuta. Go to Kuta for a couple of days, think they’ve done the island, and then slag it off at immense length.

This talk of shrooms is making me miss hallucinogens. Stop it 🙂

People bash Kuta because they’re looking for wrong things there. Like authentic Bali or something.There is a good deal of shady things happening there. Muggings, rapes on the beach, drug dealing, lots of prostitution. Magic shrooms are used wrong way. I saw drunk backpackers helping themselves to a magig shake at night on the way from one club to another. Big mistake.

Gili Trawangan, though, is really a trap. An evil place where you curse yourself for coming there the minute you step on the shore. They have maybe 70-80 percent of beach boys on crystal meth. These idle annoying creatures are like stray dogs there. They are everywhere and they are brazen and often quite aggressive. There is one place there where everybody goes to take exstasy. I think it’s run by a Dutch or British expat who is dealing pills big time. There are few quite places and even there you feel trapped. They offer shrooms everywhere but there is no environment to take them. The most bizarre for me was to hear the prayer call from the mosque all the time while walking along semi naked Western girls and local beach boys on crystal meth ogling them from the shady wooden platforms where they hang day in day out.

Actually, we did eat at Scallywags — twice. They were trying, and got close, but it wasn’t a patch on some of the restaurants in Ubud. But it was their Gili Air arm, not the Gili T one — so I’ll reserve judgement.

When you’re in Kuta, check out Astari, up the hill on the dreadful road — really good veggy cuisine — also Family Cafe for Lombok food (the sate are amazing).

You can find fairly deserted beaches on Lombok, easily. Also on Sumbawa, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Sumbawa. The beaches on Pulau Derawan feel fairly deserted. And I suspect there are loads of gorgeous beaches along Flores that are yet to be explored.

90s raver?! How dare you be so accurate? Ahem. It was only weed I got offered in Phnom Penh, actually. Not shrooms.

Indeed… Mind you, one can get beach fatigue.

SO SHOOT ME!