We spent Chinese New Year in Bali, Indonesia. We have been looking forward to vacationing there ever since we lived in Chongqing. We have several friends that have been there, so we took all their great advice when planning our vacation. Bali is 92% Hindu and the culture is rich. We planned on seeing traditional dances, visiting temples and the monkey forests, taking a bike ride through the villages along the rice paddies, swimming, shopping, relaxing on the beach...and we did!
We stayed three nights in Ubud among the rice paddies and 4 nights in Nusa Dua on the beach. It took a day to fly there. We flew to Korea (a two hour flight) and then to Denpasar, Bali (another seven hour flight).
I love that our kids are old enough now to swim and do things on their own, which meant that this vacation was full of sleeping in, walks on the beach with John, and I even got to read 2 1/2 books while lying on a beach chair: Room (Emma Donoghue), Michael Vey (Richard Evans) and Bruiser (Neal Shusterman).
We stayed three nights in Ubud among the rice paddies and 4 nights in Nusa Dua on the beach. It took a day to fly there. We flew to Korea (a two hour flight) and then to Denpasar, Bali (another seven hour flight).
I love that our kids are old enough now to swim and do things on their own, which meant that this vacation was full of sleeping in, walks on the beach with John, and I even got to read 2 1/2 books while lying on a beach chair: Room (Emma Donoghue), Michael Vey (Richard Evans) and Bruiser (Neal Shusterman).
The kids wrote down a few of their memories of our trip.
EMMA:
Bali was a great vacation!! My favorite parts were: shopping, the monkey forest, swimming, and hanging out at the hotel. My favorite moment is probably when we were playing ‘uno’ and mom said, “pigs will fly if I don’t win.” Then, of course, she didn’t win. I did! So, when are those pigs going to fly, huh? Another fun moment was when we saw a cat with no tail and mom stood on a chair… On this trip I was always the one who got hurt: falling on the bike ride, getting my toe cut on the bottom of the pool, bad sunburns, getting sick on the last day. I know I should have, but I didn’t like snorkeling. There was only one type of fish, the goggles got all foggy, the coral was ugly, and it just wasn’t fun. Well, the rest of the trip was amazing! That’s all that counts, right!?
JAMES:
There were 2 main highlights for my trip to Bali, my hike through the jungle with Dad and playing games with the family each night. I really liked my hike through the jungle because it made me feel like a Survivor. One day, I want to be on Survivor, so it made me excited. We went in caves on cliffs, by waterfalls and by fallen bamboo. It was a long and tiring hike walking steeply upward and downward. I loved it. I also enjoyed nights playing Uno and Pit because of some of the laughs we had. One night we saw a stray cat with no tail. When it walked by, Mom snuck to the other side of the table and climbed onto a chair. It was so funny. Some of my other highlights were building a sandcastle on the beach and seeing all the monkeys. I liked building the sandcastle because it actually turned out great! Most of the sandcastles I’ve made look like a bunch of lumpy towers that don’t look like towers. This one was a big, hollowed–out square with wing-ish things on all of the sides to protect it from the ocean because we made it next to the ocean to see how long it could withstand the waves (and it did pretty well!). I thought it was fun to see all of the monkeys because they were really cute (and I could relate to them). Seeing them in the trees was like Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which is the movie I watched on the airplane). Bali was extremely fun!
ELIZA:
Bali was fun! I really enjoyed swimming at the different hotels we went to. My favorite was the last hotel. There was a bar in the middle of the pool, and they gave everyone a free welcome drink with little umbrellas. We saw a fire dance near a temple with monkeys there. They were a little scary to me. We shopped a lot. We went to a painting store and a woodcarving. On our first day we went to a nice store where everybody bought something. I got little bottles for my American Girl Dolls and flip-flop magnets for my collection. We biked, but it was in the rain, so I didn’t like it. At one hotel, each night we would go out on our outside living roomish thing and play Pit and Uno. Twice we saw tailless cats. The only cats we saw there were tailless ones. One day on the beach Tessa, James and I played in the sand. Bali was super fun for me!
TESSA:
I like swimming with daddy because he’s very nice. I liked dancing on the beach with the band. I liked helping Emma buy her “Bali Bali Bali Bag.” I liked going to McDonald’s because I got a goose and humpty-dumpty toys with my happy meal.
Back to Laurel….
Just so you know that we are normal, I’ll mention a few of the “low lights” before you see all the pictures of the high lights from our near-perfect vacation.
· All three girls took turns throwing up on the planes.
· Tessa and Eliza didn’t like any of the food in Bali and basically ate breakfast and then lived on convenient store snacks.
· The mosquitoes were bad.
· We had booked a brand new villa in Nusa Dua that we were so looking forward to staying in, but when we got there we found that it wasn’t completed and didn’t have electricity yet…and no one had told us! So our driver helped us find hotels/villas that had space for us. It was a little stressful, but it worked out.
