Bad Travelers

For two weeks we lazed around Bali, swimming in pools, eating food and curling into a bedridden foetal position after consuming something dodgy, possibly from the egg-station at the daily buffet breakfast free-for-all.

It just wouldn’t have been right to finish this trip in a calm, well-planned fashion. We’d been traveling for nineteen months, and after all the mad rushes for busses, boats, planes and trains, it would’ve felt a little inappropriate to just wander up to our final transport and slide on like we’d been practising it for a year and a half.

Not that we wanted to be late; wandering up like a seasoned traveler would’ve been great, but in retrospect, it couldn’t have ended in any other way than this:

I was positive that the ticket we had booked months earlier had us flying out of Bali at 11:50 that night. Rather than double check that time, like sensible people, we decided to enjoy a long dinner accompanied by some sickly celebratory cocktails and a spot of reminiscing about the last year and a half. Nine o’clock rolled around, and on the way back to the hotel, we checked the ticket times on the internet. I was a little startled to find our departure time was actually 10:10 pm; about an hour from now, meaning the brutally strict Jetstar check-in had just closed and we were half an hour from Denpasar airport.

The most stressful taxi ride ever followed; it wasn’t stressful due to the fact that we’d paid the driver to get us there in record time (twenty minutes), it was the gut-twisting, plain embarrassing feeling that we might miss our final flight, for no good reason other than laziness and incompetence.

In the end, our beaming taxi driver got us there in time for the flight (‘Very good time! Very fast!’ he exclaimed as we pulled up to the drop-off point, eyeing my wallet). In a hilarious twist, the plane was three hours late anyway, so really we had nothing to worry about, except for the fact that even after nineteen months, we still hadn’t learned some of the most basic fundamentals of stress-free travel.

One Last Fitting

Spending a year and a half in hotel rooms means you start to find the little details fascinating (I did anyway). Here's the last hotel room shot from the trip, our framed air-conditioner controller in Bali.

For more photos of interesting/depressing/weird room fittings, see here, here, here, here and here.

The Big Day

The chapel overlooks Uluwatu

Originally, we were supposed to fly straight home from India, but Eric and Leah decided to get married in Bali, so that gave us a good excuse to add three Indonesian weeks onto the end of the trip. The big day came, and the weather was good, and the setting was stunning, and it was a wonderfully happy way to finish off our trip.

Paparazzi

Leah dabs away the happy tears, Eric wipes away the sweat.

Quite the setting

Angie in her sari, which behaved itself and stayed in place. Phew.

Bali Bits

The tiger character from a traditional dance

Wooden horses and cobras

Temple statues

Temple fish and coins

Harassed monkey

Monkey attack on Angie's pop. Uncle Mike was not amused.

Roundabout statue

Gili Air Breakfast

The fruit, the coffee and the view

The location

Gili Air

Rustbucket transportation

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.