Vacation Day 12: Lovin' Lovina

After our house arrest episode, we ventured across Bali to Lovina, which is a beach town on the Northern coast of Bali. We were informed that renting a car and driver would cost us each in the region of $20, so we went to what we thought was the appropriate bus station to get to Lovina.
Upon arrival, we knew something was wrong when, I kid you not, an 80-ish year old man and a limping dwarf (not sure what the PC term is there) tried to take our bags and put them on a bus.
We asked around and were informed that one of the buses would be leaving for Lovina shortly, but then upon further investigation we discovered that none of the "employees" of the station had any idea what they were talking about and the bus perhaps would arrive in Lovina that day in three hours, perhaps next week, perhaps never at all. Alisa took charge and got us off the bus of terror when one of the other passengers, who looked like she was going to die, started to puke her guts out at the front.
Thank goodness for Alisa's initiative: we found a taxi that would do the trip in about 2.5 hours for a very reasonable price. True to his word, he got us there no problem and took us down the main street where we had no trouble walking to a nice hotel and getting a room.



The room in Lovina was very nice and cost us a fraction of what we had paid in Kuta. We could walk anywhere we needed to go and it was right on the beach. It had an open-air washroom with a garden, which we think was the home of something fairly sizeable and interested, apparently, in consuming Alisa's soap.

The beaches of Lovina are black sand, which was the attraction for us. Unfortunately, they are not the cleanest beaches that we have ever seen...we visited Bali in very low season, and I think that had Lovina been more busy (we were virtually the only tourists there- I think we saw maybe five other people who looked like they were visiting) there might have been some kind of beach clean-up patrol.



The sand is neat- it's hard to tell from the pictures but it really IS black. It's black because it's sand from volcanic rock (there are volcanoes on Bali). The beach is long and spacious and most of the resorts are either right on the beach or within steps of it. I think that Lovina is likely very alive and beautiful when it is high season.

That afternoon and that evening we had incredible food at a couple of restaurants where we were the only patrons. We felt sort of badly for the people of Lovina, with their empty businesses and their feeble offers of deep discounts...but then we remembered that during high season, these places are probably completely packed and the prices sky high.
Our lunches and dinners were significantly less expensive than our food had been at our first hotel, and they were also significantly more delicious. I have fallen in love with Gado Gado, an Indonesian salad of sorts with various steamed vegetables, tofu, eggs and (key!) peanut sauce all over the top. Indonesian peanut sauce is perhaps the best sauce I have ever tasted. I could have drank bowls of it.
We booked snorkeling for the following two days: one site, the tour guide told us was the best in Bali; the other, the wreck of a US ship. We slept early that night in preparation for the dolphin sunrise tour on Day 13!


Until next time,
Heather