You Need Transport?

Walking the streets of Ubud as a Westerner, you cannot go more than five meters (can we please just standardize this America?) without being asked if "You Need Transport?" or ""Taxi?". It rarely suffices to answer a polite no as you are then asked "How about tomorrow?" You will be asked on your way into a shop and then thirty seconds later by the very same person on the way out if you need transport. Gas is cheap here by American standards - aproximately 80 cents per liter, but it has also risen sharply in Asia so the cost to take a moto to other parts of Bali is relatively expensive for a group of four. We decided to chart our own course yesterday and rent our own car. Jon, Jason and I all got International Drivers Licenses before leaving home and we hired a Suzuki Jimny for a trek to Animal Safari an hour away in central Bali. We paid $15 for the rental and filled it up with gas to ensure we had no problems. Jon agreed to drive and Jason navigated with a map that had no highway numbers or street names. They also drive on the other side of the road. It was a little harrowing at first, but Jon masterfully got us to the Animal Safari in one piece. It is geared entirely towards tourists and is very expensive by local standards, but we were promised a great time by an Australian woman and her daughter Jon and Kat met so expectations were high. We arrived in the blistering heat in time to see some Sumatran elephants perform and we were all pretty charmed as we all love elephants. They allow you to take a photo with either an orangutan, a baby lion, or a baby tiger. I chose the orangutan as it was the first one and had a very sweet face. It looked so cute with the other tourists, putting it's arms around them, hugging, laying it's head on their shoulders. So sweet. I could not have been more wrong. It had creepishly long fingers and leathery hands, with long arms that it wrapped around my neck. It's sparse orange hair was course and alien-like. I make Kat come over and sit with me so I could pass it off to her. This is often how I feel about children...except they usually wear pants. It took me a while to shake this horrific experience, but petting a nice Sumatran elephant and an air conditioned ride through their African and Indonesian safari proved the whole Animal Safari worthwhile.