Kuta! The most tourist-y town in Indonesia (I expect)

Me and Grace arrived on Thursday morning, checked into a prison-cell-esque room and booked a nice place with a pool for the next two nights when the others would be joining us. We spent the day shopping and walking along the market stalls. They all sell the same thing but some people are much easier to barter with than others. We booked some surfing lessons and I bought a new camera. Being in Indonesia, I thought that it'd be relatively easy to find a rubbish, dirt-cheap camera - it wasn't. I ended up spending more than I would have liked on a new camera, but it's red and looks cool so it's not too bad...

We went out that night, having found a "beer garden" where you can get 2 hours of unlimited Heineken for the equivalent of £3. The 2 hours was spent playing cards with a load of Swedish people. If you want to learn card games or drinking games, go travelling. After that, there was a freeflow upstairs, this place seemed to just give out alcohol! Although I left before 12 and didn't really take too much advantage of the free cocktails.

The next morning we checked out of our prison cell and moved into the nice place, got given free breakfast and headed off to our first surfing lesson. It was just me and Grace with the instructor and the 2 hours were spent mostly drinking saltwater and falling off of the surf board. Although we both managed to stand up for a few seconds! When we returned to the room Elena, Holly and Sophie had moved in too. It was a great sleeping arrangement with 2 people top and tailing on a single bed and the others sleeping sideways on a double.

Grace and I had two lessons the next day, the first at 9am, so we got our complimentary breakfasts (banana toasties) and set off. Halfway through the lesson, Grace's lip ring fell out so she had to go and get that sorted, while I stayed and had a 70% success rate on standing up on the board. We then had some food in the three hours between our next lesson and chilled on the beach. While I don't have enough strength to paddle about, I think I can now stand on the board 90% of the time and stay standing! We got back to our room that afternoon, a bit tired and started getting ready to go out for our big last night out in Asia. However, we found out, just in time, that our flight was in fact that night and not the next day as we had thought. This led to two hours of panic (on my part), a quick scribble on all of the postcards I'd just been out and bought and a rush to the shop to stock up on toiletries before we got to Australia.