Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pared with their home countries. However, the range of accommodation, restaurants and oth-
er opportunities means that it is just as easy to have a fabulously extravagant experience as a
budget one.
If you're happy to eat in local places, stay off the beer, use the public transport system
and stay in the simplest accommodation, you could scrape by on a
daily budget
of £15-18/
$25-30 per person if you share a room. For around £30/$50 a day per person if you share a
room, you'll get quite a few extra comforts, like the use of a swimming pool, hot water and
air conditioning, three good meals and a few beers; and you'll be able to afford tourist shuttle
bus tickets to get around. Staying in luxury hotels and eating at the swankiest restaurants and
chartering transport, you're likely to spend from £65/$105 per day. The sky's the limit at this
end of the market, with $1000-a-night accommodation, helicopter charters, dive or surf sa-
faris and fabulous gourmet meals all on offer.
Government-run museums
and the most
famous temples
charge around Rp15,000 per
person and
private art museums and galleries
Rp30,000-50,000. Tourist attractions, such
as the Elephant Safari Park at Taro ($19) are even pricier. Youth and student
discounts
are
rare but can be fifty percent where available. All visitors to any temple are expected to give a
small donation (about Rp10,000 or so).
Bargaining
Bargaining
is one of the most obvious ways of keeping your costs down. Except in super-
markets, department stores, restaurants and bars, the first price given is rarely the real one,
and most stallholders expect to engage in some financial banter before finalizing the sale;
on average, buyers will start their counterbid at about thirty to forty percent of the vendor's
opening price and the bartering continues from there. Pretty much everything, from newspa-
pers and cigarettes to woodcarvings and car rental is negotiable, and even accommodation
rates can often be knocked down, from the humblest losmen through to the top-end places
where potential guests ask about “low-season discounts”.
Bargaining is an art, and requires humour and tact - it's easy to forget that you're quibbling
over a few cents or pennies, and that such an amount means a lot more to an Indonesian than
to you.
Crime and personal safety
While incidents of crime are relatively rare on Bali and Lombok, the importance of tourism
to the economy, and the damage that adverse publicity could do, means that the true situation
may be kept conveniently obscured. Certainly, the majority of visitors have trouble-free trips,
but there have been instances of theft and assault on tourists.
It makes sense to take a few
precautions
. Carry vital documents and money in a concealed
money belt: bum-bags are too easy to cut off in a crowd. Make sure your luggage is lockable
