A Bali Folly

Julie and I first went to Bali back in 2010 for a birthday celebration (no need to say whose or which birthday it was).  We had a great time, but learned an important lesson – Bali has traffic, narrow roads, and it can take forever to get anywhere. We stayed that time down in Nusa Dua, which was lovely, but it meant crossing Denpasar to get to the real Bali, not the sanitized resort version.  We said if we came back again (and it was a big “if” at that time) we would stay somewhere else in Bali—so we did!

Back in January we realized that Singapore had a 4-day weekend in August with National Day on 8 August and Hari Raya Haji on the 12^th.  Seeing that every long weekend in Singapore is a chance for a getaway weekend we booked our flights to Denpasar and figured we would work out the other details later.  We were glad we did because a quick check of airfares as the actual date approached show that they had more than tripled.

The flight to Bali is almost 2 ½ hours, so we consider it a quick trip by our adjusted scale (living in Singapore, anything less than 8 hours we are considering a short flight).  Landing at Denpasar we were greeted by long lines in the immigration hall.  There were arrows pointing to the right for “those 60 years or older or with children under 6”.  I felt like I had won a prize!

A quick check with and officer to make sure that I could bring my family along (“Yes”) and we stood in that line.  Turns out we were standing in the wrong line.  And it took about 20 minutes for us to realize.  We quickly moved over to the proper line and got through immigration in about another 10 minutes.  Without the benefit of my “golden years” I think that the wait would have been over an hour.

Thankfully, our bags were circling the luggage carousel after immigration so we picked them up and headed off to find our driver.  We have become somewhat spoiled in Asia by having a driver meet us versus getting a cab.  You get used to seeing a sign that says “Hamilton” and following someone to your car.  And it’s usually not extravagant—this one was about $28 USD and it is a 75-minute ride.

Anyway there was a sea of signs, I have never seen so many.  So all of us were looking for our name.  Some greeters had names at the end of poles that they would shake vilolently , as if that would somehow the sign name match ours.  We got to the end (probably 150 names) and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, then Julie pointed that we needed to keep going as there was another section.  Sure enough at the end of that section we saw our name and we were on our way.

Back riding in a car in Bali, a couple of memories of previous trips popped into my braid.  First is the unique, at least from my perspective, spelling of taxi – the rooftop signs on the cars all say “Taksi”.  The second is traffic.  Denpasar is nothing but traffic.  And this time it was worse as there was a political congress in town.  So our trip to our hotel was a little longer than we expected, but we got there before 11 pm.

We had two rooms at the Ubud Village Hotel right in Ubud.  I had stayed here in April 2017 while the family was still living in the US and wrote about my trip then.  It’s quite nice, nothing fancy but it has a restaurant, two pools, and a spa.  The staff is great and it is very well priced.  (Priced well enough that Christopher got his own room.)