Chad’s Blog

Tanah Lot is a temple on a cliff on the West coast of Bali. It’s probably one of the most photographed temples in Bali as the sun sets behind it. Unfortunately, it was overcast to the West, and the sunset wasn’t so much a sunset as a disappearance behind clouds.

Lacking a beautiful sunset, I distracted myself by shooting some of the patterns carved into the rocks.

No beach experience is complete without tossing a disc. I got a chance to play with some slow shutter speeds for fun.

After a very short night of intermittent sleep, interrupted regularly by a barking dog outside the door of our guest house, we set out at 4:00 a.m. up the side of Gunung Batur. We got to the top just in time for me to set up my camera and capture the first light. It wasn’t a difficult hike by any means, but spectacular.

I’d love to know what planet or star is visible in the top left of this photo. It was really bright in the morning sky.

The sunrise was absolutely spectacular; quite possibly the most beautiful I’ve seen in my travels.

Gunung Rinjani was visible off in the distance (above and below left). The other side of the old Batur volcano was silhouetted in the foreground along with Gunung Agung (below, far right).

Of course, this being Indonesia, a warung was set up at the crest of the volcano. Admittedly, a kopi susu was a nice treat after a two hour walk up hill.

The lava flows from the 1974 eruption are still visible as a black desert on the landscape.

The guides are regulated and will harass and threaten anyone without a guide on the mountain. Our official guide cost IDR 300,000 per person and was a lazy jerk. You have three options for a trek: short, medium, and long as shown their map. We paid for the long trek, and got something similar to the medium trip with a lot of sitting to stretch it out to the full time. We complained when we got back to the village of Toya Bungkan where we were staying. It seemed the village was ready to roast one of their own.

Despite the annoying guide, I’d still recommend the hike to anyone as it was clearly spectacular.

I had definitely taken Bali for granted while I lived in Indonesia. It was so easy, cheap, and less than two hours away. It wasn’t until I spent this past week in Bali that I realized exactly how beautiful of an island it is. Here’s four random shots from around Ubud.

We took a bicycle tour with Bali Eco Tours. I had picked up their flyer on a previous trip and gave them a call this time around. It was a mostly downhill ride through the back roads like this one.

While it wasn’t quite as enlightening as the bicycle tour of Yogyakarta that I did, it was still a lot of fun. I chatted with the owner of Bali Eco Tours for a little while, and he seems like he’s trying to run a first class operation.

Going diving with someone with an underwater camera is great. These are courtesy of Dedi

One of our dives was at the site of a Japanese wrek from World War II.

Yeah, it’s a really long flight. Here’s some photos from Gunung Bromo stitched together. I can’t figure out why the small images have cracks where they’ve been stitched and the full size images don’t. Take a look at the full-size images.

View the full size photo.

View the full size photo.

View the full size photo.

On a side note, March of the Penguins is a great film.

For my last weekend in Jakarta, we decided to escape with friends to Pulau Macan. Our sunset boat ride to another island provided some great light for portraits.

I also borrowed Joya’s nifty waterproof camera while snorkeling. I leaned that photographing fish is pretty difficult if you’re trying to capture anything but them swimming away from you.

The colours inside of some of the clams are fantastic.

The hard coral around Macan is relatively healthy. Being so close to Jakarta, that doesn’t mean that it’s not without some large bleached out areas.

I’ve been looking online without luck to see what this creature is. He was neat to watch as he hung out resting on the coral. There were three of them. Does anyone know of an online fish identification guide?

These white and pink fish hang out in the sand and challenge anything that comes near. They’ll charge you by swimming right up to your face before turning quickly away to make another approach. They’re synonymous with Pulau Macan in my memory.

I didn’t manage to capture the vibrant blue and purple colour of the crabs on the dock with a good shot, mostly because they were quicker than the shutter on Joya’s camera. Which brings me to the possibility of buying a housing and strobe for my Nikon. Underwater photography has intrigued me for a long time, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to drop $1,500 on a single-purpose piece of plastic. That’s not including the macro lens I’d feel compelled to buy.

One of my requests for a last dinner in Indonesia was for some good street food. So we found ourselves at the seafood warung on Jl. Benhil. Apparently Santosa Seafood is pretty famous, despite no one knowing its name.

It’s not exactly the nicest environment, given that it’s a tent over a dirt sidewalk outside of an ATM, but the food more than makes up for it. At 70,000 rupiah ($8), I think it’s the most expensive meal I’ve ever had at a warung, but the fish, crab, calamari, and shrimp in a variety of sauces was worth every rupiah.

The Embassy put on a spectacular Canada Day event at the Four Seasons in Jakarta. The entire place was fixed up to look like Quebec City, and a bunch of staff got together to organize period-ish costumes for the event.

Jakarta is home to a number of absurd ideas for transportation solutions, most notably: a half-built monorail; one-way streets that prevent you from getting anywhere; minimum passenger regulations at rush hour, complete with a market for extra passengers; and, the general idea that it’s possible for millions of cars and millions and millions of motorcycles can all get where they want to go efficiently.

This article, “Indonesia to deploy skating police officers to overcome traffic jams” summarizes what might be 2008′s winner for most stupid transportation plan.

JAKARTA – INDONESIA is rolling out a new weapon in its battle against gridlock: traffic police on inline skates.

The idea is that officers will be able to reach traffic jams in the capital Jakarta quicker than by car or motorbike, the Koran Tempo daily reported. Once there, they will be able to direct vehicles to get the city’s traffic flow moving again.

…

Traffic police in Jakarta have a reputation for laziness and often demand bribes from motorists to ignore minor or imaginary violations. The city’s 12 million residents generally hold them in low regard.

Thanks Michael.

We spent a weekend at a great place on the south coast of Java.

The weekend revolved around eating breakfast…

eating lunch…, eating dinner…, sleeping…

lounging…

throwing around a frisbee…

and playing games.

It’s mango season again, and I decided to buy two of every mango in the store. We had a tasting session of five different kinds.

In the end, we decided that the many varieties of harum manis were the best, and the cheapest of those were actually my favourite.