Summer 2018 big trip - days 22 and 23

Saturday 18th August

To say we had an early start would be a big understatement. In fact, it was so early it could still, sort of, be classed as 'late'. We got picked up from the hotel at 2am for a pre-dawn hike up Mount Batur, so we could watch the sunrise from the summit.

The volcano lies in the north-east of Bali, in the centre of two concentric calderas (basically enormous sinkholes formed after an eruption). After picking up two more people and driving for about 45 minutes, we stopped at a roadside coffee place for a small breakfast of banana pancakes and a hot drink. There were so many people there, dozens of groups brought in by different drivers. It's obviously a massive business. It was weird, actually; if you're up and out in the dark hours of the morning it's usually still and quiet and peaceful, so it was strange to be somewhere so busy and surrounded by the buzzing of lots of people talking.

After that breakfast stop it was another 45 minutes or so in the car. We arrived at a large car park and our driver introduced us to Jordan, the young man who would be our guide up the mountain. After taking the last opportunity for the next five hours to visit the lavatory (squat toilet! This morning was the first time I'd come across them, hadn't even known they existed, so it was quite amusing!), we, along with at least couple of thousand other people (I'm not exaggerating), started along the road towards the mountain. Jordan told us it would take a couple of hours to climb.

It was pitch black and freezing cold, and our way was lit only by torchlight. After a while the paved road ended and became a dirt track, leading into fields where we had to move into single file, and eventually started climbing upwards as a narrow rocky path which quickly became steep and strenuous. In such darkness, you have no idea what's either side of you, or what's ahead, or really what's behind, which in a way is a good thing, as you don't have a choice to do anything other than look at the ground in front of your feet, and focus on where you're putting them. You're also part of a very long queue of people, so you have to be aware of those in front of and behind you too, you can't really go at your own pace. The hike isn't tough, but it is a challenge and your leg muscles most certainly protest.

At various points along the route, locals had set up chairs or little stalls and were selling water and hot drinks and chocolate bars, having made the trek up here themselves, something they probably do everyday. It was still pitch black when we arrived at the top, and Jordan led us to one of a few little picnic tables where he said we'd get a great view. It wasn't quite the summit - that would take another half hour of clambering up a steep slope, and we could see an unbroken line of torchlights up there already - but none of us minded at all. It did mean sitting down in the freezing cold for 45 minutes though, which was not fun, although it finally gave me a chance to look up at the amazing stars for a few minutes. Jordan disappeared to the guide huts, and after a while he brought us out another small breakfast of a banana sandwich and a hard-boiled egg each. The latter were still in their shells and hot from the pan and we just held them in our hands for a while! The arrival of the food also meant the arrival of some very cute puppies!

In the pre-dawn grey light it was very foggy, and we were worried we wouldn't actually get to see anything. Thankfully it did start to break up and, as the sky changed from inky blue to pink and orange, we were able to see the view spread out below: an area of damaged landscape from an old eruption, the villages, the lake, and, on the opposite side of the water, Mount Agung - a sacred mountain, the highest point on the island, and another volcano which erupted at the end of last year.

Walking down was tough! Walking down a steep hill is always harder than going up, because you're bracing yourself and trying not to slip, and this took maybe an hour and a half. It was great to be able to see the wonderful views, though, if only through quick glances upwards, and the warm sunlight was very welcome! As we reached the flatter land and paved road again, we were surrounded by little farms, small fields of different types of crops. I was struck by just how basically the people here lived. That is, how poor it was. Their homes were just little huts, shacks made from combinations of breeze blocks, corrugated metal sheets, sheets of wood or plywood, tarpaulins, things like that; present-day versions of the 19th-century miner's hut at Herberton in Queensland. And there we were, thousands of tourists just walking past at our leisure, going back to hotels and forward travel to other holiday destinations or back to comfortable homes and fairly easy, well-paid jobs which give us money to spend on luxuries. It was a bit uncomfortable, which is a good thing. We're so cocooned and fortunate and take a lot for granted. I know there are places where poverty is much, much worse, but even here I can't imagine what life must be like, what an average day is like for the people who live and work in those fields, it's so different to my own. How many are content, accepting their way of life with grace and doing the best they can, and how many scream out for more?

It hasn't really struck me till now, even though I'm writing this over a month later: I climbed a mountain. A small one, yes, which may have only taken a couple of hours to hike, but it was a mountain, it was a bit of a challenge and something I haven't done before. I climbed a mountain. Cool! I didn't fully appreciate that fact when I was there doing it. I was focusing on where my feet were going and then was so cold sat at the top that I didn't actually try to stop my thoughts and just pause, observe what I had just done and where I was. Mindfulness is another skill, habit, I'd like to cultivate. Doing the hike reminded me that, for a few weeks several months ago, I wanted to climb Snowdon one day... then completely forgot about it! During this hike, I thought "Ah, this is tough enough, this'll do, this can count as a mountain climb instead of Snowdon!" But now, it being in the past and not something I'm physically struggling with at this moment, maybe I will make myself do Snowdon one day!

We got back into Ubud around 10, and my sister's friend promptly went to sleep for the rest of the day. After a few hours of doing nothing much, my sister and I went out for a late, light lunch to a place we had passed on Thursday, which had a pretty view of the rice paddy out back. Then at 5pm I went to the Yoga Barn for a salsa class, which was great fun! I put on the one nice dress I'd brought with me, a light blue, slightly floaty, knee-length pretty summer dress, thinking - it's a salsa class on a Saturday night, dress up a bit! Very quickly wished I hadn't, haha. That's not the kind of dress people wear around Ubud, and the others in the class were wearing ordinary clothes or yoga-wear. Oh well! The teacher was an exuberant, enthusiastic young Cuban with a colourful oversized shirt and a thick accent we struggled to understand. Somehow this somewhat effeminate young man was one of the most masculine men I have ever encountered, probably perhaps because it wasn't in a stereotypical way. He wasn't at all butch, but was strong and lean, and gave off a vibe of just knowing himself and being perfectly comfortable and confident in all aspects of himself. Plus he could dance, and dance well. This isn't to say I was attracted to him, it's just an objective, appreciative comment. Anyway, I had wanted to try salsa dancing for a long time, and it was good fun, I'm definitely going to look for some classes I can go to at home. 

My sister and her friend met me after the class and we went to the same hotel restaurant from Thursday. I had a beef curry this time, which was again very nice but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the yellow vegetable curry before. There was a performance of traditional Balinese dance. The costumes were brightly colourful and elaborate, with headdresses and a lot of make-up. There must be some meaning behind all the movements, but because I didn't know what they are, to be honest it was just a bit bizarre. I probably could have appreciated it a bit more if there wasn't head-jerking and weird creepy eye movements. But I'm glad I got to see some traditional Balinese dancing!

Oh, and although the curry wasn't as wonderful as the one I'd had before, the pudding I ordered was wonderful. Super simple - deep fried bananas - but gorgeous! The batter was sweetened with delicious palm sugar and was thin and light and crisp, and the fruit inside was warm and soft but still with some bite. Hmmm :)

Sunday 19th

Another early start, this time to go our separate ways. My sister and her friend were staying in Bali for another week and a half, and left early on the 8:30am shuttle bus for Seminyak. I spent a couple of hours writing some blog, pottered around, and went out to buy a nice dress I'd seen the day before. (Came out of the shop with two nice dresses. The owner was very happy that she'd sold two items to her first customer of the day, and went round the shop touching the money to everything else, as a blessing and good luck charm.) I got the 12:30 shuttle bus to the airport, then a taxi from the airport to my nearby hotel, as my flight to Singapore was at 7am the next morning.

The hotel was lovely, modern and purpose-built, and I just stayed inside very happily, listening to music, unpacking and repacking my suitcase, a bit of writing. Around six I went downstairs to the empty restaurant, where dinner was okay but nothing special. They had MTV playing on the TV screen, and I enjoyed listening to the songs, it was oddly comforting for some reason. Although I had brought my iPod on the trip, I hadn't listened to it at all. I often feel like that on trips, like not listening to music, partly because it acts as a reminder of normal daily life, where I'll sometimes listen to music during my commute. I don't want to bring that to mind when I'm on holiday. After dinner I washed my hair so I didn't need to in the morning, then got an early night. Shortly before 11pm I woke up to the bed wobbling a bit. I didn't know if it was my half-asleep brain still in dreamland, or if it was an earthquake. It stopped about ten seconds later, I couldn't hear or see people outside and nobody came to the door so I just stayed in my room and went back to bed. I thought it probably was an earthquake, due to the ones in nearby Lombok in previous months, so it was quite weird, ever so slightly disconcerting. But I was fine. Shortly afterwards a message from my sister confirmed my assumption. Her hotel had been evacuated and she was very shaken up, but otherwise okay. (If anyone's curious, as I was - magnitude 6.3, depth just 16 miles down, epicentre roughly 100 miles away.) I went back to sleep easily enough and woke up at 4am.

Summer 2018 big trip - day 21

Friday 17th August

My sister and her friend left early for a day of white-water rafting and quadbiking in the jungle. I lounged around, worked on the blog a bit, went to the Yoga Barn for a 'Gentle Yoga' class late morning. It was gentle, but because I don't practice, getting into and/or holding some of the positions was hard! Haha. I found out what bolsters are for, though, and used one this time. Much more comfortable! Makes it easier to sit upright. As with meditation, part of me would like to build up a habit of daily yoga practice, even if it's just five or ten minutes of simple stretches when I wake up or go to bed.

Wedding decorations at the compound opposite

I'd booked onto a cooking class for the afternoon, with Periuk Bali. I was picked up from the hotel at 2:30pm and taken to a family compound just outside Ubud, where we were met by a young woman named Wayan, who got us back into the vans and took us to the nearby rice paddies, where she explained the traditional system. Fields are owned by families, and there are little shrines dotted about in the corners of some to mark the boundaries, essentially. They practice crop rotation, otherwise the waterlogged soil would lose its nutrients and rice would eventually not grow. So they grow rice one year, then dry the fields and grow root vegetables the next year, then do rice again, and so on. Seeds are planted in a top corner of the field, then when they've grown a certain amount they're moved into the field itself, and water is let through. Wayan told us a lot more than that, but I can't really remember it. It was interesting, though, and it was nice to be somewhere rural for ten minutes, see some lush green fields.

Back at the compound, Wayan's father, also named Wayan, came out to greet us and gave a little talk about some aspects of Balinese culture, particularly the traditional family compound. Traditional compounds have an outside wall, and have a number of small buildings within the walls, linked by paths - bedrooms/living spaces for different members of the family, a kitchen or two, an open one generally in the centre. There generally aren't dining rooms, people just bring their food out and sit on the steps of one of these little buildings. We were also given "herbal tea", a very refreshing and absolutely delicious iced drink made from ginger, lemongrass, cinnamon, and black tea (apparently, anyway - I couldn't detect a tea taste, happily), finished off with a little honey and a squeeze of lime. Definitely making that at home! Might leave out the tea, though...

A side note on Balinese names. Most Balinese, though not all, are named according to the order in which they are born, and regardless of gender. The firstborn is called Wayan ("why-an"), second Made ("mah-day"), third Nyoman, and fourth Ketut. If there's a fifth, the cycle would start again and there would be two siblings named Wayan. These days couples are restricted to only having one or two children, I can't remember which, so that isn't really a thing anymore. The Balinese also don't have such things as shared family names. They might have a name, instead of or in addition to the traditional first/second/third/fourth, which indicates the caste, or social class, they belong to. They might be given a second or third Hindu name. They might use a nickname. And when using their full names they add a prefix to indicate gender: "I" for men and "Ni" for women. It seems complicated, but isn't too hard to understand I guess, and it works for them.

We were shown how to traditionally make coconut oil, which is the main oil used there. Basically you grate mature coconut (the ones with the dark brown husk), then in a bowl keep squeezing the pulp over and over, releasing the milk. You do this until you've got all the milk you possibly can out of the pulp, then leave the milk for 24 hours to separate. The cream will sink to the bottom, leaving the solidified oil sitting on top. It takes something like 20 coconuts to make one litre of oil. I wonder if people knew, were really aware, how much of something was used to make or do something, if they would use so much, take things for granted, be so wasteful.

After that demonstration we were taken to where the cooking class would take place in a specially-built area at the back of the compound. It was on the slope of the hill and faced out over the jungle-filled valley, which was misty and slightly drizzly. There was a raised dining area with a long table (there were twelve of us in the group), a prep area down a little set of stairs next to that with tables covered in baskets of great ingredients, and a cooking kitchen next to that. All open-air but under shelter. There was also a little shrine, and we were shown how to make the simplest of the numerous Balinese daily offerings, the little trays of flowers you see everywhere - on pavements outside a home or shop, on shrines in the street, in car windows. You make a little square tray out of a piece of dried palm leaf, then fill it with little flowers in four different colours, to represent four different Hindu gods, and put a pinch of shredded pandang leaf in the middle. There's something about symbolically offering mind, body, heart and soul to those four gods, too, or something like that, but I can't remember. The sacrifice for this offering is simply the time and effort taken to make it - although it's only women who do the making and offering, on behalf of themselves and the men in their family.

The shrine with our offerings on

After a brief talk about what we would be making and the ingredients we'd be using, we were put into pairs and started chopping, crushing, grinding and bashing ingredients in massive pestle-and-mortars, for the pastes of the four sauces we'd be making: yellow curry sauce, peanut sauce, sweet chili sauce and spicy chili sauce.

I found out what that mystery ingredient with the nutty texture in the delicious yellow curry I'd had the previous evening was! Tempeh! Tofu is made from soybean milk, and tempeh is made from the solid beans, which are cooked, shaped into oblong patties or loaves and fermented. The end product can be sliced and you can see the whole beans. Like tofu, it's pretty tasteless itself so you have to use it with other things or have a sauce.

So, on the menu was:
 - Sup ayam - Balinese chicken soup
 - Sayur urab - Balinese vegetable salad
 - Nasi putih - Steamed rice
 - Sate tusuk ayam - Chicken satay
 - Pepes ikan - Steamed fish in banana leaf
 - Kari ayam - Balinese chicken curry
 - Tempe manis - Deep fried tempeh in sweet soy sauce
 - Dadar gulung - Rolled pancake with coconut and palm sugar

We didn't cook the rice ourselves, but Wayan's relative Made demonstrated and explained the traditional cooking method to us. It takes hours, as you have to soak, rinse, re-soak, re-rinse, cook, cook a second time... nowadays people just have rice cookers, it's much quicker and easier! It was great, the women not only showed/told us what to do but also explained things, so we learned about the culture and traditions and the ingredients we were using, too. There's a big culture of respect there and in many other places in Asia, which I think more Western, English-speaking cultures could learn from; they're just nice gestures. They call everyone auntie or uncle or sister or brother, and pass things to people with both hands a lot of the time, or at least the right hand. The left hand is considered unclean.

I've never made a curry paste, or any really decent sauce, from scratch before, which I want to change. I liked it, it was easier than I thought and I liked the kind of connection with the ingredients, the knowing exactly what the sauce contains and so having a slightly better understanding of the dish. I've only ever had curries using a sauce from a jar, or just shop-bought generic 'curry powder' with some water, or from a restaurant or takeaway where obviously I have no idea how it's been made. That doesn't really bother me, those things are perfectly tasty (well, not my version of the water-and-curry powder mix... but my dad used to be able to make it work), but I do like the idea of knowing how to make a paste, and therefore the whole dish, from scratch with fresh ingredients, as it would be so much better. That's true for a lot of things, there are lots of things I'd like to learn to make rather than buy...

After a couple of hours, when we in the group had done everything we could and there were just a few things left that only the women teaching us could do, we went up to the dining table and sat down. There was a long buffet table at one end of the room and they brought up all the dishes we'd made, so we could serve ourselves from the large bowls lined with banana leaves. First, though, they brought us individual bowls of the sup ayam, chicken soup, which was wonderful, full of these delicious flavours that were still new to me.

Taken at the end of prep... I thought I took a photo of what we were served but must not have pressed the button hard enough!

Dessert was a pancake, the batter coloured green with pandang leaves, filled with a mixture of coconut and palm sugar. Ohhh, it was so good! Really yummy. We were served two each, on a plate decorated with a smiley face made from some lovely sweet sauce. Come to think of it, perhaps it was a caramel made from palm sugar... Palm sugar is delicious in itself. You buy it in solid little blocks which are dark brown in colour, and you have to shave or grate bits off to use. It's intensely sweet, and has a slightly different flavour to the brown sugar we're used to.

We had time to linger at the table and chat for a while after finishing eating. I had chosen a seat at one end of the table before most other people had sat down and ended up being surrounded with the other young people in the group, a few couples; all Brits in their late twenties/early thirties, but I couldn't join in the conversation and they didn't try to include me. I always find it easier to join in with older people, but they were at the other end of the table. So I sat in silence, looking past the people opposite me to the plants behind them and the darkness of the valley beyond that. I've gotten more used to this kind of thing over the years, but it's never comfortable. So it was with some relief for me when 7:30pm arrived, it was time to go and we were taken back to our hotels.

Well I'm quite surprised at how long this post has turned out to be, haha! I very much enjoyed the cooking class, it was a very very good one, run by instinctive cooks who know the food from a lifetime of cooking in their own home for their family, and which had other interesting aspects apart from the actual cooking. And of course the food was amazing. We were given the recipes, so I'll definitely be giving some of them a go at home!

Summer 2018 big trip - days 19 and 20

Wednesday 15th and Thursday 16th August

The first full day in Bali was just spent by the hotel pool: looking out at the sea, a little bit of reading, in the sun, in the shade, a short swim, went down to the room for a while to get away from the heat and to blog. The sea was a beautiful blue, and there were a few reefs just offshore so the waves were huge, really cool, proper surf waves; there are lots of surf schools along the western beaches. I didn't go down to the beach, though, it was busy. On the hills in the hazy distance there was this enormous thing, some kind of gigantic structure which looked out of place and completely surreal. For some reason what I was looking at seemed to me to be some weird statue of a non-realistic monkey with a hat on and its arms up in the air... Mojo-Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls came to mind. I later Googled it and it's Garuda Wishnu Kencana, a 120m-tall statue of Vishnu located in a large park dedicated to the god. I wish I had known about it, I would have gone there.

My sister's friend was joining us in Bali and had flown in late the night before and stayed in a hotel at the airport, so she arrived late morning and came up to the pool. After a while we had lunch there, on the rooftop terrace at a table in the shade. Originally thinking of just a sandwich or something, we ended up having a hot meal – I had grilled chicken in a tasty slightly spicy sauce with steamed rice. A couple of the hotel staff came out to the terrace to look over the street – there would be a parade around 3pm for Indonesian Independence Day. (The archipelago had been under Dutch control for a couple of centuries before the Japanese occupied it during WW2. When the Japanese left in 1945, Indonesia declared independence on August 17th, but it wasn't until 1949 that the Netherlands accepted this.) A convoy of old military cars appeared around 2:30 but then nothing for ages. I went downstairs to the room. After a while I heard music and parade-y sounds so went down to the street (easier than going up to the pool terrace) and watched for a while. There was music, Chinese dragons, and groups of people in various costumes - some plain, some beautiful, some bizarre.

I had looked up good places to eat in Kuta and read about Poppie’s Restaurant, a local institution, established in the 1970s. The ‘street’ it's on (more like an alleyway to us but counts as a street in Bali) is named after it. So we wandered along in search of it and eventually (to our relief) found it, a little haven in all the outside noise and bustle. Not to say it was quiet and peaceful, far from it, it was busy with lots of customers, but it was nice. An old family compound, the place is now filled with tables and plants and little water features. Lovely! Wonderful food too. As with everywhere in Bali, little shrines were dotted around so we were surrounded by the smell of incense. I had ikan pepes - spiced fish wrapped in banana leaf with rice and tasty little Balinese salads, and my sister had satay chicken, served sizzling on a little wooden stand containing red hot coals, it was literally still cooking.

The next morning, after breakfast at the hotel, we checked out and got the 9am shuttle bus to Ubud, a town about an hour away, further north towards the centre of the island, surrounded by the lush greenery of rice paddies and jungle. It’s Bali’s cultural and spiritual hub. That is, modern spirituality – it’s where the yoga places, spas with holistic therapies and detox treatments, and vegetarian eateries abound. Bali as a whole is a very spiritual place, a Hindu island in a Muslim country, and rituals are a deeply-ingrained part of everyday life; shrines are everywhere and temples are on almost every street. The rickety old minibus with no seatbelts and non-existent aircon took two and a half hours through traffic jams in the midday heat to get to Ubud, and there wasn't a single break in the buildings lining the roads along the entire route.

When we arrived it was still a couple of hours before we could check into the hotel. My sister and her friend went off to the nearby Monkey Forest Park, and I went to find The Yoga Barn, which does what it says on the tin – they have classes in various types of yoga and meditation, with some dance, music, spiritual theory and community-oriented classes in there too. It’s a lovely place, another haven away from the noise and hectic-ness of the streets outside. There’s a vegetarian café/restaurant there so I had a super healthy salad for lunch, which was yummy and full of nutritious things: vibrant green spinach, bright butternut squash, earthy beetroot, creamy avocado, nutty quinoa, toasted sunflower seeds, and a lovely tangy yoghurt-lemon dressing. It felt great after barely any greens for weeks. I looked at the schedule and decided to go to the Gong Bath Meditation that evening, and get a 3-class pass.

After meeting back up at and checking into the hotel, we spent the rest of the afternoon planning the next three days. For dinner, we wandered round looking at the endless eateries, eventually going into a hotel restaurant which said it had a view of the rice paddies. Turns out because it was windy they’d closed the rooftop view bar, so we ate inside. Still very nice. I had a vegetable yellow curry, which was absolutely delicious. Mild, no chilli at all, but wonderfully spiced, full of flavour. Among the vegetables was something I hadn't had before and didn't know what it was, it had a kind of soft nutty texture and I loved it.

I like cultures where people take off their shoes before going indoors. It's not so convenient in countries like England, where it's cold and wet and it's easier to just keep your laced-up trainers or boots on when you run back inside to grab something you've forgotten. It does make it easier in those places where the climate is hot and dry most of the time so everyone wears sandals and flip-flops anyway, the kind of shoes you can kick off and slip back on in a second. Bali is one such place. You didn't need to at restaurants, but many shops encouraged leaving your shoes at the door if you could, and the hotel staff who brought our breakfast or came to clean the room would leave their sandals on the step, and not even come onto the porch with them on. It makes floors so much easier to keep clean, especially if the floors aren't carpeted and you can just sweep. Shoes may appear to be clean but there'll be dust and microscopic amounts of dirt and muck on them that gradually build up. I guess it also encourage you to wash your feet more often; it's probably a daily occurrence for most people in these cultures, giving their feet a quick wash at the same time as washing their face each morning and evening. There's also just a sense of respect about it, treading lightly.

The Yoga Barn asks class-goers to leave their shoes in the racks at the door of each studio, the main reception area/shop, and the café. Don't just take them off at the door and bring them with you into the room - leave them at the door. Participation for the meditation session was on a first-come-first-served basis so I had to be there an hour beforehand. Everyone (at least fifty people) waited in the main reception area after registering; when the class was due to start our names would be called one by one and we would go up the stairs to the studio. In meditation sessions everywhere, most of the time, silence is adopted from the moment you enter the room. The building was open and airy, with just one wall at the back and the other three sides open to the elements, with a roof of course.

A gong bath meditation (or just gong bath) is where you're, well, bathed in the hypnotic sounds of the gong. Today it's classed as a form of sound therapy, but the practice has been around for thousands of years. It's meant to be really good for deep relaxation, easing stress and anxiety, etc. The studio was dark, we could just about see our way round by the ambient light from the other buildings and nearby streets. I liked that, and the hush that permeates all dedicated meditation spaces. There were several gongs of various sizes hung up on one side, and yoga mats were laid out around the rest of the room with a blanket and thin cushion on each. Many people went to the cupboards at the back and took out a bolster, too. Some sat up on the mats, most people laid down and made themselves comfortable using the bolster as a pillow and covering themselves with the blanket. I hadn't been to anything like this before, so didn't know what to expect, and hadn't seen bolsters used before so didn't really know what they were for so didn't get one... soon wished I had.

The gong-master (I'm just calling him that because I've no idea what he refers to himself as) quietly spoke for a few minutes at the start, then began. It isn't an hour of gongs being struck loudly, as if to announce dinner or the entrance of somebody important, until your mind is kind of numbed. He used the gongs like a musical instrument, softly, creating different sounds and tones and vibrations to form an audible energy that was the music of the universe. It was a cool experience. ...Or rather, I knew it was a really cool thing and could be a great experience, but I don't practice meditation so haven't learned how to relax and let my mind settle, and lying on a wooden floor for an hour became very uncomfortable. A few bony parts of my body hurt at the end of the session, and I may have relaxed a little bit but not significantly. But I'm glad I went, I'd like to go to one again, and want to build up a habit of daily meditation practice.

Summer 2018 big trip - day 18

Tuesday 14th August

When I said at the end of the previous post, about the last day in Sydney, that I wished I didn't have to go, I meant it seriously. The day before, as we got into the train into the city, I had to stop myself crying. I focused on enjoying Sydney during the day, kept my thoughts away from where I would be twenty-four hours later, but back at the house in the evening I could no longer avoid it and I did cry. I did not want to go to Bali. It wasn't that I was just nervous, or wished I could have more time in Australia. I wanted to not go.

I'm sure you're all wondering "What?! Why?!" I did, too. I had chosen to go, wanted to go, it sounded like a nice and interesting place. It was somewhere new that would be very different to anywhere I'd been before, stretching my comfort zone, so I was nervous, but over the previous couple of weeks a fear and dread strong enough to make me want to not go at all had developed. Some far-away rational part of me knew that I would be fine: Bali is Australia's holiday destination of choice, their Spain or Greece, tons of people including families with kids go there every year and have a great time. You just use common sense, like everywhere else. I wasn't going anywhere dangerous. But that message wasn't sinking in. I knew that what I was feeling was a completely irrational over-reaction, but I didn't know how to stop it.

I think it stemmed from some of the travel advice I'd been given. The fact that vaccinations were recommended in the first place meant there could be diseases in the water, the food, the air, and of course animals. All the advice was commonsense stuff, but the grumpy doctor I got my third rabies jab from in Cairns went a little bit more worst-case-scenario than the UK nurses had. I'm not blaming him, he was just doing his job and didn't know he was talking to an anxious overthinker.

Of course, I had to go. That's a self-imposed "had to". It was just fear of the unknown, it would be fine. I knew I was very lucky to have the opportunity to go there. I didn't want to lose the money I'd already spent or spend any more. I didn't want to disappoint my sister, whose suggestion going there had been. Most of all I knew that the amount of self-loathing and disappointment in myself I'd feel if I didn't go would be just as awful as the fear. With help from my poor worried mum, I managed to calm down, finish repacking my suitcase, and sleep.

Our flight was late morning. The four of us got a taxi to the airport and Mum and Gary were dropped off first at the Domestic Terminal, so we said goodbye there. After checking in at the International Terminal, Cat and I went for breakfast - poached eggs in a tomato sauce with chorizo and peppers and a bit of grated cheese melting on top, with some toasted ciabatta, yum!

The flight took about six hours and, after taking an hour and a half to get from the back of the passport control queue to the front, we were met by our hotel transfer driver, who looked so happy and relieved that we were finally there, poor man. He was very friendly and cheerily welcomed us to Bali. I like the musical way they pronounce it - "ba-lee" rather than "bar-lee".

Of course, now that I was actually in Bali and could see what it was like for myself, I was able to relax a bit. I can't say I liked the urban areas we drove through - hot, humid, noisy, crowded, crazy traffic, narrow pavements - but it wasn't that bad and I felt a bit better. Our hotel was in Kuta, only ten minutes from the airport. It was early evening when we arrived so we unpacked a little, went and found the pool (which was on a lovely rooftop terrace overlooking the sea), then went out to find dinner. We came across an outdoor warung (a small restaurant or café) and went in there, ordered simple grilled duck with rice, which was good, then afterwards had a short wander round a couple of streets, full of tourist shops selling exactly the same things (lovely clothes though) then went back to the hotel and had an early night.

Summer 2018 big trip - day 17

Monday 13th August

Last day in Sydney. We got on a Big Bus tour to see the city, but I'm sorry to say that I barely took any photos and didn't make any notes so can't really remember anything. Does anyone remember much of what they saw on one of those tours? I did love the city though, the history was interesting, and I remember the pretty, colourful old terraced houses with balconies, and the thoroughly modern high-rise covered in plants with a huge panel of mirrors facing downwards and angled so that sunlight could reach everywhere.

We'd booked onto a two-and-a-half hour boat tour of the harbour for the afternoon, and the bus tour got us to Circular Quay just in time. Thankfully it wasn't very windy or cold up on the boat deck, and the sun was out, so we could happily gaze out at the beautiful views of the stunning harbour while listening to the tour guide's commentary on the history of the place.

In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook and his crew on the HMS Endeavour were the first known Europeans to see Australia. They made first landfall on the east coast at what he named Botany Bay (due to the range of new-to-European-science plants, insects and animals they found) then sailed north, exploring and mapping the coastline. (In northern Queensland there is a town called Cooktown, and another called Seventeen-Seventy, and probably many more such references.) Not far from Botany Bay, Cook passed an inlet, noted that it looked to be a good and safe anchorage, and named it Port Jackson, but didn't go in. It would be another eighteen years before someone went in.

In 1788, having taken eight months to sail from England with a fleet of eleven ships carrying over a thousand people, Captain Arthur Phillip decided to venture into the little inlet Cook had marked as Port Jackson, and "had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security." We now know that it is the second largest natural harbour in the world after Rio de Janeiro, with 240km of coastline and 66 bays. Choosing a bay with deep water, good defence positions, and a source of fresh water nearby, he made landfall and named that particular bay after the Home Secretary at the time, who had authorised Phillip to establish the new colony - Lord Sydney. Sydney Cove is where Circular Quay now is, the one the modern city grew out from and is based around.

The colony of New South Wales, the first European settlement in Australia, was a penal colony - most of the settlers were convicts. Their sentences were either for seven years, fourteen years, or life, but of course, even if they managed to survive until being freed, they had no way to sail back to England. So most stayed, claimed some land, worked hard and made a new life for themselves. Brits in Australia are still referred to by Aussies as POHMs ("poms") - Prisoners of His Majesty.

Now, two hundred and thirty years after it was founded, Sydney is the size of Greater London but has a few million less people at 5.1 million. Sydney Harbour is a National Park and a heritage-listed marine park; since legislation introduced in the 1970s forbade anyone from 'putting muck into the harbour' as the tour guide put it, industry has moved out and the water is very clean. There are sharks. It's very sheltered, right next to the ocean but protected from it. It doesn't need dredging, but there are a lot of reefs and over a hundred shipwrecks. Most of the land along the extensive shoreline is public, either open to the public or set aside as a park, because the authorities didn't think it was right that only the richest should be able to enjoy the waterfront. I like that they did that! Of course, only the richest can afford most of the waterfront houses (and have their fancy cars displayed in glass-walled rooms to show off to tourists on boats), but many of them don't own the water frontage; so the public can wander along and sit on one of the pretty, white-sand, nearly-empty beaches directly in front of some millionaire's house, or just go for a stroll, if they so wish.

After a lovely couple of hours - boat trips are nice anyway but Sydney Harbour is amazing and beautiful! - we wandered around a bit, saw some of the old colonial buildings. It was getting dark, the lights were coming on, there was a park with tall globe lamp-posts and a fountain, it was pretty. We made our way back to Circular Quay to have a nice last-night dinner on the waterfront. The next morning, we'd go our separate ways - my mum and stepdad back up to Cairns, and my sister and I to Bali.

I really wished I didn't have to go.