THE ROUGH GUIDE TO BALI ACCORDING TO JIM AND DONNA PART 2

Bali is well known for its art and culture. In the 1930s, Balinese art was the latest craze that swept the world. While most countries were sinking into fascist dictatorships, great depressions and global warfare, Bali's economy was booming.

Those heady days may be gone but artistic Bali is still alive and strong. It can be seen along every street, town and village whenever you take a car journey or bike ride. It seems that every single roundabout or street corner has a huge monument adorning it, hundreds of shops are packed full of impressive wood carvings and statues and every house is more extravagantly decorated than the last.

It can be good to embrace this artistic side; for example we went to a class where we learnt how to create our own piece of batik. This involved covering a sheet of cloth in lots and lots of layers of wax. It is harder than you think because the wax tends to drip onto the material just where you don't want it to. Amongst professional batik makers it is common to hear such expletives as 'Oh dear, I have just blobbed on my elephant' or 'I find I can reduce my blobbing by wiping thoroughly'.

It is so nice to do an activity, which results in you making something you can take home, and be proud of. Which is a shame as my picture of elephants is certainly not something I can be proud of. If you think I am being a bit harsh on myself, take a look at the picture attached with all our efforts:

Roy's is the geckos with the arty use of blobs, Donna's is the fish with the extravagant coral colouring, Ali's is the flowers which is just good and mine is the elephants.

However, some artistic endevours should be avoided at all costs; for example going to see a traditional Balinese music show. Every night at the Ubud Palace, they put on a show for the princely sum of £4 per person. We are very proud that we managed to stay for at least half an hour before sneaking out.

The show starts with the appearance of about a hundred musicians, all of whom seem to play the same xylophone type instrument, none of whom play it in time with any of the others. Imagine if you went to a 3 year old's birthday party when all the kids have just been given their first drum kits and you get the idea.

You could perhaps put up with this racket (after all if it is classed as 'traditional' then it must be worth having your eardrums bleed to listen to) if the dancing and story made up for it but unfortunately this was even worse than the music.

It involved two people dressed up as a giant dog, a bit like a pantomime horse, sitting in the middle of the stage while someone wearing a monkey mask stole the dog's banana.

Eventually the dog got up and stole his banana back.

Somehow they managed to stretch this out for half an hour.

We didn't stay to find out what happened in the second half.

Bali is also a country of interesting and diverse wildlife. While sitting in one of our favourite bars, over the space of ten minutes we managed to see a cat, a bat, a rat, a rabbit, a cow, a duck, a dog and a frog. It was like being at a zoo but with more beer and mojitos.

The diverse wildlife is not as much fun when it is in your room. We were severely delayed going out the other night by some horrendously evil, giant insect thing flying around in our room. It was about twice the size of your hand and would fly around making angry noises, every now and then finding somewhere to land where it would sit swaying left to right trying to hypnotise us (its prey). We chose the only option available to us and got the staff at the hotel to remove it. They turned up with a giant net but on seeing this evil specimen, promptly went over and picked it up with his hands and took him out. Apparently it was a grasshopper.

Yes, in Bali, you can expect such wonderful service at your hotel where they risk their lives to remove dangerous animals from your room every day.

You can also expect them to replace all of the towels in your room, including the extra ones they give you for hanging round the pool, at least once a day. When I arrived, I thought this was a little extravagant. Surely, I can use a towel more than once and it still be considered usable? But, no, after two weeks of being able to have a sparkling fresh clean towel every time I so much as wash my hands, I have developed a pathological fear of dirty towel.

This goes somewhat against the grain of my previous travelling experience where I failed to wash my towel the entire trip (and then was surprised when it smelt a little bit) and leaves me with great concern for how I am going to cope for the rest of our travels. I will either have to learn how to wash towels, be very nice to Donna or regress badly back to my old ways.

Yes moving to Australia is certainly going to be a culture shock. Here it is perfectly normal to wave, smile and say hallo to every small child you pass on the street. I worry if we don't break this habit in Oz then we might get arrested pretty soon.

But like all good things, Bali has to come to an end. Roy and Ali have already left us last night and it is lonely here in the last throes of our holiday. Now that Roy isn't around, we can wee in the pool whenever we want but it just isn't the same without them.

So bye bye Bali! It has been an action-packed, amazing holiday but on to Oz. It is time to go, not least because we have finally worked out how to pronounce Ubud. There is nothing left for us here.

Here's to hoping that Chloe will have has a three-week supply of clean towels and a glass of goon waiting for us when we get to Australia.

Lots of love

Jim and Donna