Walkabout in Bali and Thailand

It seems a former life now, rather than something that happened just a few years ago, but once, for a thankfully not so brief period of my life I managed to go extended walkabout with a laptop with mobile connection and survive.

Having given up on conventional ways of earning a living, something to do with going crazy counting nose hairs on fellow passengers, I managed to do something many people yearn for, I dropped out and went up in the world. Having started my own not so pretty reservations site and forum a few months before, having arrived at a crossroads regarding normality, I decided to hit the road Jack and not come back (to England or other such places) any more; except to do solid work for a few weeks on a real PC with a decent Internet connection.

I would go around Bali and Thailand with my laptop (to stay in touch and keep an eye on my sites), planning a route and schedule but ultimately going and staying where the mood took me. My mission? To find and bargain hunt for the "best" hotels, which redefined my interpretation of what "best" was. Sometimes staying in rooms up trees with ants, sometimes the lap of luxury, always for the sake of enjoying, discovering and ultimately adding hotels of choice onto my rather badly designed yet increasingly popular reservations site. Being on some form of a "schedule" (to see as many areas and hotels as possible without ruining the day), I was often alone, although not always, because other independent travellers of course viewed walkabout differently, as they should.

It is a fact that I used to have to give drivers in Bali instructions on how to get from A to B else they would take a bloody long and awful route; for example, I found few drivers knew how to get quickly from say the Seminyak area to the North East coast. My own wife, then my Balinese girlfriend could not believe how well I knew Bali, or perhaps how well I knew the roads. If there was a road, I wanted to drive up, down or along it. I remember when the road from Amed round the headland to Amlapura was so bad, you really thought you were not going to make it.

I also remember the group of locals sat eagerly waiting for stupid tourists driving the "wrong" way around Mt. Batur (Kintamani area). You see, as you drive into the main crater where the lake is, after the shacks and the guys trying to stop you to tell you there is something wrong with your car (when there is not), there is a sharp turning to the left where you ultimately find out the circular "road" around the actual volcano comes back on itself. The obvious choice is to drive on and go anti-clockwise around the volcano; wrong, wrong, wrong. After miles of painstakingly slow driving along the world's most cratered road, wondering why all the trucks are driving in the opposite direction but yet you never see one going the same way you are, right near the end of this tortuous drive, just before you get to that sharp left hand turning I mentioned before, you come to this incredibly steep and very nasty slope, which you need to go up. Of course traffic going the other way around come down the slope, no problem, but going up; yes, that is where the locals come in. You then have to spend 2 or 3 hours driving back along the nasty road from which you just came or enlist their help, for a fee!

So your companions has to get out the car and also all your bags to lighten the load, then the locals split into two teams, one pushing or rather bumping the car up the mud slope, while the others slipping large rocks under the back tyres when they need to rest / stop, so the car does not slide back. Of course, a single member, their mother probably, stands at the top and stops trucks from coming down as you try and basically shove a so-called Jeep (Suzuki Jimmys are no jeeps, believe me) up a muddy slide. The truck drivers do not mind the wait though, I think they come out and take bets with each other as to whether you will make it or not!

It is not always that bad being semi-adventurous and having a flexible schedule, sometimes you find a little slice of heaven and can actually stay longer. I remember with life long fondness the day I found Pee Pee Island Village, was only going to stay one night, ended up staying eight (low season rates in may, good weather, plus a special stay for 4 nights, get 4 free, what can I say?). Also when I found and fell in love with Le Meridien Baan Boran right on the Golden Triangle; I truly love this area and do not understand why people go to Chiang Rai (which I did not like much), not the GT!

Some things you can laugh at later but not at the time. I remember staying in Krabi Town en route for Koh Lanta, learning what Thai karaokes can sadly be all about (best not to go into details), and obviously eating something with a time bomb in it. The next day arriving in Koh Lanta, finding a hotel with a bungalow directly on the beach for the right price available. Checking in aware rumblings were afoot both in my stomach and the weather. Compounding my shortly to be discovered misery by eating some durian. Going to my room as the storm starts to come in, directly bearing down on my room with the resultant loss of electricity of course. The time bomb exploding right at the height of the storm and having to sit on the can, which was in the sea-most part of the beach-front shack, with the waved banging the wall behind me and causing the can contents, well, let us just say it took a while to laugh about that one!

I experienced so much though during those walkabouts and being often on my own in terms of not travelling with fellow walkabouters, I naturally got to meet and talk to learn about the locals as many tourists simply can not. Ultimately my walkabouts ended when my Balinese girlfriend, then living with me in Phuket, got pregnant. This changes life in many ways, mostly for the better, but it killed my walkabout era, which is sad, as I had so many places I wanted to walk to. Yeh, yeh, I know people go walkabout with kids strapped to their backs, well good for them. But still I remember sitting on the front-most of the two balconies you get with a luxury bungalow at Pee Pee Island Village, first thing in the morning and later in the evening, when the heat dropped and allowed the mobile phone signal from Krabi get to where I was sitting, so I could do my emails and check my sites, and I defy anyone to make a living more pleasantly than that.