Our departure from Good Karma was anything but. While we lazed at the resort I over heard that our neighbor in the bungalow in next door was charged only 15,000rp while we paid 35,000. We agreed only because we had arrived on a dark and stormy night. It seemed unfair.

I figured that 20,000 a nite was a more fair price. I intended to leave the 40,000 in the bungalow when we left. (We never saw the "landlords" while we were there). Of course they materialized while we packed. (Eric: I knew they would).

I had promised myself back in Ubud not to get mad at people ripping us off because it was probably just a dime or a dollar and they probably need the money. But I forgot all that as I confronted the landlords. I tried to tell them their price was unjust but I couldn't find the word for unjust in the dictionary. Ditto for unfair. I settled for "Not Right" but I wasn't sure if I was using "right" in the moral sense or the directional. The guy who had shown us the bungalow was doing most of the talking in English. When I tried to address the actual landlord in Bahasa Indonesia, the first guy told me, "You can talk to me."

When I did, he defended himself saying it wasn't his bungalow or his decision. Meanwhile Eric grew more awkward. As a peace offering the landlord knocked 5,000 off the 2 days price. I finally paid it in disgust so we could leave. Eric later said he will remember this is the birthday we fought for half and hour over 50 cents. It was actually over US $4 but he was right. I felt awful.

A few km later we put it behind us. It's hard to stay mad when your only mission for the day is to ride from one beach resort to the next. Out next stop was Tulamben, a diving resort just about 17km away. We found a great resort called "Paradise Palm Beach Bungalows." We got a great room facing the beautiful garden for around 30,000rp /nite. As if to make up for our morning, the manager told us the people next door were paying 45,000 and told us not to tell. Eric said that proves how rooms on Bali are like stock prices. You and your neighbor own shares of the same stock but you both might have paid wildly different prices.

We had a fabulous time at Tulamben. We got in two dives on the wreck of the USAT Liberty (a cargo ship sunk in WWII by a Japanese submarine) for $90 each, including a 10 percent discount because we stayed at the hotel. We had to pay for the dives in dollars but it was totally worth it.

The dives were great fun but I thought the wreck of the Rhone in the British Virgin Islands was better because I could recognize tiled floors and things like that. I couldn't recognize anything on the Liberty. It's ironic because the Liberty is a newer wreck but appears more disintegrated.

ERIC: "The Liberty was great because we got to swim through openings and stuff."

One of the wildest things about the dive was the local help. For a beach entry we didn't have to do much work. We did have to walk 500 meters of rocky beach but we didn't have to carry any heavy equipment, Balinese women did that for us. They carried oxygen tanks and huge crates full of weight belts, BCDs, and other gear on their heads.

Everytime we ate in the hotel restaurant, we saw these women gliding by on the other side of a low wall with one or two oxygen tanks balanced on their heads! They never seem to stumble on the rocks like we did. I hope they got paid well. I figured it was a way the dive center could share its proceeds with many locals. But it did make me feel guilty seeing these women who probably had no interest in diving, lugging our gear around for us.

We split the next several days between a big city and more beach resorts. The big city was Singaraja, population around 100,000, about 80 easy kilometers west of Tulamben. We checked into a comfy business hotel for 25,000/nite. We spent a couple days running errands, lazing, and walking through a city populated mostly Indonesians instead of tourists.

One night we waked to the wharf and sat under a huge statue and ate peanuts while watching the waves break over the low piers. The woman who sold us the peanuts wore a T-shirt that said "Follow your dream."

At our hotel we met an upper class Bali resident Emille, a government auditor originally from Java. He had earned his master's degree in economics in Australia and was eager to practice his English. He talked to us for hours about: the rupiah crash, the government, and studying in Australia.

He made fun of the Aussie accent. His first day there, somebody asked if he had come "to die"?

"No, I've come to live!" Emille said.

He also talked about growing up in Jakarta and dealing with a rough gang of friends who sounded more like extortionists. His "friends" periodically asked for money and Emille would give it to them but, he insists, only when he wanted to. If a "friend" asked for money and Emille wasn't in the mood he'd refuse. If the friend insisted, Emille would say, "I have already told you no. Do you want to fight?" To which the friend would say, "No boss." That was high school. It probably didn't hurt Emilles standing any that his dad owned a shooting range and his brother was a champion marksman, although Emille said he was never very good at shooting.

Emille said in general the best policy when parking your car in a large city is to pay off any nearby beggars so they don't bother it. But once in his youth he chased off one of his would be extortionists by pretending he was willing to run the guy down. His bluff succeeded.

Emille made us feel better about beggars. Although he talked eloquently about the need for people to help each other, he too was reluctant to give money to beggars for fear of encouraging them to beg. Eric and I have gone back and forth on this. Our latest policy is to spread our wealth in the form of 1000rp notes and 100rp coins since many Indonesians seem to need it a lot more than we do.

From Singaraja we made one "day" trip by bus to Ubud to check email and get an English language newspaper and other errands. We stayed too long to get a bus back so we got a hotel in Ubud for about 15,000rp. So that night we had two hotels, one in Ubud and one in Singaraja. They play first run movies like Titantic at bars in Ubud. Even more curious, they didn't charge to see them except in slightly over-priced beer. We went to bar showing a movie (As Good As it Gets, with Jack Nicholson) and found out that these are pirated movies. Obviously someone went into a theatre with a camcorder and taped the whole thing. Then they put it on a video CD. The sound was absolutely awful. A loud hum nearly drowned out the whole dialogue. It took sometime to get used to it. I felt a little guilty watching a pirated movie. We'll rent that one when we get home to make up for it..

The odd thing about walking about Singaraja is that nobody seemed to think we belonged there. They all seemed to believe we had lost our way to Lovina, a beach resort 10km to the west. We couldn't walk 20 feet down the street without some van pulling up beside us and the guy inside yelling, "Lovina? Lovina?"

It did get us curious. So the day we left Singaraja we went to Lovina. We spent three days lazing, lazing, and letting Eric recuperate from a brief but violent bout of food poisoning. But it was hard to truly relax. Everytime we looked out from our bungalow to the sea, a bunch of Indonesian women would pop up from the sand trying to sell us trinkets, massages, sarongs. We already had four sarongs and didn't want anymore. When we left we gave them a little money "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." The book I told them they should be able to sell for 10,000rp. Even after that, they still tried to sell me a sarong.

By then we were getting anxious to get to Java. We had read about a few riots there and wondered if we should really ride across that island as we planned. We hoped to spend our last days on Bali monitoring the news. But those last days we never heard any or find an English language newspaper. So we rode ignorantly on, spending our last nite in Bali in the ferry port town of Gilimanuk.

That last day we got two bad omens. First, we met a team of tandem bike tourists who were doing a trip like ours (except in the opposite direction) but completely scoffed at the idea of riding on Java. Second, on the way to the ferry, we could not find an open restaurant that served or had even heard of banana pancakes. That was how we learned that most Indonesians don't eat banana pancakes for breakfast after all.

Next: Java, the most densely populated island in the world.

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