Inevitably the last day of a vacation rolls around and today is our day. We went out for dinner last night and enjoyed the delicious Indonesian food one more time as well as our “free taxi ride” back to our hotel. That idea to get you home safely is a welcome treat at the end of a night. This morning we were still trying to straighten out our “late check out” from the hotel and finally managed to get in touch with our travel agent who in turn made those arrangements. We were to initially check out at 11 am and were not being picked up to go to the airport until 9 pm. Now we can keep our air conditioned room until 6 pm. Our flight leaves Denpasar at 1:05 am for the first leg ... read more

As you may have picked up from previous posts, it is impossible to go anywhere in Bali without encountering temples. It’s said that in Bali, there are more temples than there are houses. Some estimates are even as high as 50,000, in fact. While this may be hard to believe at first, it doesn’t take much time on the island to notice that temples are literally everywhere. Balinese temples, or pura, have strong associations with the number three. Temples are divided into three spaces: an outer courtyard in addition to two holier inner yards. Each temple also has spaces of worship for Hinduism’s three prominent deities: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. And within the context of a Balinese village, there is also something called the ‘three temple system.’ Each Balinese village contains its own Pura Puseh, Pura ... read more

Although we had some interesting visits to the bird park and the elephant area today I’m going to leave talking about those two experiences to another time. For today’s entry I’m going to focus simply on what I have learned and seen about the Balinese people. In addition to the many tours that we have booked through the travel agency we also arranged to hire a private driver and car for a full day to take us out to see places that were not on the tour schedule. As it turned out yesterday, time with our driver has been the highlight of our trip. Anytime we came across a place that we would like to stop and take a picture all we had to do was ask and he would pull over as soon as he ... read more

We are now a week into our Bali experience And we continue to learn about the Balinese way of life. Everywhere we have traveled we have encountered numerous temples, ranging from small ones out front of each house to the larger ornate temples at places of worship. Entrances into most buildings are through the traditional “split gates”. Some are quite plain but others are extremely ornate and very beautiful. We had registered our trip with the Canadian Government before leaving and right after the bombings in Jakarta a few days ago, we received an “alert notice” from the Canadian Embassy advising us to stay out of Jakarta. Nice to know they are keeping tabs on us! That being said, we returned from a dinner out in the community last night about 9:00 and had just got ... read more

I started the day by getting up at 6:00 to catch the sunrise on the beach. After breakfast, We had our first tour today to the Eastern part of Bali. It was to be a 9 hour day and promised to give us some insights into the culture and traditions of the Balinese people. We were picked up at the hotel at 8:00 as promised and transported to a central office where we joined a small group of folks from other hotels. There were about 11others, 2 women from Merritt, 3 folks from Holland, a young couple from Calgary and 4 folks from South Africa. We set out on an air conditioned tour bus through the streets of the city on our way to Batubulan where we were to visit a “batik factory”. On the way ... read more