Bali - Kintamani

When I was in Bali, I hired a taxi driver for the day to drive me around the interior of the island. That's the pretty part. It was all going so well. He'd driven me to the Monkey Forest at Ubud (monkeys are bad), then we set off to look at some rice terraces. That's where it started to go wrong.



It was getting on to lunch time, so the driver suggested that we go to a place that had good food. HE said it was only 20 minutes away from Ubud, so we though that would be nice. It would save us having to find a place for lunch.

45 minutes later, along a long narrow, bumpy road, we came to the town of Kintamani. The first sign that something was afoot was a road side policeman. He said we needed a ticket to get into the town. No such thing exists. He was basically just a corrupt bad man standing by the side of the road extorting visiting tourists. He wasn't asking much, so I handed over the cash and we moved on.

The main attraction of Kintamani is the volcanic caldera. It's right on the edge of the crater and you can look down into the crater and see smoke rising and see the occasional bit of lava. That's the theory, at least. When I got there, it was raining, overcast and foggy. I was treated to some lovely views of a grey fog bank. Delightful.


Just to rub it in, the driver dropped us at a specially designated restaurant. The drivers obviously get given a free lunch if they bring stupid tourists here. FOr me though, the food was diabolical. For a start, it was a buffet, which is never a good idea. Worst still, it was an overpriced buffet. The cost of the meal was the same as that at a 5 star restaurant in town. Such a rip off. Then, to make things as bad as they could be, the food was mostly cold and tasted bad. Yummo. When he said he was going to take me to a place with nice food, I now know what he meant - nice for him, as it was free!

It put a dampener on the entire day and left me feeling quite pissed off. I'm old enough and ugly enough not to fall for these dumb tourist traps, but occasionally you get caught. Apparently the view is really nice on a clear day, just make sure you don't go there on a wet day like me!