11 May 2011
Munduk Trekking
The image of the blood running down her leg thanks to the leeches that were attached kept flashing through my head as we brushed through the wet jungle leaves following our Balinese guide to the first large waterfall. The “she” in question was a woman from the UK who we chatted briefly with at the reception desk last night, noting that she and her husband appeared to have just come back from hiking the nearby trails and thus could be of some information to us. All was well and good and happily informative until she mentioned the leeches. The blood-sucking leeches that they had been surprised to find attached to their ankles and calves – and diligently photo-documented – after hiking to the very waterfall we were headed to now. In fairness, these were small leeches, not of the Stand-By-Me size that typically comes to mind when one mentions the word leech but more of the small but mighty size leeches. In my mind bigger would definitely be worse, but really, any size leech sucked onto my skin is going to send me into a frenzy of Get-It-Off-Get-It-Off-Get-It-Off dance moves, of that I have no doubt.
Our Balinese guide is moving quite slowly along the trail for what I guess to be one (or all) of several reasons: (a) it’s humid out which is tiring in and of itself, (b) he wants to make the hike last as long as possible as he’s paid by the hour, or (c) it’s simply the Balinese way. Regardless, I’m glad he’s moving so slow for this allows me every 3 meters or so to stop, inspect my bare legs for leeches, and then catch back up without anyone noticing.
We pass through groves of cocoa, vanilla bean, nutmeg, clove, and banana en-route to our first stop at Laangan Waterfall, the highest waterfall in Bali. Then it’s up 450 stairs and through the territory of a handful of growling dogs to reach our second destination, the Red Coral Waterfall. Both quite lovely and the cool spray a welcome refresher for the heat and humidity pansy that is me.
The entire trek lasts only two hours so we are now faced with a free afternoon which can only mean one thing: time for Finances! For those who may not have read or heard about any of my previous accounts regarding this, it’s where Gina pulls out her little yellow Travel Expense book and reads me numbers that I dutifully enter into a spreadsheet (a few spreadsheets, actually, which goes against my Data Management principles but which I must live with here on the road where there is neither time nor energy nor really, interest, to devote to building a more efficient system). Although I tease Gina about these Finances! it’s amazing how well she keeps track of our expenditures – a very important task when unemployed but out spending money traveling. So we tally up our Asia expenses thus far and think that maybe we should update our resumes next.
