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Wow, its Christmas Day and I'm in Bali! I could have never guessed this would have happened in a million years this time last year!
I got up about half 7am, to find some of the others all ready having breakfast. I joined them so me, Saskia, Georgie, Aiden (the Aussie), Joey (the Irishman) and Matt (the Canadian friend of Joey's) all sat and ate together. None of us really had much of a plan for the day, but decided we'd all get on the beers in the evening.
After breakie Saskia and I booked our Nusa Lembongan trip at reception. For $80 we got the return shuttle bus to the Villa Serentiy and speed boat trips, which although we could have done a bit cheaper by sorting it all ourself, doing as a package took out so much hassle it was worth it. The shuttle takes us to and from Padang Bai, where the speed boat take to the island and back.
By about 10am Joey and I got our stuff together and went off down to Echo Beach for a Christmas surf. But first I got Saskia to take a stereotypical 'surfing with a Santa hat on' photo of me. We got to Echo Beach to find it was about 4ft with the occasional bomb set much bigger, and breaking really well over reef in the river mouth. Unfortunately on the paddle out my Santa hat didn't quite make it, and was claimed by the ocean within 5 minutes.
I got some really fun ones, and completely smashed on others. The lower the tide got the more shallow the reef became, which became pretty gnarly. A couple of times near the end of the session I found myself stood on the reef in thigh deep water trying to jump walls of white water. Fortunately it was a dead reef though, so it was more like rocks and boulders than razor sharp coral!
When we got back to the villa I had been talking to Joey in the surf about Lembongan, so he went straight to reception and booked exactly the same trip for he and Matt. I was really pleased as although just going with Saskia would have been fun, I now how a surf buddy about my ability in Joey. Plus Matt had brought his spear gun and I have my hand spear, so we are going to see if we can catch some dinner!
Having had some lunch I got stuck into my 'care package' of Christmas presents, which I had brought over from Australia. I was stoked to have so many presents to open, from my family, my 'adopted family' and from the Parkers too! It was good fun messing about for an hour or so taking silly pictures of myself and some of girls working there, with the Santa hat and face mask thing on. It was definately the most 'Christmasy' I felt all day.
Later on I went on a beer run with Joey to the local shop, as all the others had already been whilst we were in the surf. Then about 5pm onwards we had a bit of a 'pool party'. The others had bought a selection of Lilo's and water guns etc, so we just put some music on and bobbed around in the pool drinking, it was great fun.
As early as about 7pm everyone was half cut and we were considering going out, when Aiden threw out the idea of getting tattoos, as he knew a friend doing them for free. In the end that split the crew up - everyone but me, Saskia and Wesley (who joined in later due to being a bit ill) went off to the tatto place. I was going to go just for a laugh and see what happened to the others, but when they said they were going on the scooters I sacked it off. It's dodgey enough on those things, let alone after beers and it's dark!
That was the last we saw of them that evening, as it was obviously a late one, and the 3 of us went and had really good burgers, chips and beers at the Canggu beach BBQ place, for 'Christmas Dinner'.
We had a good laugh, and 2 of Wesley's other Dutch mates joined us too, so it turned out to be a lot of fun. Im not sure what time we went back and to bed, but I don't think it could have been majory later as we had to be up at 5:30am to sort ourselves out for Lembongan the next day.
(Photo - My Christmas hat from Mum, and face mask from Fenella).
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