Riding to Tanah Lot, Bali

Riding to Tanah Lot on Sunday afternoon is a combination of pleasure and frustration. I took Jalan Raya Kerobokan from my house in Seminyak past the Global Extreme internet cafe and turned right onto the Canggu road past the Globe Cafe. There are signs all along the route and I ended up bearing SW towards the coast. The ride only takes about 35 minutes and on the way I travelled through paddy fields and observed locals going about their Sunday business. I watched a farmer chop down a coconut with a parang ( machete ) and other locals riding down the country lanes with big baskets attached to their motorbikes with some kind of crop inside.

Riding through a town I could see the local banjar guys out in their sarongs and black shirts preparing for a celebration.

I could a see majestic volcano off to one side and the view was like a postcard with the paddies lined up in front. The frustrating part is this beautiful scenery makes me want to gaze and enjoy it, but the traffic can sometimes be a little crazy and all it takes is a close one with a truck to make me realise where my attention has to be (last night I went for dinner at an Indian place on Jl. Dhyana Pura called Gateway of India with Mark, Jojo and some other people. The guy sitting next to me was the person who hit Eric from Woodstock last week on his motorcycle while drunk. I asked him how he was injured and he was quite honest about it ). I do enjoy cruising through the country lanes though when I escape the mad dash of the locals.

Tanah Lot is a temple structure that juts out into the ocean and it gets cut off at high tide which is when I was there. It is highly developed as a tourist attraction but there were scarce foreigners around on this day. Most of the visitors were Indonesian and a few other Asian tourists.

It was entertaining to see the local tourists doing their best to get washed away by standing on a wave swept point. Every time a large wave pounded they whooped and laughed.

There is some construction going on here and I observed a group of women workers unloading dirt from a truck using head borne baskets. There were also a group of guys fixing a cement pathway.

Plenty of nick-nacks on offer including this one that reminded me of Chris and Sean. I bought 20 postcards for 10,000rp from a 10 year old girl. They weren’t the originals but had been scanned and reproduced. Got to hand it to these people they can copy anything.

I stayed for a hour or so. There are multiple places to eat and an ATM if you need it.

The cost for me was 15,000rp to park my bike and get in.