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.

Summer 2018 big trip - day 16

Sunday 12th August

I'm actually writing this, or the part about this evening anyway, on the day for a change, although it won't be published until I've caught up and written and published the rest of the days until now. It's because I've had the evening to myself in this wonderful little house we're staying in, and I want to write about it before I forget about it.

It's a quirky place, in a lovely residential suburb. The house is old and cold, and the lounge is dark. But I'm sitting here in one of the armchairs (which don't match each other or the sofa), with the tall standing lamp next to it spreading its warm light into the room, a blanket over my knees and the little gas heater on (it heats the room very well, but probably is far from energy efficient). It's perfectly cosy. The floor is dark wood, with a red rug over it. There are pictures (as in artwork, not photographs) on the walls and vases dotted around. There are DVDs of the Italian crime drama series Inspector Montalbano. The kitchen has a stovetop whistling kettle, a wooden board for bread and a bowl of lemons on the counter. There are eco-friendly chemical-free cleaning products and books on homemade things like that. Upstairs is a large lounge area which is light and open and airy, but warmer than downstairs, and there's a dining table covered in sewing materials. And, best of all, there are books in every room. Hundreds of books. Books on subjects I wish I knew more about. Travel and foreign countries and languages, cooking, history, literature/ fiction, plants, gardening, sewing and needlework and embroidery, art and crafts and more. I could spend a week here just in the house, devouring a treasure trove of books. Alas, I cannot, so I've just noted down a few that I'd like to find and read when I'm home.

My sister, mum and stepdad went to see Pink this evening. I didn't fancy going, and had a couple of options for what I could do for the evening, but after a day walking around Sydney Harbour, I felt like staying in, out of the chilly wind, and watching a bit of Netflix. I watched the last episode of Spanish drama Cable Girls, an episode of Queer Eye, and then a quirky French rom-com called Blind Date, which I loved. Such a lovely, relaxing evening :)

So, rewind... In the morning we walked from Waverton into the city centre. The route took us through the lovely suburb, which again reminded me of Vancouver, and brought us to the waterfront at Lavender Bay, where we were greeted with a view of the Harbour Bridge directly opposite. We walked along from there, eventually reaching Milsons Point and Luna Park, a fairground built in the 1930s at the foot of the bridge. The entrance gateway is the kind of thing that would be very creepy if the place was closed. I wonder why fairgrounds are like that, creepy when closed.

The suburb at the northern end of the bridge is called Kirribilli. I've since read that it's one of the city's most affluent, and it was very nice, though we only saw a very small part of it. There were trendy, quirky cafés and eateries and a wonderful market in the large underpass under the bridge road. My sister and I spent a long time wandering around the market before we went back to where our mum and stepdad were sat people-watching (they immediately told me they'd seen a woman who was me in 30 years), and we all started across the bridge.

I can't remember how long it took to walk across. The thing is enormous. It's over a kilometre long, and nearly fifty metres wide with eight lanes for cars, two for trains, one for cyclists and one for pedestrians. It's quite impressive that the designers in the 1920s thought ahead and decided that cars and other road vehicles would become commonplace enough that the bridge would need six lanes just for those (the two tramway lanes originally constructed were later converted to roadway as well). The bridge was nicknamed "the Iron Lung", as its construction brought vital jobs to the city during the Depression. In the shadow of the other end of the bridge is The Rocks, a pretty area of cobbled lanes originally established in the early days of the colony in the 1790s, when it was more of a slum. We wandered through but not really around it.

We stopped for lunch at one of the numerous waterfront restaurants on Circular Quay. Despite its name the quay is in a rather square U-shape, with The Rocks and the Harbour Bridge at one end and the Opera House on Bennelong Point at the other, with an art gallery and boats (from harbour tour boats to cruise ships) and shops and restaurants and more all along in between, and the skyscrapers of the CBD rising behind. Such a cool place! We sat outside, with a great view of the bridge, where they had notices everywhere warning customers about the seagulls, and spray bottles on some of the outer tables. One thieving bird swooped down and snatched a small fillet of battered fish from one woman's plate as she was still eating. Thankfully we were seated under a parasol, which provided a deterrent for the gulls as well as shade from the sun. I had barramundi with salsa verde and a lovely fresh salad - so simple, but so good. Fresh fish! *Grins* Yum. Also had a mocktail, a strawberry and lychee virgin mojito, which was nice.

After lunch we continued along Circular Quay to see Sydney Opera House up close. I had looked at going there while my family were at the Pink concert - there was a performance by the Australian Symphony Orchestra - but it turned out it was at 2pm rather than in the evening, and I'd rather see the city during the day. A bit of a shame, though, I would have enjoyed that. The wind was chilly but we didn't go inside, we stayed outside looking at the architecture and the plaza and the other tourists and the views and it all... then went and got a coffee to warm up before we started heading back to the house. I don't like tea or coffee or hot chocolate, which sometimes, on cold days, is something I wish was different. (Back in January I had a white hot chocolate for the first time, which I loved, but it's too sugary and sweet to have often, and not many places do them anyway.) If I had known that a babychino was just warm milk with no coffee, I would have gotten one long before now. Why don't they just call it warm milk, and have a 'small' cup option as well as an espresso-sized one? Babies aren't the only ones who like warm milk.

Earlier, outside an Italian restaurant opposite the jetties, I'd noticed a sign saying "Come and try our homemade cannoli!" or something like that. I looooove cannoli, so as we passed it again on the way to the train station I went in and asked if they did takeaway cannoli. They did, so I ordered one, and after a few minutes they brought it out in one of those plastic takeaway containers - a crisp, golden cannolo (-o is singular, -i is plural) filled half with a thick chocolate-ricotta mixture and half with a glossy, sweet, vanilla ricotta, and fixed to the bottom of the container with a dollop of the vanilla mixture to keep it from moving around. They put the container in a paper bag and I held it close and horizontal on the way back to Waverton, looking forward to enjoying it after dinner while watching some Netflix :)

Summer 2018 big trip - day 15

Saturday 11th August

We arrived in Sydney - civilisation! - on the Friday evening. I loved it immediately. It reminded me of Vancouver. It was a modern, relatively young, cosmopolitan city by the water, the evening was clear and cool and fresh compared to the last few weeks, and it was beautiful, with the lights of the buildings and the water of the harbour. I felt relieved and comfortable.

View from the train after passing over the bridge on Friday

We were staying at the house of Linda, an old school friend of my grandma's. We were met at the airport by Linda's friend Richard, who took us on the train (double-decker, spacious, efficient, I like them!) to the house, which was in the lovely suburb of Waverton, just north of the Harbour Bridge. Again, the area reminded me of Vancouver. Linda's house was wonderful, I loved that immediately too. Quirky, cosy (apart from being cold), and full of books. Very "me".

We went for dinner in one of the two restaurants in Waverton. There's an Indian and a Thai and we went to the Thai, which was very good! I do wonder why Indian and Asian restaurants give you such huge portions that are large enough for two or even three people. So much goes to waste.

On the Saturday we went on a day trip out to the Blue Mountains. I'm writing this a week and a half later on a computer in my hostel in Singapore and haven't made any notes in ages so haven't got much to say. The train took two hours from central Sydney to Katoomba, where a chilly wind was blowing. We made straight for a coffee shop, which happily turned out to be my kind of place, too. It was a quirky independent one called The Pirate Ship Coffee Shop, sold coffee they roasted themselves and had a menu of nutritious hot and cold food and homemade cakes. When my sister asked if they did hazelnut lattes, the owner replied they did not, as they believed good coffee was good enough on its own without adding flavoured sugary syrups (they didn't use those words, weren't so blunt) - good for them :)

We got tickets for the hop-on-hop-off bus tour and stopped first at a waterfall, then did a bit of a walk along a trail, got our first views of the mountains. I can't remember the details of what we did, but it was quite a bit of walking around, seeing some great views. After a few hours we had lunch at the centre at Echo Point. My mum and stepdad had wraps or sandwiches but my sister and I had hot food - she had "burnt ends", which were amazing, and I had a veggie lasagne, which was also very good. In the centre they had an area about the Aboriginal history of the area, which was interesting. Some of it since the Westerners settled was awful. The Echo Point viewpoint, which is the main one, was cordoned off. Someone was on the walkway just below, contemplating jumping. There were lots of people behind the police tape, curious onlookers and people looking at the view. We went off for another walk, which was pretty hairy and strenuous with ever so steep and narrow steps and lots of people trying to squeeze through - but the exercise was good - then went back to the point and got an ice-cream. Eventually the guy was persuaded back up and was led off with his hood covering his face to the police vans and ambulance, and the viewpoint was opened.

We headed to the nearby village of Leura and got the train from there back to Sydney, where we had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. It was one of those older, huge upstairs ones, with a patterned red carpet and loads of tables. I don't know why but I like those places. It also had tanks of live lobsters and crabs, so your meal was as fresh as possible if you ordered either of those things. They were enormous! Then back to the house. It was colder inside than out, haha.