We've started our trip through Indonesia on Bali - it's the most tourist-friendly island so we figured it would be a good starting point. As most of the visitors, we arrived to Kuta, which is a heaven for young people who want to surf and party. Without realizing it, we stayed the first night at a hotel right next door to the "ground zero" where the 2002 bombing took place. It's back to normal now, so our heads were bouncing on the pillows until 4am thanks to the music next door :)
Surfing - that's what's Kuta is all about. The town is full of surfers in early twenties with bodies that leave even me drooling :) There are surf-shops all around and surf-rentals dot the whole length of the beach. After watching the surf-students one afternoon, we've decided to try it ourselves as well. We went independent though - we've seen it enough, so no need for instructor we reasoned :) The guy renting us the surf-board asked about our experience and when he heard "none", he fished out the biggest board on the southern hemisphere. Not big enough as we found out soon. I was the first to go. Took the board and boldly walked to the water. The very first wave took me, spun me over, dragged me through the sand on the bottom and spat me back. So that's why surfers wear t-shirts. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get on that damn thing and stay for more than 2 seconds, being only partly successfull. At least I know now where the surfers get their body-shape; the paddling around is sure exhausting. Kacka tried after me with pretty much the same results, which wasn't bad at all considering it was our first attempt :) Later in the afternoon I went once more. This time the waves were a bit bigger and I actually managed to ride some of them for maybe 5 seconds or so! Despite all the bruises and scratched chest, it was great fun!
Paragliding - conicidentally, one of my cousins is married to an Indonesian and both of them were raving about the paragliding there. So I found a contact to an instructor online, got in toouch with him and agreed to meet him one afternoon close to Nusa Dua (east coast, south of Kuta). It's a cliff site, with pefrect alternative LZ (landing zone) on the beach below. When we got there, it looked just perfect, but soon we found out that it was too windy. That's the problem with paragliding - there're usually either too much or not enough wind :( One very experienced dude managed to take off, but then he had troubles getting down. I've actually read about it before - as he approached the LZ, he just couldn't get down, the wind was constantly pushing him up. Finally he managed by doing big ears, but you can tell he wasn't very comfortable. We kept hanging around for until late afternoon, but the wind kept blowing and so I didn't fly... :(
The final thing I wanted to do on Bali was kitesurfing. Unfortunatelly the season was about to end, the wind was dying out and our time was running out too. So I didn't get the chance, but that's just one more reason to come back one day :)