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Text by Snookums, Pictures by Filbert

Part Twenty-nine

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October 25 (Saturday, Day 39, Padang Bai, Bali, Indonesia - Continued)

While returning to the Padang Bai beach in the canoe, Snookums noticed that one of the passengers in the tender looked like Charlotte so she yelled. Sure enough, Charlotte and Gary were on the tender that was getting ready to unload at the pier right when we were ready to "dock" on the beach. Filbert took Gary's picture and Gary leaned out of the tender and took our picture in the dugout canoe.

Gary's photo of the adventurers

More after the jump . . . We got out of the canoe and decided to go back to the ship, as is, to clean up. So, we rode the tender back to the ship wearing our bathing suits and no shoes. We quickly showered and cleaned up in order to go back out to see the rest of Padang Bai.

We took the tender back to Padang Bai and witnessed some happy crew people. Many of the crew are from Indonesia so lots of them had family members waiting for them in Padang Bai. Some of the crew were given six hours of free time to see their family and some of the families came from Jakarta which is a two-hour flight to Denpasar and then another 1 hour drive to Padang Bai! That's a lot of traveling for six hours of time. We saw entire families coming to see their fathers on the ship.

We realized that there weren't as many taxi drivers standing outside the fences anymore since they were probably all hired by the passengers getting off by 10 AM. We still had many vendors coming up to us wanting us to buy silver bracelets, carvings out of cow bones, Balinese fabrics and all sorts of things. We ignored them and walked around. The map that the ship provided us with showed five streets in the town and that coincided with the Lonely Planet information Snookums brought. Sure enough, this was a very small town. We walked all the streets and saw interesting sites including the gas stations. These were wood shelves on the side of the street that held 1 liter plastic bottles (refilled) which contained premium gasoline. We assumed that the gas station attendant was around, but we never saw anyone. Maybe it was an honor system.

Balinese gas station

The streets of Padang Bai

Drying fish

A front door

Another front door

The road out of town

The gates of the city

Bovine

We saw plenty of "stores" that were selling a few packages of gum and potato chips and bottles of soda but most of the stores had inventories of less than 100 items and all of the food items looked very old. A lot of the vendors were just walking around the streets hawking their wares. There were several men selling sunglasses and they would ask us if we wanted any. Mind you, we were both wearing sunglasses so we didn't need any but that didn't stop them from asking.

By this time we had seen the chickens and the cows and the various Hindu temples and decided it was time for lunch. We returned to the snorkel store (which sold "Kansas" brand cigarettes) since we felt bad that we couldn't tip Mr. Wayan in the morning.

Kansas brand cigarettes. We don't know why.

Next post: Lunch in Bali! Don't miss it!