Where's the beach?

We landed in Bali just after 10 p.m. after a two hour flight from Singapore. Having selected the cheapest hostel listed in the guidebook, we directed our cab driver to Legian Beach, just one beach north of Kuta beach about a 10 minute drive from the airport. Luckily for us, a lone traveler was awake and outside of his room when we arrived and he advised us to knock on the door behind the reception to wake someone up to check us in. Our knock was answered by a young Balinese man who gave us a key to our room and went back to bed.

The following morning we awoke to the sunlight streaming through our windows and decided to head out and explore our new environment. Our room was one of a block of rooms lining one side of an open courtyard filled with trees and flowering bushes. Across the courtyard to the right of the opposite row of rooms, there was what looked like the ancient ruins of a wall surrounding mini-temples on raised platforms. As I marveled at the structures, a wizened old Balinese woman walked by placing offerings of small square baskets of woven palm fronds filed with flower petals and rice into the various temples as well as on the ground before my feet. She smiled up at me as she passed and continued with her task.

I walked back past the room and over to the open air dining room where Steven sat with a smile sipping his strong Balinese coffee. We ordered breakfast and then headed down the small dirt road towards the beach.

As we popped out onto the main road, we were immediately accosted by an incredibly friendly looking Balinese man. He introduced himself as Wayan, one of the many we would meet as the Balinese traditionally name their children in order of their birth (the first child is Wayan or Putu, the second child is Made or Kadek, the third is Nyoman or Komang and the fourth is Ketut. The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth will be another Wayan, Made, Nyoman, Ketut and Wayan again). After welcoming us to Bali, Wayan handed us what looked like lottery scratch off cards. Immediately on alert, Steven and I started to protest, but he was so friendly and genuine - something we would learn was a Balinese hawker tactic - that we stayed and listened to his spiel. After scratching off the hidden part of the card we learned that I had "won" a T-shirt advertising a resort in the area and Steven had "won" a digital camera worth over $1000 US Dollars. At this point, Wayan became overly excited and explained to us that if we merely went to pick up our "prize," for which they would provide transportation both ways, he would earn $50 US Dollars. Having realized early on that this was one of those timeshare deals where they entice you in with the promise of a lucrative reward only to force you to listen to sit through hours of pressure to buy a property or resort that you (in our case 'we') would never be able to afford. With great effort, we extricated ourselves from the ruse, leaving a much less enthusiastic Wayan calling out a deflated "maybe later" to our retreating forms.

As we left Wayan behind, we walk toward our anticipated escape from the loud, dirty streets of Saigon - a white sandy beach, with hammocks strung between palm trees and quaint little restaurants serving tropical drinks with little umbrellas - only to find an sprawling gray sand beach, devoid of people except for a handful of hawkers trying to rent out their dilapidated lounge chairs, backing up, in some areas, to cement walls separating the beach from the street and in others, to dirty parking lots with a spattering of old motorbikes. Not wanting to rain on Steven's near eternal cheerfulness, I tried to contain my disappointment. We walked down the beach turning down vendors as we went and continued on to Kuta beach, one beach south of Legian.

To our surprise, Kuta's beach had something that Legian did not. Dead fish. They were everywhere. As we walked along, trying to avoid direct contact with our bare feet, we stepped over countless fish carcasses and wondered aloud if the fishermen were actually this wasteful or if there wasn't something more sinister lurking below the surface of Bali's famous waves.