We're home. We took a night flight back to Tokyo and arrived this morning at 7:45 a.m. (A Japan Airlines 747 makes a 16-hour round trip between Narita and Denpasar, Bali's capital, once a day.) We dragged our stuff into our house, Blaine made pancakes for the children, and I took a 3 hour nap!
We had a great trip in Bali - very relaxing, lots of sleep, and we loved being in a warmer climate without the humidity of Tokyo in the summer. The children are getting better about traveling, though Arno lived on pancakes, pasta, and french fries for 10 days.
We spent a week at the Westin in Nusa Dua, which is the equivalent of a gated community for enormous resort hotels, and three nights in Ubud, the alleged "cultural center" of Bali. I took heaps of photos and will write some blog posts about our trip this week, but here are a few of my favorites shots.
Lucinda sipped coconut milk from an actual coconut!
At the Westin, Blaine and I usually read for 1-2 hours every morning in a thatch-roofed pavilion.
Arno at the cliffside Ulu Watu temple.
And this is what I learned on my winter vacation:
- Lots of rich Russians vacation in Bali! The men are huge and hulking, with Russell Crowe's "Gladiator" hair, and the women favor peroxide-white long hair and the flashiest outfits imaginable.
- Being a tourist in Bali couldn't be more enjoyable. Beautiful beaches, well-managed hotels, spa treatments, and it's shockingly cheap - we often spent $36 for dinner for all of us, and we hired a driver for $40 a day. (The traffic is nuts there.)
- As a tourist, though, it's pretty rare to see anything that's authentically Balinese other than, say, people carrying heavy loads of stuff on their heads. Bali is known for its inexpensive, good-quality crafts like woodworking, basketweaving, batik, and silver jewelry. But any impression of this as "culture" is diluted by the craft shops lining the streets in every town near tourist centers. Which doesn't mean I couldn't find trinkets to bring home.
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