The Dancing Girls
“Shhh....the Balinese dancers are moving away. Get ready to go...”. Not a comment I was really expecting to ever say if I’m honest. We were peering over the edge of our balcony at the three brightly dressed girls just below. It felt like a really crap episode of Doctor Who, all a bit surreal with bad costumes. Our keenness to get to a different restaurant to eat was matched by their keenness to drag us in for the Balinese buffet and another dreadful exhibition of local dancing.
I’m no great fan of ‘traditional local dancing’ whether it is Turkish, Greek, Irish...I don’t care. It’s dreadful. You know it will end up with some poor sod being dragged to their feet to be forced to dance with them. Our poor sod on the first night was Ralph and he still seemed scarred by the experience 2 days later. I had warned the staff that I couldn’t guarantee that all, or even any of the group would be there for the buffet. It hadn’t been that great on the first night and besides, the bar up the road had a happy hour. It didn’t really surprise me after we had run the gauntlet to find just about the entire group in the happy hour bar. I felt a bit guilty that the hotel owners had put on a buffet and entertainment again and there appeared to be nobody attending.
That wasn’t the only unexpected comment I had made that day. “No Lucas I don’t think that it is a whoopee cushion”. We were at the Floating Palace, looking at a statue of Shiva. If you are unaware, Shiva is the goddess of destruction, hardly likely to be depicted holding a whoopee cushion. I’ll accept it did look vaguely like a whoopee cushion but Lucas obviously needed to research his Hindu gods.
We had spent a while earlier trying to coerce our driver Wayan to find us a good view of Mount Agung and to be fair he finally had. We were just on the edge of the exclusion zone looking up at the volcano that had been causing me so much concern lately. The exclusion zone was in place and a few hundred thousand local residents had been evacuated as Agung had been grumbling for the last month or more for the first time in 50 years. If you are a Daily Express reader you would no doubt be aware of the imminent mass destruction, ash cloud and permanent ice age heading to Bali.
Then again, if you are an avid Daily Express reader you’ll probably believe anything.
Finally the floating palace. It sounds more interesting that it really is. It’s ponds again. Several of them, with an ornate summer house where apparently Balinese royalty and all of his family stayed.
Bali is definitely more than just beaches. There’s a lot of buildings, roads and traffic too and some bloody persistent local dancers.
3 nights, 3 days then back to KL for the long journey home....
I’m no great fan of ‘traditional local dancing’ whether it is Turkish, Greek, Irish...I don’t care. It’s dreadful. You know it will end up with some poor sod being dragged to their feet to be forced to dance with them. Our poor sod on the first night was Ralph and he still seemed scarred by the experience 2 days later. I had warned the staff that I couldn’t guarantee that all, or even any of the group would be there for the buffet. It hadn’t been that great on the first night and besides, the bar up the road had a happy hour. It didn’t really surprise me after we had run the gauntlet to find just about the entire group in the happy hour bar. I felt a bit guilty that the hotel owners had put on a buffet and entertainment again and there appeared to be nobody attending.
That wasn’t the only unexpected comment I had made that day. “No Lucas I don’t think that it is a whoopee cushion”. We were at the Floating Palace, looking at a statue of Shiva. If you are unaware, Shiva is the goddess of destruction, hardly likely to be depicted holding a whoopee cushion. I’ll accept it did look vaguely like a whoopee cushion but Lucas obviously needed to research his Hindu gods.
We had spent a while earlier trying to coerce our driver Wayan to find us a good view of Mount Agung and to be fair he finally had. We were just on the edge of the exclusion zone looking up at the volcano that had been causing me so much concern lately. The exclusion zone was in place and a few hundred thousand local residents had been evacuated as Agung had been grumbling for the last month or more for the first time in 50 years. If you are a Daily Express reader you would no doubt be aware of the imminent mass destruction, ash cloud and permanent ice age heading to Bali.
Finally the floating palace. It sounds more interesting that it really is. It’s ponds again. Several of them, with an ornate summer house where apparently Balinese royalty and all of his family stayed.
Bali is definitely more than just beaches. There’s a lot of buildings, roads and traffic too and some bloody persistent local dancers.
3 nights, 3 days then back to KL for the long journey home....
Comments
Post a Comment