Blue Lagoon

After getting worked over at surfing, the next day we decided to leave Echo Beach to the professionals and went snorkeling instead. We hired a driver to take us to the Blue Lagoon, a highly rated snorkeling sport near Padang Bai, about an hour and a half drive from us. The drive itself was really nice, as we got to see a mix of both the crazy city and then the transition to farmland.

Drew kept saying, we should rent a scooter! Scooter! SCOOTER! But, I put my foot down. If we were just cruising around our little small town, that's one thing. But traveling from one side of the island to another is another story. First of all, the place is overrun by scooters. They ride everywhere, and there is no predicting what they will do. Some ride nicely on the edge of the road. Some zoom down the center. The cars, therefore, do even more erratic things to get around said scooters. They pass them going down the middle of the road, with cars in oncoming traffic, essentially making three lanes on a two lane road. That's problem #2 with driving in Bali. There are no rules other than stay left. But even that doesn't always happen. I've seen roundabouts where a car cuts across the middle of the roundabout and shoots out the other side. On top of all of that, the roads aren't marked at all. And trying to find your way while trying to not get hit on a scooter doesn't sound like fun. So, in the end, we hired drivers pretty much every time we wanted to go somewhere far. It would cost about $50 for the day, but then the rest of the day's activities were cheap, so it made it affordable. For instance, renting our snorkeling gear costed $5 per person.

We didn't actually get any pictures of us snorkeling, so this is my representation. The two pictures below are of the blue lagoon itself. It was a small little lagoon, with beautiful water and white sands. The water itself had some debris floating on it because it had rained heavily recently, but once we were in the water looking down at the fish it didn't bother us. The snorkeling was great. The coral itself was more colorful that what we saw in Hawaii, but Drew said the Caribbean spots he went to were even more so. We saw lots of beautiful fish; nothing large but lots of small colorful guys. 

 After snorkeling, we went to the lagoon next door which is where a lot of boats were anchored. The boats would take you out on farther snorkeling adventures if you wanted to.

More doggies. This one has a brindled coat, but other than that looks very similar to Trig. You can also see how junked up this beach is. If there isn't a resort right on the beach, nobody comes by to clean it. 

 We, of course, had to stop for lunch. I had grilled Marlin. Delicious! I love steaky fish. Barracuda was on the menu, but they were out that day. Drew had yellow pork curry. In the curry was one little pepper. He decided to eat it, and for the first time in our marriage I got to see Drew cry. It was that hot! Don't think he'll try one of those again. We also had our obligatory fruit smoothies. Mine was pineapple. How can you refuse a fruit drink when its so fresh?

Here Drew is drinking a Bintang, the main Balinesian beer. It's just like any pilsner you've ever had, but it tastes good on a hot afternoon. 

 On the drive home, our driver took us to a few tourist traps. We agreed to this just to see what they were about, and I am glad we did. The first was a shop that makes hand-made dyed clothes. It's this whole process of drawing a pattern, dying the cloth, covering the dye with wax to protect it, drawing another pattern of top of the old one, dyeing it another color, and so on. At the end, the wax is melted off to reveal every color used. Apparently a larger piece takes about a month to make, and as such, everything was really expensive. But, it was beautiful stuff!

The second place was a factory where they made silver jewelry. They actually gave us a tour of the factory to see how they made it, then, of course, ushered us into the store with the finished products to try to get us to buy stuff. The factory looks like a sweat shop from the picture below, but it's not. Just a really rudimentary factory. You have to remember the only real industry in Bali is tourism. So this job of being a jewelry maker is actually a good job for these people. It's reliable income with normal hours. The sad part about it is a lot of these workers are young folks, maybe 16-25 years old. They probably didn't finish school, and this is a job they can do without a high education. We saw a guy finish his shift for the day, and when he left a security guard scanned him with a metal detector to make sure he didn't steal any silver on his way out. 

These are statues on the outside of the silver factory and shop. Drew really liked the pig one for some reason.