Tiffany and Greg Around the World
When we called Bali the Cancun of Australia, we had no idea how right we were.
Because, like Mexico, people do come to Bali to drink cheap beer on the beach, party and buy cheap souvenirs so Bali caters to that. And they even have a good sense of humor about it:
But that’s not all this island is. Because Bali, like Mexico, is far more fascinating when you’re paying attention to the details.
The Balinese have an odd relationship with their monkeys.
On the one side, they are considered sacred (and therefore protected and allowed to live where they want) for their ability to ward off evil spirits from the temples they inhabit.
…and that’s good. Because those temples are pretty amazing
On the other hand, they raid rice paddies for food and snatch the tourists’ purses, wallets – pretty much anything they can get their hands on.
…which is kinda bad.
There are those things you hear about but you assume the chances of them happening to you are just so scarce as to not even give it much thought. Then, of course, it happens to you.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s start at the hotel.
We managed to find a really nice place to stay for the few weeks we were on the beaches of Bali. But “nice” has a lot of different meanings when you talk about international destinations…
Sailing out of Australia would have been a great idea except for two things:
1) We had arranged to meet Tiffany’s sister in Bali on a specific date.
2) Our work holiday visa in Australia was expiring fast.
As we’ve said before, a key element to being good crew is being able to be flexible. Since we had to be somewhere at a specific time…oh and that our visas were set to expire in about 12 hours, flexibility was not something we had in abundance.
So a quick flight later and we found ourselves in what we’ve heard called the
Continue reading “The Cancun of Australia”
