This warning is not meant to be alarmist, but informative. Disregard at your own peril.

1) sand covered concrete roads. Despite going to Bali for 34 yeatrs, I NEVER ride a moto, not self driven and not Gojek. WAYY too dangerous because of traffic. With Bluebirds and grab so prevalent, there is no reason to leave your skin on ther asphalt.

Here in LBJ there are neither Bluebirds nor Grab cars (there is grab food delivery and transport on motos) . While it is a backwater, it is a quite busy one. Nonetheless we had a lovely ride out to Rangko cave today 16 kms each way. Road was quite good albeit narrow in mnay parts. They are building a new port and power sttattion which you pass and there the road looks like Indonesia's answer to the autobahn but with freshly laid first World sidewalks even.

After a shower we headed from our hotel by the airport to catch sunset at the Sunset Panarama bar. You descend a very steep hill with great views but at the bottom of the hill is a T junction. As you turn right to head North, the ENTIRE lane is covered in a thin layer of sand and you must turn rather sharply. The kind locals who arrived said it happens there every day and guided us to the hospital. I missed an important clue earlier when the moto was delivered to our hotel becuse it was covered on ALL sides but evidencd of repeatedly being laid down on its side while moving. Those guys knew.

While at the hospital we met a foreign couple who live here that own Azul Dive school. The Californian wife told me how frequent sand accidents are here, and that when it happened to her the helmet she was wearing shattered! Luckily our heads never hit pavement but out right legs and elbows left lots of skin in the sand, and took many imbedded pebbles with us which they roughly scraped out of our wounds at the hospital . While painful was happy to have them thoroughlky cleaned. She told me they left 20 pebbles embeded in her after her incident and she had to go to the interntional clinic in Bali after developing an infection.

Carry credit card at all times so you can pay your hospital bill, about 1.4 million each for us with no xrays, just bandaging of flesh wounds on my better half and I .

2) Dengue fever epidemic; she also mentioned how dengue is RIFE here despite it being dry season. There is no prophylaxis for dengue, unlike malaria and many other mosquito carried pathogens. DAYtime for dengue, nightime for falciparum malaria. Be safe folks.

Cannot imagine it in rainy season, although hills would be greener and crowds much less. Its PACKED here at peak high season like right now.