Singapore for a minute

We awoke for sunrise on the beach, in Sanur. It was cloudy. A little too cloudy. But it was still nice.  By the time we had breakfast, we had to pack and head to the airport.

Transport is weird here. Grab, an uber type app is pretty big in this part of the world. But Bali is like super against it, specifically.  Yet, when you compare prices that the hotel offers, grab is often 1/2 or 1/3 the price.  So I knew it should be about 100k rupiah to get to the airport, but saw the no grab signs. The hotel said we could try a metered taxi or pay a driver 300k.  After some research, we took our chances with the meter, as most said it should be in the ballpark of 100 give or take traffic.

I knew there was a quick way to get to the airport, that involves a toll road, which was 11,5k rupiah in addition.  When we got to the point to pay, he not only told me it was 50k, but that I needed to pay it in cash. It was the only thing he could really communicate.  He kept pointing to a card. I was getting angry, knowing he was charging me nearly x5 the cost.  Joe is trying to reason with me, it's the difference of about $3USD. But it's the principle. He didn't  tell us this right away and he took advantage. We were hostage and couldn't say no and didnt have the language to negotiate. The meter came up at 115k and I tried to give him 150k and he only took the 100k, so he wound up scamming me 20k as opposed to 42k, but still it's dishonest and underhanded and it sucks that people choose to do that. (Again, I know that to us, the money means much less and that small amount of money can mean a great deal. And also, I had a total of 300k left and was planning on giving him all of it, as the currency is little use to me elsewhere  but I just couldn't when he used us to fill up his card.)

Our flight was luckily uneventful.  I was a little worried about this flight. I bought third party on an airline called scoot. I had a ticket number but no 6 digit code, so many calls later to priceline, I finally got someone helpful to get me the way to sign into scoot so I could up our baggage allowance. Also, as of entering the airport, we had mo boarding passes. The line, then, was long, as everyone needed to get their as well. But otherwise, it was uneventful.

We took a grab to the hotel. Oh man, what a hotel. This was one of those old fashioned, high tea in the lobby kind of hotels. I had a free night on hotels.com and we were pretty miserable at our last hotel, which wasn't much bigger than a closet so we decided to go big for our last night. Including the free night, this hotel still cost more than most of the other hotels on our trip. But it was only one night and it was nice.

Once settled in the room, we ventured out for food. Next door was a mall called far east plaza. I was able to trade in my leftover rupiah, and actually made a decent exchange and we got some wanton noodles. We then hit up the small pool for a bit and relaxed.

We went back and forth. Joe really wanted to do a drink at the marina sands hotel, 57 floors up. I'd been having stomach pains for days at the thought of it.  Tiredness eventually won the day, but first we went to our last hawker opportunity 15 minutes down the road.  Unlike in Malaysia, we spent nearly $50 on our food, but did have several courses including out first taste of durian!  There is video of this.

We then gave up completely on the marina sands, deciding it would give us an excuse to come back.