Let’s be honest, unless you are in business class, long haul flights are not much fun. However, what if I told you that there is a way to make them enjoyable, and perhaps like us, one of the highlights of your trip?
After spending three months backpacking around Australia, our inevitable return was imminent. A 27-hour flight awaited us, like the final boss in a video game. However, as always, we managed to do it in a way that was more than enjoyable.
So, instead of getting on a plane in Adelaide and arriving home over a day later, we arrived a whole week later.
Let me explain, with direct flights between Europe and Australia only going to London and Rome, although Qantas are introducing direct flights between Paris and Perth in July 2024, just in time for the Paris Olympics, we didn’t have the choice to have a stop-over in order to get back home to France. Seeing as we had no other options than to stop-off in Asia, we thought we may as well make the most of it; and this is where you turn your long-haul flight into a memorable experience.
When looking at flights from Adelaide to Paris, the cheapest at the time had two stop-overs, first in Denpasar (Bali), then in Singapore. So, I thought, why not spend a week-long stop-over on the Indonesian island of Bali?
Well that turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life!
First however, here is a crazy near-coincidence before I squeeze our trip to Bali into a few words:
We booked our return flights, so these ones, before we even set off, in August. Fast-forward a few months and we’re on a Beach Clean Up on the largest sand island in the world, where we met a lovely couple from Brisbane. As I mentioned in my previous blog, they then invited us to stay at their house. After a lovely stay with them, we stayed with her dad for a few days, who put us in contact with his son in Adelaide, our final destination Down Under. It turns out that his son is a pilot for Jetstar who regularly flies the Adelaide-Denpasar journey. Basically, if our flight was a few days earlier or later, he would have been our pilot.
That means that out of the 27 million people living in Australia, we nearly stayed with the one person flying our plane that we booked four months earlier.
Anyway, back to our week-long stop-over on an island named the world’s top destination by TripAdvisor in 2021.
Our flight landed at the Ngurah Rai International Airport in the late evening, and once we were through visas and customs, we were met by, firstly, a wave of incredibly hot and humid air, and secondly an army of taxi drivers wanting to take us to our hotel. We had booked a hotel close to the airport, so we refused the ride, about 150 times, and made our way there on foot. Before arriving, I was honestly quite worried about our safety, especially walking at night, surrounded by stray dogs, but I’ve rarely felt as safe anywhere else in the world, as I did in Bali.
Bali really felt like a holiday. The first reason being the weather obviously, but after going from summer in Europe to spring in Australia, we had had great weather for about seven or eight months; apart from Melbourne obviously. The main reason our time in Bali felt so much like a holiday was the price of everything. After basically rationing since we left home, we really splashed out in Bali, and even being the tight ass I am, I do not regret it one bit. So, due to the cheap prices, we stayed in hotels every night, and very fancy ones at that (they were to us anyway). We also ate out every meal and actually ordered drinks instead of relying on our water bottles.
To give you an idea of prices, most of our hotels cost less than £20 per night ; and when it comes to meals, our favourite restaurant or warung as they’re known in Bali, was a very modest place, run by a local family. We actually ate there every day that we were staying in Ubud, one of the main hubs on the island. It was like eating in their home because the kitchen was in the same room as the seating area, which made for a real family ambiance. The family were also very nice and were overjoyed when we returned the next day, and the days after that. One evening, we spoke with an Australian couple, who also ate there every chance they got. Having lived there for a while, they knew Bali very well and said that this was the best there was. The icing on the cake is that a delicious homemade meal, paired with a homemade smoothie (made from scratch right in front of you) will set you back a mere £2 per person!
So, if you are ever in Ubud, head to Sekar Sari Kitchen, you will not regret it!
Now, onto a handful of things we got up to across the week. First of all, other than our first and last nights being close to the airport, we stayed in Ubud, known as the arts and cultural centre of Bali, the rest of the time. Also, although Ubud is only 38km from the airport, the constant traffic makes it difficult to get from one to the other in under a couple of hours.
We stayed in two different hotels in Ubud and the only thing I have to say about accommodation is, get a place with a pool. We made that mistake with the first hotel we booked. The air is so hot and humid that we were in the pool five times a day in the next one.
Everything we did in Bali was very spontaneous, as we hadn’t booked anything other than our accommodation. A perfect example of this was the traditional fire dance we attended the first evening in Ubud. We were walking around in town, having a look at different things, such as the Ubud Palace. There, a man stopped us and asked us if we were interested in attending a traditional dance later that evening, even offering us a complimentary ride to the temple where it was taking place. We accepted and came back to see him a couple of hours later and hopped into a random car with a couple other tourists, which took us to our destination. The amount of trust we constantly put in strangers while travelling was frightening. The Kecak and Fire Dance, which is a traditional dance that takes place at sunset with a mix of traditional costumes, captivating chanting of male dancers and swirling flames, turned out to be very interesting and mesmerizing in many ways.
Another time we got into a random car, was to take us to our Balinese cooking class. It started with an in depth tour of the local food market. We were then driven to the location of the class, in the countryside. Once again, it was a family run business. It was one of the highlights of our whole trip. We cooked lots of different dishes from scratch. We also had a cooking stove each, which meant that we didn’t combine all of our dishes, we all got to eat our own creations. The whole experience was very memorable, I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Bali. The name of it was Ketut’s Bali Cooking Class. Just in that name alone, there is are a whole lot of interesting facts. Indeed, in Bali, all the children are named based on their order in the family, as follows :
TABLEAU
What I find quite amusing, is that if a family has more than four children, the cycle repeats itself, with the fifth child taking the name of the firstborn. However, in order to differentiate the two, the fifth child will be named Putu (or Wayan) Balik, with “Balik” loosely translating to “return, again, repeat”.
This just shows how rich the Balinese culture is, and that attempting to do it justice with anything shorter than a book is an impossible task.
Some honourable mentions of activities we got up to : Ubud Monkey Forest, Penglipuran Village, lunch at Kintamani, Tegallalang Rice Fields, Yana Art Gallery, the Campuhan Ridge Walk and Ulu Petanu Waterfall.
That was my attempt at trying to condense a week in Bali into a single blog.
However, Bali is so breathtakingly incredible in so many ways that it would take hundreds of these to even start to scrape the surface on the many unique aspects of the island. Especially for all of us living in the Western World, it is a complete culture shock, which in a way, is what travelling is all about.
I could not recommend enough to spend some time in Bali, especially if you are flying to somewhere like Australia or New Zealand.
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