Cooling off in our cute little pool

To close out our trip through Bali we rented another villa, this time in the bustling, touristy, (comparatively) upscale town of Seminyak in the southwest part of the island. We were in Seminyak back in 2014 and stayed at a great resort, but this time we were on a mission: is this the sort of place where we would come back to rent a villa for an extended winter stay?

The short answer is no. I found myself longing for Lovina, the small town feel, the huge villa, the rice paddies, the great household staff. Now, our villa in Seminyak was certainly nice. It consisted of three separate buildings, a mostly open air living area (walls on just two sides, consisting of kitchen, living room, and dining room) and two separate one-bedroom buildings with attached open-air bathrooms. And of course a nice little pool. Absolutely nothing not to like.

This is the living area from our villa. The kitchen is behind that little fake wall, and the dining area is around the corner. It was a great combination of indoor/outdoor living, with no wall at all separating you from the pool area.

Except the noise from the neighboring villa. The property is built to two identical, separate villas or, if you open a gate between them, a four-bedroom space with two pools. The first two days we were there, though, some young partying Aussies were renting the other space and they were loud. Loud. The big cement wall between the properties provided all the privacy you could want, but their music just went right up and over the wall. On the second day as they were blasting some heavy metal music I finally went over to ask them to turn it down. The music was so loud they couldn’t hear the doorbell so I had to wait until the song was over and then knocked really loudly. To their credit their response was perfect: they immediately turned it off … and then left the next day. Couldn’t ask for anything more.

It’s worth noting, of course, that the issue of noise went both ways. I like to listen to music at the pool, too, but felt pretty inhibited knowing that whoever moved in after the Aussies moved out were unlikely to welcome our music so we had to keep it down, a limitation that just didn’t exist in our isolated Lovina villa.

Back in 2013 when I was first contemplating retirement one of my concerns was just how lazy I might get with no obligations. One thing I learned in Bali was that the fear was well placed. I can get really lazy. I made breakfast every morning (the housekeeper was supposed to do that, but she explained when we arrived that she’d just had shoulder surgery so, well, we’d just have to take care of it ourselves), and even lunch half the time. Otherwise, I was just lazy; on a couple occasions I realized when we’d go out to dinner that it was the first time all day I’d been out of the compound. Pathetic.

With this pool and the comfy loungers, why would I do, well, anything?

There was plenty to like about Seminyak. There was the grocery store I’d been hoping to find in Lovina. Nothing that would pass muster in Cambridge, but pretty much everything I would have hoped for. Our villa was beautiful and relaxing. And eventually we managed to find some good restaurants. Sip, a genuinely authentic French restaurant, was a standout, as was Rolling Fork, a tiny, cool Italian place. Even a classy bar where we could have cocktails and dinner.

And while on the subject of entertainment in Seminyak, can’t forget the entertaining drag shows

Ultimately, though, I can’t really imagine going back for an extended stay. The town is just too crazy/busy/touristy for my taste, crowded and hot. The crowds and traffic and noise and sprawl just go on and on and on for miles. The beach is a 20-minute walk from where we stayed which wouldn’t generally be such an issue except that the first few days we were there it would rain every hour or so, sometimes reasonably hard. Then it would clear up and be beautiful … and then it would rain again. No problem in our villa but if we’d made the trek to the beach we would have gotten rained out pretty quickly.

In that sense, then, it was a successful stop: I learned I don’t want to do it again, at least for more than a week. Apparently the search for the perfect winter hideaway continues. Unless we already found it in Puerto Vallarta.

At any rate, that’s it for Bali. From here it’s north to Bangkok where we hope to get a 10-year visa for China (10 years!) and then, visa gods permitting, we’re off to China.

Sip, a great French restaurant in a classy setting, very un-Seminyak-ish

Don’t believe me that it was authentic French? Here’s the steak tartare to prove it, with Mark’s rack of lamb in the background.

And Rolling Fork, a little quirkier, not as flashy, but great food

Before dinner we’d enjoy music and a little Absolut on the rocks

After dinner there was always a show if we were up for it

Never enough pictures of Mark with a kitty

And finally the beach. The weather cleared up near the end of our stay but by then we were too spooked by the frequent rainstorms and never came down here except to take pictures.

The Laguna resort – fabulous pools and a great beach

Nusa Dua – an enclave of five-star resorts in southern Bali – might be the most beautiful place we’ve been that I just can’t imagine going back to. We stayed at The Laguna, a really great resort where, because of our Starwood status, we were upgraded to a nice suite. Sweet! (And we relearned an important lesson. Starwood properties are supposed to upgrade us to the best “standard suite” available when we check in. They didn’t, and after unpacking we went online to see if there were better rooms available. There were so, after lunch, I went to see a manager. She apologized, had some lame excuse, and we moved into the much larger suite. Lesson? It’s OK to complain. You might get a much nicer room!)

At any rate, the resort was little short of stunning, with a great sandy beach and more swimming pools than you’ve ever seen anywhere. Because it’s a bit off-season it wasn’t crowded at all, and though we normally don’t like big resorts, this one hit the sweet spot.

The beach isn’t the best in the world, but it’s damned good

So why wouldn’t we come back? Except for the resort and several others along the same beach, there was really nothing here. No local town, no decent local restaurants, no cool local … anything. And because of Nusa Dua’s location on a peninsula on the southern tip of Bali and the horrible traffic, you couldn’t really go anywhere else. So we were kind of stuck, though stuck in a beautiful resort isn’t the worst thing in the world.

If the goal is to “get away from it all” at a great beach resort, this does the job. We’ve learned, though, over the last few years that for us there’s nothing we’re trying to get away from (except the new administration in DC, but that’s another story). If there’s no stress in your life, the “get way from it all” thing just doesn’t pack that much punch. And since there are other great beaches and resorts in the world where you’re not so cut off from the local life, that’s where we’ll be aiming for in the future.

The view from breakfast

The food situation in Nusa Dua was kind of grim. Who’d have thought that after moving down to the fancy southern part of the island we would pine for the great restaurants of Lovina? All of the big resorts had multiple restaurants that were expensive and not that good. And as for the local options, they were if anything worse; cheap and just not worth it. Ultimately we found one genuinely good restaurant at one of the resorts; unlike the other resorts this one appeared to be independent, meaning that maybe they had to try harder. And we found one OK local restaurant for a couple of lunches. But mostly the meal options were decidedly inferior to anything we’ve had in a long time.

Dinner at the one genuinely good resort restaurant. That’s an asparagus flan that I’m having while Mark is having beef carpaccio; both were excellent.

One of the things anyone immediately notices about Bali is that there are Hindu temples everywhere: big ones, little ones, all kinds. And everywhere, more evidence of my theory that the poorer people are the more they spend on religious stuff. We know from previous trips to Bali that you can’t go into the bigger temples without “proper attire” which, for men, includes a “no shorts” policy. And I think I remember from the past that menstruating women can’t go into the temples at all, no matter how they’re dressed. Seems a little medieval to me, but then there’s lots of religious stuff that’s medieval. The big news to us, though, was a sign outside one small temple that had the usual restrictions for proper attire and menstruating women, but added that infants under the age of 42 days were prohibited as well. Very strange. I wonder what differentiates a 41-day-old baby from a 42-day old baby?

Temples everywhere in Bali

We did have one important task to take care of in Nusa Dua, starting the process of extending our 30-day Indonesia visit. Getting the initial visa at the airport was super easy, just a few minutes and a few dollars. Extending it for another 30 days, though, is a bureaucratic nightmare. You have to go to the immigration office (which apparently moves frequently, so we weren’t even sure where it was) and fill out forms. Fair enough. Fill out forms in black ink, I should add, since I did it in blue ink and was duly reprimanded and told to go back and start over. Once that’s done, and they have copies of your outbound fight – God knows they wouldn’t want you to stay longer and spend more money – you’re told to come back in five days to get your picture taken and to pay the fee. (Why you can’t do that the first day was not explained.) and after that you have to come back three days later to actually pick up your passport and new visa. What a hassle.

And, to make it worse, we’d brought our umbrellas since in rainy season it can start pouring at pretty much any time. I set mine down to fill out the form … and walked away without it, never to see it again. Mark and I have often remarked how amazing it is that we have the same collapsible umbrellas that we left Boston with in 2013. Who keeps an umbrella for that long without losing it or having it break or something? Well, we did, until the immigration office. I’d traveled with it for 1,381 days and now it’s gone. How sad!

No big excursion, just a little afternoon walk out along the coast

Lunch at the Westin next door. The food wasn’t very good, but the location on the beach was nice.

The gado gado – a classic Indonesian dish – at Loco Café, the one decent lunch spot we found

Mark enjoying a steak and spinach salad over dinner while it’s pouring outside

Dewa the bartender at the Westin Hotel’s tapas bar

And melting the cheese on one of our dishes … with a blow torch

Mark, me, Jenny, & Pat in Munduk. This is the third time they’ve come to visit and each time it’s been fabulous.

Two more weeks in Lovina. The big excitement was a somewhat brief visit from Mark’s brother Pat and his wife Jenny. It’s a long way from Monroe, MI, but if it’s winter there and we have a big villa with a private pool just waiting, why not come over?

It was a great visit (as were their visits in Bangkok and Marrakech). The crazy part was that while the weather had been mixed before they came – plenty of sun, some rain, a couple of big downpours – once they got here it was just constant overcast and rain. Never a speck of the sun you come to Bali for.

I never get enough of these rice fields

Still, it was fun showing them around our Lovina. A day trip back up into the hills for lunch back in Munduk where, instead of wandering around the beautiful grounds, we huddled out of the rain. A trip to the Secret Garden for dinner, lunches at Jasmine Kitchen (our Thai favorite), and of course My Greek Taverna. Given how big the villa is, it seemed crazy that just Mark & I would hang out there all the time, so we were pretty eager to have Pat & Jenny join us. And, having traveled nearly 20 years ago in Bali with Mark’s brother John and his wife Alma, that leaves just sister Jeanne & Jamal as the Sullivan sibs we need to travel the island with.

Four weeks was a long time, and Lovina is a distinctly quiet part of Bali. There’s really not a lot to do. But still, there is something magical about the place. Mark tells me that Bali is the only place on earth where the primary religion teaches that the afterlife is, well, pretty much just like this. People are certainly poor – we see people working out in the rice fields not vastly different from how they worked many years ago, and we can only imagine how little the voluminous staff make in restaurants that charge us practically nothing for great meals – but … but. Everyone smiles. Maybe I’m just kidding myself, but it sure seems as though it’s a place where people are just basically happy.

And it’s worth noting it’s not just because the beaches are great. You may have noticed that there are no pictures of beaches here. I don’t know what the beach is like the rest of the year, but during the rainy season it’s really pretty crappy. Not just because it’s cloudy; the water is an ugly brown from all the stuff that runs off the hills day and night. Contrary to common assumptions, Bali really isn’t all about beaches or – at this time of year – about beaches at all.

Mark with our household staff: Reno the gardener, and Julie the housekeeper/cook

And Mark with one of the many attractive men serving at My Greek Taverna. (The owner is gay and he seems to have a decided preference for what the staff should look like.) Everybody here is happy.

And speaking of happy …

Once Pat & Jenny pulled out the sun came back. Literally. They left one afternoon and that night walking to dinner we could see the clouds breaking up. The next morning was mostly sunny so it was back to the hanging out in the pool. I did a little meal prep – salads and such for lunch, even appetizers for cocktail hour. Mark spent his time obsessing over his online language lessons: a little bit of Spanish, Russian, and Italian, and more intensely Chinese. I spent my non-reading time (a biography of Hirohito in anticipation of our upcoming Japan travels) obsessing over finding an apartment to buy in Paris. We’re still a couple years away from wanting something that settled, but we’re starting to imagine it.

Our pool the morning after Pat & Jenny left. Sunshine everywhere.

After four weeks we were ready to leave Lovina, but not Bali yet. From here we’re going down to Nusa Dua, the very upscale resort area in the southern part of the island. And after that we’ve got eight nights in another villa, this time in Seminyak, the upscale residential area not far from Nusa Dua. Basically we’re skeptical we want to come back to Lovina for a month but want to see if the more populated and “happening” Seminyak would work. We’ll see.

Pat borrowing my scooter. Driving around Lovina – especially when we’d go up into the hills – was great fun.

Pat snapped this picture of Mark on his way back down the hill into Lovina

Jenny & Pat on our day trip into Munduk

Jenny rocks Boston – at the Global Village Kafe (sic)

Jenny & Pat.
Oh wait, that’s not Pat!

Pat, deep in thought

We loved watching the changing weather and light on the landscape around our villa

Of course, the perfect location of Villa Padma at the edge of the rice fields won’t last forever, as this For Sale sign suggests. Another good reason not to invest in real estate when things can change.

When Pat & Jenny were visiting we discovered the Buda Bakery surprisingly close to our villa. A really good restaurant, with views like this over the neighboring village.

While Lovina was sometimes quieter than we would have liked, we got a kick out of the small town nature of it, too. This was my barber in his tiny shop. When I walked in he knew who I was; he lives just a few buildings away from our villa on Gang Padma.

While Indonesia is the world’s largest Moslem-majority country, Bali is primarily Hindu. And the swastika, it turns out, was a Hindu symbol many centuries before the Nazis adopted it. So notwithstanding its modern stigma you see swastikas all over Bali.

Food! This is a great watermelon and feta salad from Buda Bakery.

And a very Balinese fish dish at Secret Garden. We loved the personalized banana leaf welcome that usually greeted us there.

As much as we loved Villa Padma, I don’t think I’ve put enough pictures of just why. This was our living space when we weren’t at the pool, a great big veranda with comfy couches for happy hour and a table where we had our meals, all opening onto the beautiful grounds. Sweet!

And one last shot of us with Jenny & Pat walking home through the rice fields