Tuesday, 25 December 2007
(Finally) Welcome back to Tassie...
Ok almost there... on the way back to Hobart from Devonport... yes Devonport! All was going fine, I spent my last day in indonesia cruising around Ubud, a coffee here, a bit of lunch and a read there, then got dropped back to Denpasar after dinner for my flight out. Met up with Beki and Drew, who were also studying thru ACICIS, paid a huuuuuuge amount in excess baggage (bloody garuda, the no-frills airline from jogja charged me about a tenth the price) and hung round the airport waiting for our midnight flight. Everything seemed positive- our flight was called to boarding gates on time, we got thru the security gates- and then were told our flight would be delayed by 2 hours. BUgger. Beki and I had a bit of a stress cos our domestic flights to tassie were due to leave at midday, giving us an hour and a half to land, get thru customs and onto the next plane, so we asked the Garuda people if we could let Virgin Blue know we were running late but would indeed be there (fingers crossed) and what could we do... they were really dumb lol, but eventually took us to the head office, let us call oz, who told us if we get an official letter saying we were delayed, our domestic flights could be rescheduled wihtout having to pay again, if we missed them. Garuda gave everyone some midnight dinner- a toasted sandwich and chips, woo hoo, then we finally got out of there. Annoying transit passengers from Jakarta, tsk tsk. The flight was even later than they said originally, we werent scheduled to land til 11am and explained to the flight crew we had to get off quick for our connection and they said no worries, talk to the ground staff and theyd rush us thru. No such luck. We got off, had to wait 45 mins for our luggage to come out, then get thru customs, and didnt stand a chance of making our flights. And there wasnt a single Garuda ground staff around, not a single person in the terminal could help us. Stress! We got to the Virgin counter and we told there were no flights to Tassie with seats available til CHRISTMAS DAYYY... arrrgggghh stress... we headed off with our billions of bags to find the Garuda office (empty) or a Garuda counter (empty), and eventually grabbed an official looking person, had a bit of a teary explanation of things, and she found us a Garuda person, hiding amongst the empty check-in counters. Tsk tsk. The man was really nice tho. Cos Garuda delayed us and as a result we all missed our connections (about ten people, all over oz), they had to get us home... Solution: stay in Melbourne for the night, get the ferry back to tassie then taxi to hobart. Lol expensive for them... We did get put up in a nice hotel tho, the food was yummy, taxi all paid for... v early morning tho, Spirit of Tas late getting in, and late leaving... just wanted to get home! We only had sitting seats so bagged a nice couchy area and watched some tv and dozed to kill the time (all ten hours of it). Very rough seas (and lots of sick people :S) but we made it. Several titanic moments staggering down corridors and falling all over the place... and we made it! Nice deep sleep in Devonport then back to Hobart, lovely Hobart, at about lunchtime. Only 48 hours late. No biggie, rubber time- Coming from Indonesia after all ;)
Cooking class at Casa Luna cooking school
Thursday morning I did a cooking class- the biggest gathering of white people Ive seen in a while! There were about 12 people and a few people, staff from the restaurant took us on a tour of the Ubud markets to start with, pointing out the ingredients we'd need and typical Indonesian foods... We headed back to the restaurant and had a drink and morning tea to recover (lugging that laptop around in my backpack for a couple of hours certainly warranted a few glasses of hibiscus tea) and tried a few traditional Balinese dishes, some pandan green cakes, a gado-gado peanut salad, steamed bananas and some little cakes filled with sugar syrup. When we were sufficiently stuffed, we started the preparations: the restaurant had these massive 20kg granite mortar and pestle so we took in turns grinding up big bowls of beautifully smelling spices and herbs to make the sauce bases. Then we cooked a chicken curry, a few salads and our own sambal (we didnt do a lot of cooking, mostly the chefs demonstrated and explained why and how things fitted into their culture) then enjoyed the meal with a glass of brem, balinese rice wine. I met some interesting people, a family from Canada and several people from Oz, one from Launnie, and a Canadian couple teaching Spanish in Malaysia (as you do).
Second stop- Ubud for some r & r on the way home
Arrived in Ubud about lunchtime (almost got forgotten by the shuttle bus company) and checked into my hotel... very pretty! Little treat before I come home... the hotel is still being built, lots of bungalows and greenery and a lovely pool, so theres not many people around which is nice. The rainy season in Bali is a bit less drastic than Java at the moment- its just been peacefully drizzling instead of crazily trying to drown any unfortunate person stuck outside. Its ok tho, gives me time to organise my photos and catch up on some blogs (and maybe finally get around to reading an indonesian novel).
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