Board babe

(This post and the next one have been sitting in 'draft' for a while because I wanted to add pictures before posting it, but has been Blogger refusing for weeks now. Also I cannot send the pictures to my brother like I did when in Vanuatu because Gmail (also a Google product) has the same problem. So I am posting them without, I hope in future I will have a chance to add them.)
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On my first day of my 'holiday from traveling' I went looking for a nice place to stay. In the past weeks I have been staying in some pretty basic places, mostly with only a bucket of cold water and a plastic scoop for a shower. This time I decided to go way over budget and treat myself to some really nice lodgings. I found a lovely quiet garden with lots of frangipani trees in which were set bungalows which had enormous rooms, with beautifully carved four-poster beds and a bathroom with not only hot water, but a real bath as well! Wowee, what bliss! For the first couple of days I did nothing but sleep, lay on the beach and read. However, after a few days I realised there is only so much relaxing non-stop reading one can do, before one gets just a teeny bit bored. Plus I realised I could use some rigorous exercise to try and get rid of some of the adrenaline and frustration still coarsing through my body from the previous weeks. So I signed up for a series of three surfing lessons! This is Bali after all: apparently one of the best places in the world to learn how to surf.
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(From left to right: surfboard, me)

Surfing is not an easy skill to master, but it is not quite as difficult as I had feared. This is me during the second lesson: a bona fide board babe!
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Okay, so the board is bigger than the wave, but who cares, I am actually surfing! It was great fun. (I do not understand that in biblical times Abraham and Jesus insisted on walking through or on water. How boring, when they could have just grabbed a board and rode the waves! Now that would have seriously been cool)
In the third lesson we were going to learn how to do backflips and inverted summersaults from the board while riding in on waves the size of towerblocks, but that did not sound all that interesting to me. Especially as I had something much more important to do: nursing my sore muscles and lots of cuts and bruises from the first two lessons... The surfboard was covered with a strange non-slip material that gave me 'carpet burns' on my knees, the tops of my toes and all my fingertips. Adu! (This is Indonesian for 'auch!') Fortunately, nothing that a couple of hours in my lovely bath with a beer did not solve...