Oi! We ‘ome yet, or what?!? Bali

Shirtless, beer-clutching mobs of over-muscled males; shoulderblade Southern Cross tattoos accessorising Australian flag boardshorts; pink, over-fed girls overflowing from spaghetti strap singlets; coagulated accents inflecting around a vocabulary consisting mainly of unspellable sounds - ‘aahhh’, ‘whhhoor’, ‘yahh – hahAAAH’, ‘Tay-LAH!!! Get BACK ovr’ere!’. It’s good to be home.


Oh no, wait. There’s a wedding on (Angie’s brother, Eric and his fiancé, Leah) in Bali, and that’s where we’ve just landed. Culture shock hit us hard; after India and its separation of the sexes, strange-uncle dress code and omnipresent air of devotion, it was a little confronting to find ourselves in Kuta amid a pre-drunken mass of holidaying Australiana; an alien, yet disturbingly familiar, uninhibited microcosm of home rarefied by Bintang and the Balinese sun… ya bastard!

We had two weeks leading up to the wedding booked in a nice hotel (with a hairdryer - a hairdryer!), a swish-ish way to cap off our nineteen months trippinballs. There was a week to wait before checking in, and rather than killing that week in Kuta amongst the shopping packs of braid-headed, flag swathed holiday makers and touchy-feely-grabby-and-ripoffy shopkeepers (plenty of time for that later), we went in search of something a little more serene.