Today is Saturday

Saturday is a hashing day.  I took a shuttle from Kuta to Sanur today.  I was going to go on to Nusa Lembongan to dive.  But there's a hash here tonight. So I decided to stay.  A minor milestone for me since this is the first time in all my traveling that I've gone somewhere without having a place set up to stay once I got here.  It worked out pretty well.  For 300,000 rupee (pronounced rew pee uh) I have a room with ac, a fridge, a big bed, a balcony that has a view of the beach, windows all around and pretty nice trappings.

After cleaning up I gave them my laundry and found this internet cafe.
Yesterday was great.  Went to the Ubud area and rafting.  My camera's not waterproof so no pics of that.  But wow what a great time.  Cool, wet, fast, bumpy, beer.  One side of the river has huge carvings that were put in about 5 years ago although they look ancient.  They go on for maybe a thousand feet and are up to about 20' high.  Spectacular.  I'll get some pictures of it later from someone else on the trip I think.  All hashers.  And instead of paying the usual 80 bucks it was only about 50.  Afterwards I went with a few people to an elephant place.  It was a little pricier than I was led to believe so I just chilled.  Showed some of the people there pics of the red dress run and they took a shine to me.  Took me up to see their bears.  Honey bears from Borneo.  The female is about 4 years old, weighs about 40 kilo and was quite friendly.  They gave me some small ritz crackers to feed her.  Then they decided I was okay to see her husband, who's more aggressive.  We gave him a bottle of milk.  Went back to the girl, who's pregnant, and before long she was sitting in my lap.  Have a lot of pictures of that.  

Then we went to went to one of the hasher's house, Unul.  She's gotta be loaded.  I think someone said her husband is married to some bigwig at Exxon.  Her house is gigantic.  Didn't see all of it.  But had fun playing her piano and singing karaoke before heading back to Kuta. 

The driver wasn't too crazy about going back there because traffic had started slowing.  So what might normally be a an hour and a half trip could have taken us closer to 3.  When we finally hit traffic he said we were about 3 km away.  But we were moving really slowly.  So I paid him, got out and hoofed it.  Not only was the route back not particularly straightforward, it was also a bit more than 3 k, more like 7.  I was trying to get back to the Poppies Hotel I by 6 for a hash, a TDH3 reunion.  I jogged part of the way but finally gave up, not really knowing how much further I had to go, a grabbed a ride on the back of a scooter after a bit of bargaining.  They'd already been gone about a half hour so I ran trail following the marks.  Not too bad, a nice trail really, till I got to a gate they'd gone through which by then was locked, and about 10 feet high, with pointy spokes at the top, and glass shards set into the top of the concrete wall next to it.  I still managed to get over it and didn't hurt myself.  But by the time I got to B they were almost ready to leave.  Still, circle back at the hotel was fun.  I got waterboarded, with beer, for inviting someone to the reunion who'd never been to a TDH3.  Beer burns when it gets up your nose.

Well, that's all for now, I guess.