A Case of Bali Belly

I’d heard about the famous Bali Belly (google it if you’re not sure what it is, but I bet you could hazard a guess), and I’m surprised it took so long to hit me. But here it is in all its glory. 

Over the last few days I’ve not actually been in Bali, so maybe it should be called Indonesian Belly instead. I headed to the island of Lombok. It’s a similar place to Bali, but there’s a lot less people. Same unhygienic food though. 

On arriving in Lombok, there was a few things which I was told not to do. Don’t ever give your bag to someone to carry. As soon as they have it in their hands they will then charge you to hand it back. They call themselves “porters”. If your transport company offer you an upgrade for a price, don’t ever accept it, they are lying. Fortunately, I was told about these scams in advance, so didn’t succumb to them, but others did. 

We made the most of the peace and quiet though in Lombok. I got myself a scooter and off we went in search of beaches and waterfalls. 

Learning my lesson from the previous case of the Fiji Farts, I decided to take a couple of days out of the rat race and booked myself my own room with bathroom back in Bali. It turns out a few people I had met in the last week had also come down with illness, so it was reassuring that taking time out was on everyone’s minds. I’m not one for sitting still though, so I did manage to get back out on the scooter in Ubud, and also did a spot of quad biking.

I laughed so much doing the quad biking. They put you into groups of about five people and you follow a guide. My group were awful at it though, one girl crashed into a tree and fell off. Our guide got fed up and took me out on my own, as he said I was a “pro”. I had so much fun racing through forests and driving through rivers.

I did make the most of having some down time though, and when I wasn’t glued to the toilet, I did some serious planning for the next few months. As well as booking flights to Canada, I have also ironed out all of my plans in the countries before that, booking all of my accommodation and transport. I have therefore fully updated the ‘Where are we going?’ page, so take a look.

We’re off to Java next to conquer some mountains.