So we started the divemaster course soon after arrival. Everything was going pretty well, except it had been a while since our last course, so we had to do some refreshing on a few things. We like to take courses just to learn new things and one of the best dive courses we ever took before this one was the IANTD cavediver course in Mexico. The divemaster course seemed like an easy task compared to that one, but as it turned out there was a lot to learn on this course too and it kept us very busy for the first month.
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| Some health conditions can prevent you from diving. |
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| Divemaster Skills assessment. |
We then needed a day off, mainly because Kari got flu (you don't dive
with a flu) and we were quite tired from the course. We decided to rent a
motorcycle on 6th of May and drive around the islands of Lembongan and
Ceningan. That's when we got into trouble.
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The bridge between Lembongan and Ceningan.
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The Dream Beach Huts restaurant right on Dream Beach.
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| Dream Beach Huts. |
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| View to the beach. The surf can be tricky, so you have to be careful when entering the water. |
After driving around for an hour in the terrible island roads we headed to the mangrove point in Lembongan, which has a very bad road and not much people around as it's a mangrove area. We drove about 10/km per hour on the road that has loads of potholes and deep ruts from tires on both sides of the road. We were very careful although drove in the rut. Suddenly Kari lost his balance to a big rock and we fell down hard. Most of the weight of the bike fell on Kari's right knee, then on my right thigh, calf and forearm. Kari's patella (kneecap) broke in half (which we found out at Kuta) and I had some deeper wounds in the thigh. In that moment of panic Kari got up and tried to run with his foot, somehow people always try to run when they get hurt, I wonder why. Look at all those Ridiculousness videos (MTV show), every person tries to run after an accident!
Then Kari got dizzy and had to sit down. I was afraid he'll lose consciousness and was talking with him and thinking of what to do in the middle of nowhere. We didn't have any local phonenumbers with us, but a local old lady and a man happened to walk to the scene and a Danish couple also drove on the road at the moment. They all helped us. The old lady's grandchild brought us disinfectant and they cleaned us a bit. The Danish guy drove Kari to the local hospital, my bag straps holding Kari's foot straight up on the bike, as he couldn't bend the leg. The local man drove me to the hospital with our bike, as I've never driven a motorcycle before, although I could've driven by myself, I wasn't that hurt. At the hospital I gave some money to the local man, he didn't accept all that I offered to him, maybe because another local was standing right next to us. Might not be appropriate to accept money from people here in situations like this. The Danish man didn't accept money at all.
While Kari was carried to another room in the hospital for a checkup I had to clean my wounds myself at first. The place was not fit for cleaning. I washed my wounds with the bathrooms dirty still water. At this point I wasn't too worried about what infections one might get from there, but hurried so we could get onward to the main island for a better care. After cleaning they cleaned my wounds again, poorly with disinfectant, and left the wounds without protective dressing. Meanwhile they had made a splint for Kari's leg and now we had to wait for a boat to leave to Kuta at one o'clock, so that Kari gets the right diagnosis. The people in the Lembongan hospital were very sure the leg was broken. We were scared that Kari might have to be operated in a foreign country and that our trip was now done with, only after one month!
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| Lembongan hospital. |
Our dive shop manager Riana was very kind to pay for our medical costs in Lembongan, when we told him we didn't have this sort of money at the moment, but we'd pay everything back when we returned to the island. The ATM in Lembongan doesn't always work. He would've even come with us to Kuta's hospital so that everything goes smoothly. How often do you meet such kind people? We decided we can manage by ourselves, as we were heading to an Australian owned hospital, the BIMC in Kuta, which an Australian tourist mentioned to us. While waiting for the boat to leave I went to get some of our stuff from our place Widia Homestay, as we were probably gonna spend at least a week in Kuta. I also picked up some ice for Kari for the boat trip. The Rocky boat company is good in Lembongan, although expensive. We've used them many times, because they get you from door to door. In this case they were very helpful again, lifting Kari to the boat and from the boat, and driving us straight to the hospital.
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| On our way to Kuta, Bali with Rocky from Lembongan. The ride was a bit tricky with the boat trashing around. |
We had to wait about an hour at the BIMC before Kari could get his x-rays. Half of the workers in the emergency room were western with one Australian female doctor and they were very helpful. It seemed like a good place to be operated. The x-rays showed a fracture in Kari's patella. Kari's doctor was a local man, who was very nice with a cool, humorous and relaxed attitude. They would've operated on Kari's leg immediately, but the insurance company was a problem. They were hard to reach and in the end they had a problem with the costs. The hospital wanted one hundred million rupiah from the operation, which is around 8000.- euros! It would've been half the price without the insurance. They use the insurance system to make more money and this happens in Europe as well. It was a good thing though that we had the insurance, otherwise paying even half of that money would've been hard.
Since there was no reply from the insurance company by the late evening hours, Kari's operation had to wait till the next day! How crazy and irresponsible from the company, letting people suffer because of money! But unfortunately this is how the world rolls, money talks. I only hoped there wouldn't be no complications, Kari just lying there with painkillers and his leg all swollen up and blue. I cursed the insurance company many times.
While waiting for the phonecall from the insurance company I went to find a hotel for myself. Because the hotels close to the hospital were too expensive I took a taxi to Sunset Road, which is about ten minutes walk from the hospital and found a room. I couldn't yet walk well, so I needed the taxi. Later that night I left the hospital and during the whole trip the taxidriver was moaning about me giving twenty for the taxi company, hinting that I should give him another sum seperately. These guys are always after more money. I decided to give him a bit more this time, although it only supports them continuing this habit. The insurance company had made their decision by the morning and paid and Kari had his operation at 10 a.m. I went to the hospital before that. The operation lasted three hours and meanwhile I went for a walk, since my leg was doing a bit better.
I found myself from a small coffee shop and had a breakfast, and my waitress started asking me all kinds of questions, as I was the only customer there. Finally she sat down with me, first asking my permission for that of course. After that her sister, who also worked in the shop, sat down with us. It was kinda nice to have local company with me, although I didn't like the feeling like being in an interrogation. The locals like to ask a lot of questions! I like conversations that go both ways and not just me babbling about myself. I did manage to ask some questions myself too.
After a while the girls introduced their boss to me, who also sat in the table after asking my permission. Everyone was very interested in knowing who I was and were excited to have the opportunity to practise their english with me. The boss was very sad when he heard about the accident and said that Balinese people always want to help people in need. At least it was so in Lembongan. After he said this though he started talking about Bali's best spiritual healer, who could heal Kari in some temple. It was a reiki-sort of healing, and he didn't mention any price for the healing. I told him I will ask Kari if he's interested about it and I'll get back to him. The boss decided to drive me back to my hotel with his motorcycle, so that I wouldn't have to walk with my sore leg. I hadn't walked far from the hotel anyway, but it was nice to get the ride back. Probably the man had business in mind helping me out, but I thanked him for the ride, said I'll get back to him and wished his new coffee shop good luck.
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| Some restaurants deco at the Galeria Mall. |
I headed back to the hospital in the afternoon. I couldn't stay there long, as Kari was tired from the medication and operation, so I went to check out the mall opposite side of the hospital and had lunch. Kari spent three nights at the hospital before getting out 9th of May. They tried to keep him there longer though, probably to make more profit. They even said that they suspect Kari has malaria, as he was a bit feverish! One night at the BIMC cost around 550.- US dollars! But it's a private hospital, so they are expensive.
There was one more incident at the hospital to which we found a solution from the google (it's a good thing you can google things nowadays) and no help from the hospital, so this was another let down from them. It seems so often that you're not getting the whole truth about things, so it's good you can rely on the web, although do a thorough research and don't believe everything they write in there. With all these little things not mentioned and whatnot the hospital seemed otherwise ok.
Kari stayed the last night at the hospital so I decided to change the hotel, as walking to the hospital from the old hotel was very dangerous. Crossing the road was terrible, because the traffic was crazy. You just had to cross hoping that the cars would slow down! There were no lights anywhere, although one traffic police sometimes stopped the cars for the pedestrians. I booked a few nights from the Ibis Styles hotel across the hospital as Kari had a checkup on Saturday. We spent nearly a week in Kuta and before we went back to Lembongan we shopped at the Galeria mall for some vitamins and food. Lembongan doesn't have everything.
It was strange that Kari was able to leave the hospital only two nights after the operation! He still had the crutches he got from Riana in Lembongan, so he didn't need any from the hospital. He had to walk with them for one month. The patella broke so cleanly in half that it healed fast and was easy to operate.
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| Ibis Styles Kuta hotel. |
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| Ibis Styles Kuta hotel room. |
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| Drink at Pizza Hut. |
While waiting for Kari's leg to heal better we spent one more month in Lembongan taking it easy. We went to the beach and read the course material. The dive shop had some parties too with games sometimes. I tend to lose a lot in games, but I still like to play them just for fun. And this means games with people in the same room with you, not internet games.
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| Resting at beach front in Lembongan. |
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| Sunset view from our homestay, the so called sun bomb. |
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| Bananas growing right on the street. |
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| If you don't like to drive a motorcycle you can also rent these. |
Kari did some seaweed experiments on the island, even bought a blender for them from Kuta. Our Widia host Ketut helped us out with the seaweed. We wanted to test it out, because of its health factors. The dry, non-processed seaweed doesn't taste good though.
We also did the paperwork for the divemaster course and the written exams. I had a great first exam, out of the first 60 questions I had none wrong. The second exam had six wrong answers, which would've been only four, because I read one question only halfway and answered another to a wrong box (I get very nervous at exams). The second exam was harder with questions you don't find straight answers to from the book, but need to come up with the solution yourself. There wasn't much calculations, and hardly any of those that I had studied hard for! There was no time limit, so for the first test I took an hour (just being careful with the english language and all the tricks they use on the exams to fool you) and for the second test I took two hours, because I need more time for maths and physics. Kari did both the tests in half time. I'm always the slow one on everything, but I don't mind. Others do;) There were some new english words for us and you had to be careful with how the sentences were put together, they were tricky. Even if you spoke english as native tongue you had to be careful.
During this second month in Lembongan Kari had one stomach problem for three days. I had a food poisoning twice, both from very different kind of restaurants. After the accident I took antibiotics for a few days just in case of infections and got a tetanus shot, but when I was done with the antibiotics I got what seemed to be a strep throat. Only twice in my life I've had that. I got another antibiotic course, but it didn't seem to cure it complitely. I tried to eat more healthy (as if we weren't eating healthy enough already with not much sugar, veggie diet and all), but this thing was very persistent. It took over a month to heal! Maybe it was some new bacteria only around in Lembongan.
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The delicious veggie spring rolls at Ulu Thai Resto.
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During the year travel we ate really healthily, of course cutting down on sugar was mostly because of the regional differences. They don't eat sugary stuff in Asia like for instance Europeans or Americans do. If there's something sugary around it's usually a Mars-bar or Coke. You can get those in the weirdest places. White bread is also quite common, and I don't like to eat that much. Asians also like their white bread (and cheese) sweet, not salty. Another put off for me.
The divemaster course has a mapping project, where you draw a dive site map on chosen dive site. We did this at the Playgrounds. Even for a seasoned diver this place has a lot to offer, if you like to watch the sea creatures. For now though we only went there to do some groundwork on that, me diving and Kari snorkling. We finished this project when we came back to Lembongan in August.
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| Leaf fish |
After one month of resting we decided to continue the trip, because Kari
was healing well. We wanted to give Kari's leg more rest though and
leave to Laos (officially Lao) at first. Kari wasn't able to dive yet,
but he got rid of the crutches, so we thought why not give it a try and
see how normal tourism would go.
Everytime we were in Kuta we also ate pizza at Pronto Pizza close to the Kuta beach. People praise it on Tripadvisor and now we do too. The Italian owner, Giuseppe, is really nice.
When we left Lembongan we were able to leave some of our stuff with Ketut. Mainly it was the divegear and the course material. We weren't gonna dive now. We left two large bags behind with underwater camera housing too, which weighs about two kilos! Altogether we left about 25 kg behind, which helped us a lot, but we still had too much to carry. Kari was able to carry 5 kg now, but he still had to carry his own backpack and the smaller bag. I had my own to carry. We planned to travel for two months and come back in the middle of August. We left on 12th of June and stayed in Kuta for the time that Kari got his second checkup with x-ray at the hospital and leg exercise instructions. The leg would've worked even better, if the doctor would've remembered to give the exact exercise routine on our last visit. The wiring inside the knee wasn't the best work, but still good enough.
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| A nice looking restaurant in Kuta. |
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| The Art Market in Kuta, where you can buy all kinds of things. |
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| A nice Greek restaurant in Kuta. |
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| The horse carriages right on the beach of Kuta. |
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| Sent a little package back home. They pack mail outside the post office. |
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| The Kuta post office, which lies a bit outside of the tourist center. The rates aren't always the same between post offices. |
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| A nice attraction in Kuta. |
We finally visited the Tanah Lot temple too, which is a 90 minute drive from Kuta. The temple is best visited either at sunrise or sunset time, we were there for the sunset with a low tide. It wasn't a spectacular scenery, we heard the sunrise is much nicer with the high tide. We didn't get that good pictures because of the light and low tide, but the place itself is beautiful enough already. You're not allowed to climb up at the temple though. I recall that it requires some permits or you have to be a monk. Our driver was a cool guy named Julie (he was a guy though), who had a very good english, he was talkative, curious, an ex-diver and very aware of many issues around the world. We had a really nice time with him and he seemed to like his job very much, meeting all kinds of people from all corners of the world.
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| Entering the Tanah Lot area. |
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| Merchandise. |
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| Another pass through. |
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| Tanah Lot before sunset. |
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| On the other side. |
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| The temple at sunset and low tide. |
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| People taking wedding pictures opposite side of the beach and temple. |
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| Water made holes in the area with little fish in them, which escape the holes on high tide. |
