UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA

Hello, Bali! Our first taste of Southeast Asia, and now things are getting a little more exotic. Our first stop is Indonesia, which for you non-geography majors is a chain of something like 17,000 islands stretching over 5,000 kilometers and encompassing a whole range of cultures, climates, and landscapes. Bali is a relatively small island smack in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago, and one of its main tourist destinations.

It took us around six hours tonight on Garuda Indonesia to fly from Brisbane to Bali, and the town of Denpasar, where we hired a taxi to take us to the hotel we had booked online. We didn't realize, though, that the hotel is about an hour's drive north of the airport! Luckily, taxis are cheap here (along with everything else), so it didn't cost us much to get there. And as it turns out, our hotel is in the town of Ubud, a really interesting place that's known as the artistic center of Bali--its streets are lined with all sorts of interesting galleries, museums, stores, and workshops, as well as a lot of artsy cafe's and restaurants.