We only had a week in Bali and decided to travel round the Indonesian island so as to see as much of it as possible. The first town we came to was Kuta, a party town-cum-surfer’s paradise, a kind of Benidorm for Australians (but much more attractive!). We stayed in an area of town called Poppy’s Gang, a maze of streets barely the width of a car sandwiched between main strip of cavernous night-clubs and heaving bars, and the beach. The beach, or more specifically the monstrous waves, are the reason for Kuta’s surf-mecca status. They crash, laden with sun-tanned surfers, onto the wide sandy beach which is peppered with a myriad upright surf boards for hire manned by Indonesians with unlikely names such as Ricky, Brad and Antonio; goofy surf bums lounge around, periodically punching the air, whooping and ‘Yeah!’ing at their friend’s surfing prowess. I took an hour’s surf lesson with ‘Eddie’ and actually managed to stand up and surf! We spent three nights in Kuta, taking full advantage of the nightlife, before heading to Ubud.

Ubud must be one of the prettiest towns on the planet, certainly that we’ve come across. There is an unnatural preponderance of wood-carving shops and intricately ornate temples – so much so that people live in and amongst them, park their car or set up shop in them! You can’t go more than five yards without having to step over one of the decorative offerings that the locals make to some god or other – a smouldering joss stick atop a colourful banana-leaf dish of petals and technicolour rice. It feels like every day is a religious festival. As we only had one night in Ubud we wasted no time in renting a scooter so we could explore the surrounding countryside of (more) temples and fluorescent green rice paddy fields.

We visited a monkey sanctuary forest where the little Macaque monkeys were everywhere; thieving, screeching, fighting and fornicating. We also set out to find a scene that we’d only seen on a postcard in Kuta – a winding river with verdant rice paddies carved into its sloping valley sides like giant steppes. Amazingly, through guesswork alone, we found it! We caught a tantalising glimpse of the top of one of the valley slopes on the other side of a large rice plantation so we ditched the bike and set off on foot. After about 15 minutes we came to the crest of a ridge over which we would be able to see the river in all its splendour. We approached with bated breath and camera in hand…but then the dogs attacked. We whimpered, tried to not look scared, and turned back the way we came to find another set of bigger, meaner, slavering dogs in front of us; gnashing and barking. Trapped. Luckily a guy with a machete came and saved us. We scampered back to the bike and made good our escape! The next day we got the bus to Lovina.

Lovina would have been a waste of time if not for the dolphin spotting trip we took. We had to get up at 6am and make our way to the beach where we were picked up by a 4-man catamaran/boat type thing. The sea was as placid as a lake in the violet and orange pre-dawn wisps of light, and it took us no time at all to find the dolphins. Dozens of them were flipping and splashing around about a mile off-shore. Occasionally they would jump clear out of the water, silhoutted against the sun that was beggining to rise from behind mountains shrouded in the morning mist. It was a lovely scene. Most impressive of all was the solitary whale dolphin; much bigger and rougher-skinned than the others, it broke the surface periodically in its rhythmic glide through the mercurial ocean.

Apparently Lovina, which is located on the north coast of the island, never really recovered from the Bali bombings. Touts and hawkers are prevalent throughout Bali, but in Lovina they pester and badger relentlessly with an urgency that borders on desparation. In fact the whole town has an air of desparation about it. The beach is of black sand, which sounds curiously appealing, but in reality looks like the apocalyptic aftermath of a nuclear fall-out! We hired out a scooter on our penultimate day but no sooner had we signed the rental agreement than a sound rippled through the sky – the monsoon had found us! We headed back to Kuta for our final night in Bali, indeed in Asia, before our flight to Australia.

And so ends our little jaunt into South East Asia. It’s been an unforgettable ten weeks, from riding elephants and white-water rafting in the north of Thailand; hurtling along vertiginous mountain roads and drunkenly navigating rapids in Laos; watching the sun rise over the ancient temple of Angkor Wat and discovering our own deserted beach in Cambodia; experiencing the roaring buzz of Ho Chi Minh city and sailing between the prehistoric pillars of Ha Long bay in Vietnam; and learning to surf and encountering dolphins in Indonesia. This part of the world has so much to offer, and there’s so much we didn’t get round to doing but regrettably this part our journey is over. It’s a bittersweet feeling though, because now we make our way to Australia, a whole new continent and a whole new adventure.