Bali Finale

Our last few days in Bali were spent in frantic preparation for the trip ahead.  Here Ralph is doing his part by getting his third massage in 36 hours.  (I had two.)  The masseur is the famous Noora, the guy with the magic hands.

We also paid a visit to the local barber shop with Steve.  The barber nearly broke his face smiling when he saw Steve and me come in.  This was going to be easy money!  I only had to answer one question - 1 millimeter or 2 - and the haircut included a brief forehead, neck and shoulder massage.  All of this for a buck!  He had to work a little harder to earn his dollar from Ralph, but Ralph got a better cut than he usually does from Super Cuts at home.

This is still the Third World, however.  The cloth that the barber threw over my shoulders at the end (for the brief massage) smelled like it had been used on too many other folks.  And Ralph worried about how many heads had been combed with the same comb that the barber used for him.  There were no ill effects, however, from either of these little reminders that we are not in a developed country.

Our last chore was to do a little shopping for Bali souvenirs, and I use the word “chore” advisedly.  Michael, on the other hand, thinks of shopping as recreation and, as a result, knows the best places to buy everything – from batik to stone carvings to table tops to wooden carvings of penises with wings.  (I’m not kidding.)  We took advantage of all his knowledge to get all our shopping out of the way in 80 minutes flat.

Some final thoughts about Bali… In the process of planning this trip we had to make a lot of choices.  Even though we are going to be gone for 10 weeks, we can’t do everything we’d like to do.  One of the adventures that got left out was a trip to Botswana.  After we were in Bali for about a week we realized that we had made a mistake by scheduling 3 weeks in Bali and leaving out Botswana.  So we made a mid-course correction and left Bali yesterday (3/6), a week earlier than we originally planned.  I’m blogging right now in the Johannesburg airport, where we’ve encountered a short delay due to a mechanical problem with the plane.

The truth is that I just was not as enchanted with Bali as most folks seem to be.  I’m sure it’s some sort of character flaw in me.  The Balinese people who I met were uniformly kind-spirited and polite.  The Balinese culture was fascinating; the Balinese see the world as a very different place than the world I live in.    The scenery was beautiful, if a little monotonous.  The music and the dancing were interesting and sometimes quite beautiful, especially for Ralph.  The villa where we stayed was comfortable and our hosts, Steve and Michael, could not have done anything to make our experience better.  The only explanation that I can come up with is that I am such a wuss that I let the heat and humidity,  which were extreme and which I hate, cloud my judgment.  When we get home I’m going to ask other friends who’ve been to Bali and loved it exactly what they loved.  Maybe they saw something that I didn’t.