Adventure travel

Some families have big adventures on vacation - climbing mountains, floating down rivers, eating exotic foods. The New Yorker's recent food issue included a story about a couple that met in Tibet and traveled the world in search of amazing recipes, even with their young children.

We are not like that - so far. One couple I know in Seattle prepared their children for serious travel by having them nap in different places every day. We're just glad when our children go to sleep in their hotel beds, though travel is definitely getting easier for us; when Blaine was paying his bribe at the Bali airport, both kids were very patient even though they were exhausted.

Having said that, we booked ourselves into the Westin because it has a "kids' club" to give us a break on childcare and of course spent more time at the resort than on adventurous tours of Bali.

We saw the flipside of our equation when we crossed paths with our friends Rena Singer and John Murphy (of the Wall St. Journal). They stayed at a villa, as it's called, in Seminyak, a favorite Euro tourist town. Though obviously not a hardship post it was a stretch toward family independence, untethered from the Westin's unbelievable breakfast buffet.

Here's a picture of Rena and John's villa: big movable doors, open-air living spaces, a kitchen, a swimming pool, and frogs that hopped into the living room during a downpour.



Of course I immediately made an envious comparison between their arrangement and our hotel. Clearly, our vaca was more lame! Then I came to my senses: 1) Arno can't swim so the pool would be a hassle; 2) We enjoyed not cooking on vacation; 3) Without the Westin's kids' club, we'd go nuts.

But Rena and John, who lived in South Africa and Jerusalem before they came to Tokyo, did shake us out of our hotel stupor. They took us to Padang Beach, which is hidden behind an enormous cliff. You walk through a stone passageway to find this very calm beach. I thought it was neat that we were swimming in the Indian Ocean.



Then Rena and John's driver (we were in a taxi) took us to a restaurant on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with great views of the sunset.




We watched the surfers come up from the beach (they attach surfboards to motorcycles) and ate fried calamari and Indonesian fried noodles and beer, while the kids drank strawberry milk and watched lizards climb the walls.



We all had a great time.

Back home

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.

In Bali

We're in Bali - at the Westin in Nusa Dusa. It's one of several hotel resorts along the eastern coast of a peninsula south of Denpasar, the site of Bali's int'l airport.

The 7-hour Japan Airlines flight was thankfully very easy; JAL has great service even in economy class, with decent food, a toy for each child, and a long list of movies to keep everyone occupied. Arno bonded and traded toys with a boy sitting in front of him, making our flight that much easier.

At the Bali airport, we had our first adventure: Blaine had to pay a $200 bribe to the immigration service to enter the country! Though many friends in Tokyo told us how much they love Bali, no one mentioned an immigration shakedown.

Arriving at 10pm, we paid $25 per person for a visa and waited in a long line to present our passports. An immigration agent noticed that Blaine's passport would expire in less than 6 months (5 months and 1 week, to be exact). "So?," Blaine said, with the blase tone of man who's seen to his fair share of third-world airports. We were told that he needed a special visa to enter Indonesia, and he was led to a small office to discuss the situation; the children and I waited for a few minutes and went into the office, where a half-dozen immigration agents were chatting and smoking clove cigarettes.

I took the kids behind a partition to see Blaine, who listened as another official repeatedly explained the situation: Blaine's passport could not be accepted and he would have to return to Tokyo. (Conveniently, the JAL plane was leaving for the return trip in about an hour.) With the kids on my lap, I explained that we were there for a family vacation and would gone in 10 days - couldn't the agent help us? Blaine said he was a journalist on vacation. The man repeated himself, and again, and again. Then, finally, he said that Blaine might come in... if the agent manually entered his passport expiration date as 1 month later.

The kids and I left the office, which I hoped would speed a resolution - fewer witnesses, etc. We waited. Blaine emerged 20 mins later. The man, who was slow to come to the point, had finally written "$200" on a piece of paper and directed Blaine to an ATM. By now it was 11:30pm. The ATM promised dollars but didn't have any. Blaine went back to consult, and was told that 2,000,000 rupees would be acceptable. (The currency is approx 10,000 rupees for $1) He paid, we grabbed our suitcases and arrived at the Westin at 12:30 a.m. The kids were very heroic and didn't whine the whole time.

Since that unpleasantness, we've had a great time. The room is comfortable, hotel staff friendly, the kids love swimming in the warm pools, and there's a fantastic breakfast buffet for $15 for the whole family. We met our Tokyo friends, John Murphy and Rena Singer and their children, at Padang Beach yesterday afternoon for a swim before we found a restaurant w/sunset views. Today, the children are in the hotel's Kids' Club - a big reason why we stayed here - while Blaine and I are hanging out and reading.

I have my camera but can't download to Blaine's computer, so pix will wait until our return to Tokyo.