Sorry for the Group Email

We arrived in Bali on the 21st of May, in the middle of the night. For the first time since Hong Kong, we’d phoned ahead and booked a room: our plane arrived from Singapore in the middle of the night, and the hotel we found offered complimentary airport pickup. Not for the first time, I was reminded of the executive travel I used to have: forget business class and four-star hotels, the biggest luxury you can enjoy is emerging from the baggage hall to find a man holding a card with your name on it and a car outside.

Distinctly less luxurious, though, was the fifteen minutes Mendy spent in the company of Bali’s immigration officials as they tried to decide what they should do about the fact that she’d run out of blank pages in her passport. Travelling takes it out of a passport, you see. Not only does she have a visa explaining to UK immigration that she’s allowed to live there, but she also has visas for China, Russia, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cambodia, plus all the stamps for the countries that don’t need a visa. The end result was no pages, and the rather inelegant solution was a double-sided piece of sticky tape to attach the Indonesian visa, for which she was charged the preposterous amount of US$50.

The man with the nameboard, luckily, was patient, and we were whisked to our hotel, checked in and asleep in no time.

The next day we struck out. Bali itself is a deceptively large island – the travel agent-inspired impression is of a gold-fringed island that can be walked in a day, but the fact is it takes nearly four hours to drive from south to north. The main tourist hangout is Kuta, a long strand of golden beach and surf on the southern end of the island.

I should have been appalled by it. I hated Koh Phangnan, after all, which has similar billing as a tropical paradise. But after the cleanliness (some would say sterility) of Singapore, it was refreshing to find somewhere with soul, even if that soul was powered entirely by improbably-buff Australian tourists.

We spent nearly two weeks in Kuta, and frankly it isn’t surprising that my notebook struggles to account for the time spent. We ate at several of its many excellent restaurants, slept late, swam in its beautifully-warm water and generally acted like holidaymakers.

And we surfed.

This is something I’ve tried before. A few years ago (2004, if memory serves), the entire family decamped to Cornwall for a weekend in a chalet. The mornings were spitefully cold and misty, and the afternoons wet and windy. Still, I thought: I wasn’t going to go surfing anywhere tropical for a while, so why not have a lesson?

Along with opting for a 27-hour travelling day in Vietnam and attempting to break in to my own house (which resulted in actual blood and hospitalisation), it was one of the worst decisions I ever made. Even zipped into a wetsuit, the water was a few notches above freezing. My nose turned blue as soon as I was in the water, my fingers followed and the rest of my skin wasn’t far behind. The longest period I spent standing on the board amounted to comfortably less than five seconds, and I drank approximately the same amount of water in two hours as a normal person drinks in a lifetime.

Admittedly, I was shit at surfing: my sense of balance regressed to that of a one-legged horse and my attempts to catch waves typically ended in me under four feet of water and my surfing board springing like fresh toast out of the waves and smashing down on my head.

In Bali, though, surfing was fun. The water was warm enough that we didn’t need eight full minutes of splashing and shuddering before taking the plunge, and the waves were predictable and big enough to surf without being threatening.

Our days revolved around late starts, pancakes and surfing. It makes, sadly, for lousy reading, but it was a great holiday.

Dave is aware that one sentence in this post starts with “But” and another with “And”. Grammatical rules are the first to go when you don’t have an editor. I also recommend Bali the Second. And spending a few minutes having a look at the relevant Flickr set.