Day 70 & 71 (Pangandaran)

appy Birthday Barbara!!

The crew unanimously agreed to change the itinerary slightly to allow us to have two nights in Pangandaran to have extra sun-soakage time and a chance to explore the national park there. Since we weren't due in until the 2nd we had a night each at two different hotels (the second one with a pool – nice!). We all headed out to dinner to celebrate the big birthday after some warm-up drinks in the birthday girls room and everyone seemed to really enjoy the food. In trying to be healthy I'd ordered chicken with spinach, or so I thought – it was actually spinach with chicken (maybe 3 tiny cubes of it) and rather than being leaves of spinach it was all the stalky bits that I'd throw out rather than cook...not the best dinner I've had, but with delicious chocolate birthday cake for dessert I wasn't going to complain.

The next day we got up and headed for a walk around the national park a couple of minutes away from the hotel. It all started out very pleasantly with us spotting deer and birds and butterflies, but then things took a bad turn...monkeys..everywhere! We kept on walking trying to complete the loop that Anto was bringing us on without any hassle, but the monkeys were having none of it and were getting cheekier and cheekier the further into the forest we got. There were a number of families sat around eating picnics that were being plundered by the beasts, they were fearless!

We managed to get away from the picnic area unscathed but a couple of minutes on we came across a section of the path that was infested with the furry fiends. There was one massive one (not as big as the creature that jumped on my in Gibraltar – but big enough to be scary) who was getting very aggressive with the rest of them that were on the path. Half the group had passed them by at a quick pace but when the rest of us attempted to pass they started hissing and spitting at each other before they started fighting – not pleasant! When we spotted a bit of a gap I did the 'walk confidently and they'll leave you alone thing' with one of the girls clinging to my arm. We had to divert around one of the lads who'd stopped in the middle of the ring of monkeys to take a picture to avoid having the big one jump at us, but we made it through. I was feeling all relieved when I heard that we actually had to pass back that way again, the walk was not in fact the loop I thought it was – doh! A couple of paces on and there was an incident whereby a monkey stole a water bottle out of the hands of one of the girls as she tried to skip past it. There was no way she was getting the bottle back, any time she tried to approach it, it started hissing at her. So spooked by the incident and unwilling to have a repeat issue she armed herself with a big stick..very funny!

When we got to the end of the walk we were on a lovely beach that had loads of boats available for hire taxi-stylee, so rather than walk back through the monkey madness we got ourselves some boats back to the beach outside our hotel. A fun afternoon at the pool followed where I willingly got involved in (and created) some pool games to pass the hours. There was a supply of inner tubes and boogie boards at the pool that we used to get jumping tricks going on. I amazingly managed to leap from the pool side, through the inner tube ring and onto the boogie board on the other side – nice!

When we got bored of the pool we headed down to the beach to watch some of our surfer dudes on the waves. It was around this time that I discovered that my camera is banjo'd :( The screen has stopped working...not a problem you'd think since I have a viewfinder on it...but...I can't change any of the settings or shoot modes. It's like I'm back in the 80s with a 35mm camera...how retro...how annoying! Here's hoping there's somewhere in Bali that can repair it for me!!