Our short Bali visit

We touched down in Bali at 11pm after two 2 hour flights in the Promo class, the class below economy, in which I couldn't sit without pressing my knees into the seat in front of me. I really hate these domestic flights! They are always late, their seats are uncomfortable and too small and you have to pay for snacks and drinks. It was however necessary and still a better way to get there than buses and ferries. We had agreed that we wouldn't book into  a hostel that night  and would take the first bus the next day to get  to the port from where the ferries leave to Lombok but it turned out that it wasn't that easy.
First of all the airport wasn't in Denpasar which we had assumed but south of Kuta which made the trip to the harbor much longer and it was still very early for Bali standards. We walked the way to the beach (a thing no one understands in Indonesia: Why would a tourist walk at all?), which was really creepy with all the Indonesian men still hanging around, not looking very trustworthy and and hid behind one of the fisher boats trying to sleep a bit. After a while we where chased away by the local dogs who gathered around us kept approaching slowly, howling. We didn't find a boat where we could lie in so we kept walking towards the town center and the big holiday resorts. We found a place in front of an old Hotel where we put our stuff and while Bekki dozed off I decided to take the first watch. It was hard to stay awake but after a while some of the dogs turned up and so I saw a good reason to stay awake. It was a strange feeling to lie there at Kuta beach and to think about the stories I had picked up about that place, the corrupt police and the rising criminality. After a few hours I Bekki woke up and I could close my eyes for a while and sleep a bit. At 4am we started walking towards the only thing that seemed familiar at that time and granted us something to eat and chairs to sit in: The huge McDonalds M, high above everything else. We were like the three holy kings following the star, looking up into the sky to find the sign that led our way.
We used the free internet to distract us from our tiredness and they even had a TV showing some football game. We stayed there for three hours before we had a look around to find the bus terminal. As it turned out it was harder than we thoght to get to the harbor but a few hours and a extremely expensive coffee later we where on the bus to Denpasar. We were glad to be out of Kuta already, maybe because of all the stress we had there but it also didn't seem very nice. Denpasar is the capitol of Bali and just as all major Indonesian cities a place where you don't want to be for long. We would have had to take three different buses to get through it (we walked a bit) and finally got on to the bus to Padangbai, from where the ferries leave. We had to walk 2km to get to the harbor and arrived just in time for the 1 o'clock ferry. We could have taken a shuttle bus to save us all the trouble bargaining about prices and squeezing in the bus with all the locals but that always costs at least twice as much. After this day however we decided to consider that option the next time we go somewhere.
The ferry was big and slow and it was very windy which made it also very cold but it gave us some time to relax and close our eyes for a moment. The day had been very exhausting with our bags on our backs and so much to organize that we just felt like a nice "Selamat Datang" and a comfortable bed. But it would become even worse. As we arrived in Lembar, the main ferry port on Lombok, we where soon surrounded by very unfriendly and rough taxi drivers who wanted to bring us to our destination and wouldn't accept a no. Not even if you jelled it at them. We had had a lot of that stuff on Sumatra and we thought we were used to it and it wouldn't become worse but that was nothing compared to those people in Lembar. It was quite late already, too late for the public buses so we saw our only chance escaping this aggressive mob in booking a room in Lembar. We had an early dinner that day and went to bed straight afterwards, very tired and pissed of about our trip because we felt that everything was turning against us. But maybe it was just because we were so tired and needed a quiet place to rest for a few days.