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  • Day 124

    Travelling back to the island life

    June 20, 2017 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

    We've left the busy city of Singapore behind and have arrived in Bali. We caught an Uber to the airport which was arranged by the hostel and enjoyed a ride in a brand new swanky black and red car. At the airport for the first time our check in desk that was allocated was a self service area. All we had to do was scan our passports and pick our flight which gave us our boarding passes and luggage tags. After labelling up the luggage we had to electronically link it to our passports and send it on it way to the plane. All very modern and efficient. We still then had a finally check for security about our purpose and time in Bali but then we were done and on our way in about 10 minutes rather than queueing for an hour or so to check in. This gave us more time than we planned so we headed through immigration and then the Starbucks. Rather annoyingly the airport do there hand luggage checks at each gate which you understand is more efficient because they have so many gates but it means we couldn't buy water to take onto the plan we were told. Rather a pain when you have a headache but oh well! The flight was a couple of hours and I spent most of it gripped to my book. I'm 20 pages off the ending so as you can imagine I was wishing we had more time as soon as we'd landed and parked up. We caught an airport taxi to our hotel and checked in. Our room has a little seating area outside and we even have a pool here which is great. After getting a map from reception we headed in search of a supermarket and for a wonder. We're in a very busy tourist area and we're not sure we like that so it's good we only booked 3 nights at our hotel so we can move if we want to. With shopping in hand we went and had an early tea as we were pretty hungry from not having lunch. I had an amazing chocolate shake as you can see. The most interesting part of our day then happened. We'd spoke to a guy in the street who stopped us and was promoting his hotel. He spoke about it and then gave us these tickets to open where you can win a prize. We opened them as we walked to the supermarket and Nick had won the top prize: 7 night free stay, a gopro camera or £120. We were very excited as you can imagine! On our way back from dinner the guy was still there so we asked him what this means and he called over his supervisor. They seemed elated for Nick as if this never happens and said all we have to do is have a tour of their hotel for an hour with free pick up and drop off and we get the prize, simple. We arranged it all for tomorrow morning and set off back to the hotel in disbelief of what was happening and joking about when and where we'd stay if we got the free holiday. We were a bit sceptical about it though so did some googling and after an hour of looking into it we discovered it's usually a scam. They get you to their hotel and then try and make you sign up to timeshares and if you don't suddenly the prize isn't available and you've wasted your morning or even day in some cases. It is also listed as one of Bali's top scams. There seems to be a lot of scams and ripping off tourists in Bali and seeing as we're in such a tourist area we fear we're right in the heart of it. Feeling unnerved by it and not wanting to waste our time here and be put in that position we headed back to cancel. The supervisor drove off in the other direction as we walked up to the original man we spoke which we were glad about as we were quite nervous about this encounter but it went fine and we just used our limited time here as an excuse. We walked back relieved knowing we have avoided potentially a threatening and pressurised encounter so even though a prize would of been lovely it is more than likely one of the 'too good to be true' situations.Read more