Denpasar, so fuckin’ far

For someone who’s supposedly not retarded, I do some stupid things. Today I decided to escape the tourists and check out Denpasar City. After looking it up on the map, I started strolling towards it – even though the centre of the joint was about 13km away and the temperature was in the mid-30s. I’m a fucking idiot, I look at a map and think, “It’s only 3cm away” and just start walking. Shit, if I zoom out far enough, Perth is only 3cm away from Gosford, so maybe I should try to walk that one arvo when I don’t have much to do.

It was good to get away from the tattooed fatties for a while, but there’s a reason not many visitors to Bali bother going into Denpasar, and that’s because it’s really not that interesting. There’s kilometres of shops, thousands of motorbikes, and not much else. I could’ve swaggered through the outskirts and not wasted my time going any further, because it was pretty much the same scenery over and over again. I also almost got run over by about 50,000 motorbikes, because the Balinese don’t believe in footpaths, meaning I had to stroll along main roads.

Still, it was the first time since I’ve been over here that I’ve felt as if I was actually in another country, rather than in Western Sydney. The locals were staring at me and following me around and nobody could speak English, meaning it was the most authentic experience of the trip. I also got to eat a kebab that I think was filled with fruit rather than meat, maintaining my tradiion of pretty much living on the little packages of wrapped awesomeness while away.

Oh, and I saw a monkey, and a monkey-man!

After a journey that would have Cliff Young throwing in the towel, I sat back and relaxed in front of the sunset with a cold beer in my hand. Next stop, Ubud. It doesn’t look too far on the map, reckon I can walk it?