It was with great excitement that we checked into our hotel in Seminyak, not because it was particularly fabulous but because it had air con and hot water, two old friends we were very happy to re-discover. The day we arrived was the same day we reunited with Sinead, who had been swishing around Lombok while we were in Ubud.
For most tourists in the south end of Bali (the Kuta/Legian/Seminyak area), the main goals of an Indonesian holiday seem to be:
a) Get your hair braided (mullets are not exempt)
b) Get (more) tattoos (the uglier and more patriotic the better)
c) Get really really really sunburnt
d) Go out at night and get drunk, dance the night away to Rihanna with half of Perth's total bogan population and eventually crash home at 6am having apparently made it there on the back of a scooter... followed by waking up the next morning to discover a cigarette burn on your face (it later turns into a nice scab).
e) All of the above
(While most Australians apparently treat these as a checklist, we actually only did one of the above. Don't worry, parents, it was the hair braiding.)
As Lucy's part of the trip was drawing to a close, we spent her last few days shopping, eating out, lying by the hotel pool and generally ignoring the fact that Indonesia is an exciting and culturally diverse country for a few days. I'm trying to remember interesting things we did for our first few days in Seminyak but other than discovering that the small (and comically inexpensive) Indonesian restaurant over the road did 'home delivery', we really just drank a lot of gin and tonic and generally chilled out. We did have a delicious dinner in a restaurant called Ultimo, where a waitress laid out Hindu offerings around a Christmas tree in a touchingly odd display of religious open-mindedness.
For Christmas, we four girls all went our separate ways- Lucy went home to Sydney to hang with the Burgesses, Sinead flew to Singapore to hang out with her Indonesian Auntie and cousins, Tami lurked around the gorgeous villas her family co-own (more on that later), with various of her friends and relatives, and I marched back to Ubud to take up a generous offer from close friends of my parents for me to stay with them over Christmas.
A generous offer made much better by virtue of it involving staying in one of the nicest houses EVER (see photo), where even the Christmas Eve celebrations involved a suprise troupe of traditional Balinese dancers and fireworks (in the garden, you know, whatever). Having been staying in an OK but not very exciting hotel in Seminyak, Villa Sebali reminded me why I am struggling through a Commerce degree (apparently being friendly and being able to name all the major islands in Indonesia aren't enough to pay for a holiday villa there).
Leaving the villa in Ubud was amongst the hardest things I've ever done, but thw blow was softened somewhat by me being able to now sleep in a spare bed in Tami's family's villas, back down in Seminyak. Their beautiful Saba Villas as a follow-up to the house in Ubud caused me to briefly forget I had told my family I was 'backpacking through Indonesia', which I doubt they will now believe. The photo below is the Ubud villa, the one below that is the lovely Tami sunbaking at her villas in Seminyak. A very hard life.
The only dramatic thing that really happened this week was Tami and I going on a ridiculously long chase to extend our visas from one month to two, which involved four trips to the immigration office (the first was a false start as Christmas Eve is a public holiday in a Muslim/Hindu country, obviously), which was equipped with only one pen in the wrong colour for the forms, and finally required us to drag an Indonesian man along with us in order to add a bit of weight to our pleas for them to give us our passports back! So, after a few days of being illegally in Indonesia we were pretty excited to get that minor detail sorted.
Hanging out in amazing Balinese villas doesn't exactly make for exciting blog material but I can assure you it's pretty damn nice, and things are about to get a whole lot more intrepid as we are heading off to North Sumatra on New Year's Day!
Lots of love xx
