So, it’d been a few years since I’d had what my entitled self considered a ‘Proper Holiday’ and I managed to convince Jo (through careful planning and a rather overdone presentation…) that we should head off to Bali.
Bali is somewhere I visited many years ago back in 2001 while I was off gallivanting around the world post-university and I thought it was an amazing place. As such I was both keen to return there and see how it had changed but also I felt it would be a good introduction to Asia for Jo as it is, arguably, the most western bit of Asia, barring perhaps Singapore but that doesn’t really count as a holiday in of itself!
We’d booked some Saturday evening flights from Heathrow at just after 9pm so we arranged a car to take us there having had a nice easy day doing some final packing, including treble-checking that we had our passports…
We had a nice burger at the airport, and the flight left on time. We were flying Garuda (the Indonesian national carrier) to Jakarta overnight, arriving there for a small stopover then a 2 hour flight to Denpasar.
I would say that we were thoroughly impressed with Garuda, they gave you a lot of food, drinks and snacks – so many that we had almost too much. They did ease you into the local cuisine as well because basically all the dinner options were essentially Chicken and Rice, or something and Rice. Lots of rice basically…
Our stopover in Jakarta was nice and easy, even though I completely got the wrong end of the stick with respect to exchange rates and took out the equivalent of 5 quid, when I thought it was 50 quid – in my defence it is a 20000 to 1 exchange rate and I was only off by one decimal place! 😐
This was also the point at which Jo’s speech impediment appeared – namely where she pronounced ‘Balinese’ as ‘Bolognese’ Admittedly we were looking at a menu which had that dish on it…
We arrived at Denpasar airport at about 11pm and grabbed a taxi straight to our hotel, the Royal Singosari Kuta. We’d splashed out on a big suite for our first stay and it even had it’s own lounge, along with a bed so big you could probably fit 4 people in it…
Jo couldn’t sleep, so she self medicated with some pills we’d got for the flight and we both zonked out, excited about getting out into Kuta the following morning.
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