Our flight out from Phuket airport was at 10:30AM. There’s a taxi mafia in Phuket Town, who charge ridiculous prices, so we decided to take the B90 ($3) bus instead. The official schedule says the bus leaves at 7AM to arrive at 8:20, but a sheet of paper taped to the schedule claimed it wouldn’t arrive until 9 (120m), while all other departure times still only took 80 minutes. As the bus indeed arrived at 8:20, and many taxis tried to convince us they would only take 45 minutes, I think this was the taxi mafia at work trying to scare farang away from the bus.
We flew from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. Imagine a shiny, new, clean airport (e.g., the international terminal at SFO), filled with luxury goods, but the throngs of passengers are from corners of the world an American rarely sees. Women wearing everything from tank tops and shorts to Muslim women covered from head to toe in black, only their eyes visible, women wearing suggestive, tight, outfits in bright colors that leave no skin revealed and cover the hair, with bright makeup, like from an early Star Trek episode, a man wearing a fluffy white skirt that looks like a thick towel, reaching below his knees, with a bright green belt, and a shirt that reveals the bottom of his belly, cyber Japanese women in leather and huge sunglasses, and many more. It felt like the future, not just in terms of the architecture and shining metal of the building, but also culturally, given the recent and future rise of Asia.
We arrived with about an hour until our gate opened. Entry into Indonesia requires a $25 visa, exact change required. So we took a train to another part of the airport to change some baht into dollars. The visa is only for 30 days, something every guide book says is too short, given the size, scope, and diversity of a country spread across literally thousands of islands.
We found out that there’s a big dance party with music we like on Gili Air, a tiny idyllic island east of Bali, very close to Lombok (the next island over), tonight. We thought that landing and immediately heading to Gili Air for dancing sounded like a lot of fun, but given our flight arrives at 6:30 it doesn’t look feasible. We would have to make it about 50 miles from the airport to a north eastern coast town (e.g., Amed), then catch an expensive speed boat. The seas can be rough at this time of year, and making the trip at night given the warnings we’ve heard about boat safety seemed like a bit too much like danger rather than adventure.
So we are going to stick in Denpasar tonight, maybe head to Ubud tomorrow.
Right now we are on the plane from Kuala Lumpur to Denpasar, a 3 hour flight. The Private Eye is figuring out which part of town we want to look for a guest house, probably near one of the bemo (think bus) terminals and markets.
— The Professor
The Professor and the Private Eye: Adventures Abroad 