Bali Indonesia 2000
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We stepped out the door, and in a flash 33 hours later, we were in Bali, about as far away as you can physically get from New York, unless you're Neil Armstrong. It is a lush, lovely island of extraordinarily pleasant, proud people, who smile at the slightest provocation, who look you straight in the eye because they know no other way and have nothing to fear, and who are polite to a fault. Again, about as far away from New York as you could conceivably get.
It turns out to be a very good time to visit Bali, because the rupiah is a disaster. While we were there it fell from 7400 to the dollar to 8700 to the dollar, making everything super cheap. Why rent a car at US $21 (for four hours) from the hotel, when you can have a car and driver for the day for the equivalent of $35? Restaurant bills are showing up on my credit card statements as seven or eight dollars for the two of us.
It is also a good time because of two political situations. First, people are canceling their Bali trips because of unrest in Aceh province. This about 600 miles from Bali, at the far tip of the next island, Java. It's like canceling a trip to New York City because of a riot in Cleveland, but people don't take that into consideration. The other event is the US bombing of Iraq (for which we had to keep apologizing), which has tourists spooked over possible retaliation by terrorists. So the tourist throngs are reduced, and you can have whatever you want without waiting, and in relative calm and quiet. On the other hand, the hawkers are doing badly, and you can't walk down a street without ten cars honking and stopping for you. "Transport? Very good price... How about tomorrow?" (As I said, about as far from New York as you can get.) The tchotchke hawkers are the worst, constantly hassling you to buy junk they can't unload. They surround you outside temples, hassle you on the beaches, and are generally not having a very good year. Prices drop accordingly if you show no interest. At one temple (the Mother temple on the mountaintop), high quality T-shirts dropped to six cents US as we walked away. We kept walking.