Day 9 - Bali, Indonesia (Benoa)

Well today we arrived in Bali - right off the bat the day started with problems, the seas were too big to allow them to bring out the big Catamaran for offloading passengers - so they had to use the smaller tenders. It was a 30-40min trip from the ship to the shore - so even with 6 tenders, it took until nearly lunchtime for everyone who wanted to get off to get onshore.

I'm sure there are places in Bali that are quite nice, but the place that they dropped us off at was - to use Dave's description - a Sh%thole.. Basically it was a port area controlled by a particular company and to get anywhere decent they wanted ridiculous amounts of money. They did put on a little show/music as we arrived which was a nice touch, but they should have picked somewhere more central - without the $20/pp cost to get anywhere. We didn't have a tour due to the changes in the schedule so we basically got off, had a brief look at the touristy type shops and then came back to the ship. Oh.. it's also about 30 degrees and 80% humidity - so it wasn't terribly fun.

The ride back to the ship was like a rollercoaster! the tender was getting thrown around all over the place - hopefully it'll settle down, cause they have to get a ton of people back on before we leave at 5pm.