I know, I know. We have not exactly been lighting up the blogosphere on this trip. I suppose the explanation is that life is full and quite busy for a family of four on the road. There is food to buy and prepare, homes to tidy and clean, clothes to wash and mend, school to run, and then there is planning. I was naive about the planning, I'll admit it. I figured we would just find some pay phones when we needed them and ring up a new motel or vacation home in the next town on the map and we would be fine. Hah! Such a thought. For one thing, there are no pay phones anymore.
When my parents carted our family around the world in 1971 there were few tourists and no real tourism infrastructure, but this is 2011. There are tourists everywhere and in droves. We could not find a place to stay in Sydney at all in November, even though we had internet access and two weeks to plan ahead, no place at all. We've struggled to find empty seats on flights, panicked at airports about visas and entry requirements, and eaten some lousy food in transit, all experiences that have only added to the need to plan more carefully and further ahead as we move through this trip.
We did not want to leave home with ten months of flights, meals, and accommodations planned. That would have been horrible, trapping us in unhappy locations or forcing us to move on from a place before we were ready. We had some early stops set and some arrangements for Christmas and New Years in place, but otherwise we figured we would just keep planning a few steps ahead of the current stop. With some exceptions, we stuck with that plan all the way through New Zealand. We had our glitches, to be sure, but I would not have done it any other way. However, there was a cost, and the cost was spending a surprising amount of time on line, searching sites like Wotif.com (awesome), Book-a-Bach, Holidayhomes, tripadvisor, etc. I have Googled it all, and the time I have spent on the computer planning combined with the time it took me to write letters of recommendations for my students at Head-Royce, left me with little time to update the blog.
My silence should now be broken. For a variety of reasons our family has agreed that we should shift the tenor of the trip from the road to roots. We have decided to rent an amazing little house in Bali for five months. Why Bali? Surely that is not a question one needs to ask. Bali is beautiful, warm, and gentle; many of the people you meet here compete for nicest and most welcoming person on earth; there is a complex and astonishing cultural vitality here that is not averse to our participation; we found a fantastic school where Otis and Lilah can go; there are farmer's markets, avocados, papayas, fresh fish, and plenty of organic brown rice. Why not Bali? It is our family's happy place.
Our house is tiny, no more than 700 square feet, and it is the perfect place to call home. We have two bedrooms, and a light-filled kitchen. From every room we look out over the quintessential Balinese rice fields. Everyday we see people heading out to work in the fields, they carry scythes and picks in their hands and massive baskets of firewood or water spinach or pandanus grass on their heads. At night we can see bats racing through the sky in search of mosquitoes, while fireflies hover over the tips of the rice grass, flashing mysterious signals to the rain clouds. Just yesterday afternoon, a massive electrical storm rolled right over our house, with perfect bolts of lightning blasting down on the paddies outside our windows while thunder boomed about us. The atmosphere was pure energy and the air was nearly one hundred percent water. Bali was putting on an amazing show.
