What Would Make YOU Hop A Plane To Bali?

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Travel Betty: We've GOT to go to Bali.

Travel Boyfriend: You just want that pig.

Betty (drooling): So? Did you see it? It was succulent. It's swabbed in coconut milk for an entire six hours as it rotates over an open fire. Did you see the crispy skin? Imagine what that tastes like!

Boyfriend: Yeah, I saw it. I'm just not going to travel 8,343 miles to eat a meal.

Betty: Your loss.

And that's how I came to book one single ticket to Bali for October.

Travel Boyfriend and I were watching No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain was in Indonesia traipsing through lush forests, interacting with locals, eating wonderful and mysterious foods like durian and basically making me insanely eager to get on a plane. But to be fair, it wasn’t just the pig. I had made a secret plan two years ago that when I turned 33 I was going to reassess my life and either skip out and travel the world for a year or just put my nose back down to the grindstone and keep on living the way I had been (mostly by someone else’s rules). But instead of doing either, I decided to kind of split the difference. First of all, why wait until that magic random age? And secondly, did I really need to make such a drastic departure from everything I know and love in San Francisco? Couldn’t I just make travel a priority and fit it into my life whenever and however I saw fit? So for the past year I have put that theory to the test and have found out that surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Before this time there were two things I was always worried about. What will people think of me? And where will I get the money? By nature I’m not an irresponsible person and I’m also not independently wealthy. Not to get all cheesy 'The Secret' on you, but what I found is that when you decide to make something a priority in your life, the world starts to make room for you. And as much as you think they won’t, people make room for you and your newfound priority too. Yes, there may be a few sacrifices along the way, but they don't actually feel like sacrifices. Sacrifice means you're giving up what you want. But you're actually working towards what you want most of all, so these obstacles are by definition no longer sacrifices. I found I didn’t even really want them in the first place. But from watching this one show I knew there were two new things I REALLY wanted to do in my life. First was to stay at Kampung Sampireun in West Java and sit on the balcony of my own lakeside bungalow being served hot-off-the-griddle serabi (aka Javanese pancakes with coconut milk sauce) from a man in a canoe. The second was to get my hands on that delectable swine.

Now I didn’t make immediate plans after seeing this show. I just did the appropriate Googling and put the information away in my ‘travel ideas’ folder. What put the whole crazy plan in motion was simply my desire to write and be warm (not easy to do simultaneously in San Francisco). Surprisingly, my first thought was not Bali (I figured that was a place I’d want to visit with Travel Boyfriend). Instead I started thinking about the South Pacific. Fiji. Vanuatu. Cook Islands, maybe. I wanted beauty without a lot of distractions. I also wanted to stay for a month. That seems to be about the right amount of time away for me when I can get it. Because of that, it didn’t make sense to stay in a hotel so I went to Vacation Rental By Owner to see what looked good. Turns out not a lot of owners of vacation rentals exist in the South Pacific. There are a few, but not the plethora I imagined. But I did notice that Bali had no shortage of options. Can’t hurt to look, right?

Within five minutes, I’d found the perfect place. I know that pictures usually oversell a location, but as soon as I saw the first one, I knew it was for me. I KNEW it! Then I saw the second and third. I tried to contain my excitement while reading and rereading the posting and then while scrutinizing their website and then doing online searches for reviews and recommendations and especially once I sent an email to the owner inquiring about availability. Luckily, I didn’t have to contain excitement for long. Within a week, I was sending off my deposit and booking a flight on Singapore Airlines for a one-month stay in Bali.

Now back when the economy was absolutely shitty, I would have turned down an opportunity like this because I would have been afraid to miss out on an opportunity. Huh? What? That sounds dumb. What I realized I had been doing was rejecting the things I was naturally drawn to out of fear of missing out on the things I thought I SHOULD be drawn to. So, the opportunities said to each other, "Let's move on. This girl isn't going to put us to use." And so somebody else got them. And I kept sitting there. Picking up the unringing phone and saying hello. Peeking out the mail slot to see if a great opportunity was there. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t because I wasn’t fearless enough to put myself out there. But now I am. Maybe not completely (I’ll write about my terrifying hot air balloon ride over the Namib desert some other time), but I'm a heck of a lot more fearless than I used to be. And that’s also why I decided to start writing this blog, because I wanted to help in some small way to encourage other people of similar inclinations to do the same.

I have a friend who recently on a half-day’s notice flew up to Portland from San Francisco just to sing onstage with one of his favorite performers for a single song. Impetuous? Yup. A little risky? Perhaps. Luckily his boss made room for his priority. But, it is a memorable experience that he'll cherish for the rest of his life. And maybe not so much for the actual five minutes that he sang, but for the fact that he decided to do it at all. So why not go to Bali for the pig? Whatever your own personal aspirations are, going to Bali for the pig is what we're here for.

As for the pancakes, for now I’m saving West Java for the return trip. Maybe the one where Travel Boyfriend decides he actually WILL fly 8,343 miles for a meal.

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