September 24, 2008 - Serangan, Bali, Indonesia

The past few days have been a blur of errands. On Monday and Tuesday we spent time reprovisioning at the various supermarkets. Near the harbor is a Costco like place, where we were able to load up on essentials like diet coke and beer. The best of the local super markets is Carrefour, a French chain that we first came across in Tahiti. Carrefour has a good selection of chips. Unfortunately, $6 for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos was out of our price range, so we made due with a local version called Happytos. "Tos" seems to be universally understood to mean "cheesy goodness." Our big splurge of the week was buying New Zealand milk, rather than the locally produced brand. As a result of the problems with milk powder from China, some milk products and random stuff like Oreos have been pulled from supermarket shelves here. So we went with the Kiwi milk, discretion being the better part of valor and all.

This morning we got our passports back from Sail Indonesia with our Indonesia social visa extensions. After a visit to my favorite Balinese dentist for cleanings for both of us, we headed over to the Thai embassy to apply for visas for Thailand. We expected to have to wait a few days to get them back, but we were pleasantly surprised to be told to come back later that afternoon. Compared to waiting four days in Panama for our visas for French Polynesia and four days in Darwin for our Indonesian visas, Thailand's turn around time was shockingly fast.

Sten has been getting in some good surfing in the mornings on breaks North and South of the harbor entrance. After surfing in Kuta and Seminyak, he was grumbling about how crowded the waves are in Bali. He was itching to backtrack to Lombok, to hit some of the places we bypassed on our way to Gili Air. But since he discovered that the breaks at Hyatt reef and Serangan are relatively uncrowded, he's content to hang out here a while longer.