Skygardens cigar

Cigar in Skygardens.

After spending Easter 2012 in Sydney I flew up to Bali for a couple of weeks, on my way up to Jakarta.  

I stayed at the old Imperial at Seminyak, which had changed its name again. Now it’s the Royal Beach. That place changes names more often than a hooker changes undies.

It is still a quality hotel though, and in a quiet part of Bali. You can walk in 15 minutes down to the seedy fleshpots of Kuta if you want to risk the beach. I say risk because during the day the beach is full of hawkers trying to sell you crap, and at night its full of drunks and thieves who try to take the crap back off you.

Bali is an incredible place that engenders a real love-hate relationship. Touristy and tacky one minute, and serene and fascinating the next. You walk past bars full of drunken Aussies shouting and fighting, turn a corner and in front of you is a Buddhist temple with a ceremony taking place.  Bali people are calm and gentle, and put up with a lot of crap from tourists.

I was shocked to discover that the Double 6 club is gone, as too is Déjà vu. The two kingpins of entertainment on the Seminyak side of Kuta, both gone in a year. 

Double 6 was legendary around the world. It opened at 6pm and closed at 6am (hence the name) and the nightclub had a huge pool and a bungy tower in the middle of it.  An entry fee kept the riffraff out, and the drinks and fun flowed like water.  It first opened in 1987 and had a 15,000 watts sound system that you could hear halfway across Bali. They would even let you ride a motorbike off the bungy tower. The place was like that.

And now its gone. Vale Double 6.  I had a ball with you.

Déjà vu was just up the road and now it’s a fancy restaurant.  I last had a drink there a couple of years ago, and it was a zombi bar by then, dead but not buried yet. 

The action is now back in Kuta, near where the 2002 bombings took place.  Savvy marketers might wince at the idea of opening a nightclub within sight of a huge memorial to the 202 who died in a nightclub bombing, but not the Indonesians. They even named one bar after the one that got blown up.

The best by far is Skygarden, a huge complex of bars on multiple floors, each with a different flavour of music.  The place gets packed, and they let Westerners in for free but charge the locals to get in, unless they are accompanied by a westerner. This bizarre ruling results in a pool of local hotties hanging around the entrance trying to get a Westerner to escort them inside.

They have a number of performers in the clubs, including girls who look like pole dancers on steroids, and fire dancers  - with a half naked girl with a blazing hoola hoop.  I kid you not.

One of the fire dancers took a shine to me, and got real close during her performance, as she lit the cigar I had just pulled out of my pocket.   The result was a lot of singed hair and eyebrows, and a big grin on my face. The cigar however tasted of kerosene, and she dripped burning fuel all over my trousers. A kindly barmaid put me out with a wet tea towel.