An hour earlier the pool area was pristine. Then it started raining.

Apparently even paradise has off days. When I wrote earlier that “it only rains a little” I should have added “…until it rains a lot.” We were out to lunch a couple days ago and when we left to go home you could tell it was going to rain. A lot. I still decided to go a bit out of the way to the liquor store, since there are priorities. Mark got home just as it started raining but I got caught in a torrential downpour. I figured the worst that could happen was that I’d get soaked, right?

Well. I got home, it was pouring, I showered, and was just lying down reading when Mark told me to come outside: our grounds were flooding. He told me to look in back where water was coming in through a couple gaps in the cement wall separating us from the neighboring properties. Just as I got there I heard a crash and saw the brick wall collapse. And then the water just swamped our heavenly pool area, the rest of the grounds, and then came running into the house.

The cement walls apparently held back the water for a while … until it didn’t anymore. This is well after it had stopped raining, but the water was still flowing in.

Within minutes (seconds?) we had the runoff from thousands of acres up in the hills in our once-pristine pool. Two hours before I’d found it disturbing if a leaf dropped in the pool to ruin the perfection. Now it looked more like a septic tank. We learned later that a little stream nearby had backed up because there was so much trash in it, then when it broke through it just overwhelmed everything. We learned, too, that it was the third time in just a few years that it’s happened. And thus our little slice of heaven was distinctly no longer heavenly.

The good news is that the local property managers did a fabulous job cleaning it up. They were over in just a little while and quickly arranged for us to stay in a neighboring villa that was unoccupied. They started the cleanup before it had even completely stopped raining. We were stunned the next morning to discover that the house was again habitable, though it would take days to drain and refill the pool. We couldn’t say enough good things about how quickly they turned things around.

The next morning our pool boy thought maybe they’d dredge it out and just add some extra chemicals. I was pretty skeptical and sure enough when more experienced managers came over they recognized they would need to rent a pump to empty it.

Not pretty

One upside to all the trauma was that I’d been curious what other villas in the area were like, and we got to see. Staying just one night in the substitute villa made us so happy to get back to Villa Padma. The other place was just a couple buildings away, and sure, it had a nice pool and all that. But my God, the difference between this place, with all its great outdoor space, right on the edge of the rice fields, and a house with just no personality at all couldn’t have been greater. I guess there’s a reason Mark spends so much time doing research before we pick a place to stay.

The only outdoor sitting area at our replacement villa was distinctly inferior to what we’d become used to at Villa Padma. There was, though, a cat, which helps. Note the top of the wicker chair she’s sitting on: she’s spent a lot of time clawing away at it!

Another upside was that, since the pool would be unavailable for several days, we took the opportunity to go back to Munduk, a little town a bit inland from here, where we’d stayed at a really beautiful little resort nearly three years ago. Sanak (the Munduk resort) has been this iconic little retreat in my memory ever since, so the flooding was a perfect excuse to pack overnight bags, toss them on our little scooters we’re renting, and go riding up the hills. The hour-long ride itself was half the joy, with gorgeous views across valleys and terraced rice fields. And then a long afternoon and morning the next day in another slice of heaven. You gotta love Bali.

Sanak resort in Munduk. It really is that beautiful

Now just a couple days later life is nearly back to normal. The pool is full again and later today it should be ready for us. It will take a while – weeks, presumably – for the landscaping to recover fully, but this is a great place even if it’s not quite as perfect as it was two weeks ago.

Otherwise the big highlight of our second week here was a visit from Tamara, a free-spirited woman who loves traveling as much as we do, whom we met in Bali nearly three years ago. We’ve stayed in touch on Facebook and, the day we got here, Mark saw that she was back, too, staying in a writer’s colony in Ubud. We invited her up for the weekend and had a fabulous time eating, drinking, and getting to know her better. A lovely woman and a great visit, so now we’re scoping out our next opportunity to meet up with her. Somewhere in the world.

Mark, Tamara, and me walking back from lunch. She headed back to Ubud just as the rainstorm was starting so, while her drive back was not great, she missed the trauma here.

As of today we’re just over half way through our four-week stay at Villa Padma. I’d worried that I would get bored in a small place like this. So far? Not a problem, especially if the weeks are broken up by periodic natural disasters.

The other big news is that with all the time we have, we’ve figured out how to fill the time between Bali and Japan in early April. Mark learned online that apparently – apparently – we can get visas for China in Bangkok. So we’re going to Bangkok and then, assuming we get visas, we’re going to spend three weeks in Yunnan Province in southwestern China. That was the goal two years ago when Mark’s knee problems (and the earthquake in Tibet) screwed up our plans. With much of it mountainous, Yunnan is supposed to have great hiking and a beautiful Tibetan culture so we’re pretty excited about our little upcoming Yunnan vacation.

This is our front drive. Such a mess!

Two mornings later, all was clean again. This is our housekeeper Julie (on the right) dressed up for a holiday at the local temple. She wasn’t working that day but stopped by to put all the proper blessings in place around the property.

Me and Tamara in Lovina

And getting ready to enjoy dinner at My Greek Taverna, our go-to place for dinner

Besides having good Greek food, My Greek Taverna can be a fun place. Here we made friendies with the neighboring table of Aussies.

In addition to our overnight trip to Munduk, we biked up into the hills a couple days earlier to a plantation/resort partly for lunch and partly just to see stuff. It was way up in the hills with this infinity pool that seemed to just hang out over the edge of the earth. Great views, but not so great food.

This, though, at our favorite Thai place in Lovina, is good food

Cute girls in Lovina

Oh, I almost forgot this picture from Munduk. This was the view as we walked out of our little cabin. Sweet!

Mark out by a rice field

And in Bali you can never have too many pictures of rice fields, right?

These are the rice fields next to our villa. I didn’t even set foot off our grounds to take the photo.

We’ve come to Lovina, a little town on the north central coast of Bali, for a four-week rest stop. We both got to feeling a few weeks ago that we’d been moving around just altogether too much of late. The plan – assumption, really – had always been that sooner or later we’d slow down our travels considerably, start spending longer periods in a smaller number of locations. And I’d always assumed that it would have happened a lot sooner than this, that after just a couple years of truly peripatetic traveling we’d tire of it. One of the things we learned, though, is just how big and interesting the world is. There were always more places to see and explore, favorite places to go back to, regions we hadn’t even touched.

While we were in Australia, though, we really got the sense that we needed some down time. And what better place than Bali? We’ve been here a few times and we always love it; a great combination of tropical weather, seriously beautiful natural environment, friendly people, and dirt cheap. What’s not to like? So we went online, found a three-bedroom villa with a private pool in a small village for $150 a night. So we’re settled in for four weeks.

Our very private pool after a rainstorm

We’ve been here for 10 days now and there is a lot to love. The setting is pretty much everything you could hope for in Bali. We’re at the end of a little lane, with nothing but rice fields the other side of the fence. You really have the sense of pretty much total isolation. Still it’s just a 10-minute walk (through the rice fields) into town.

And for $150 a night you get a lot. The house is huge, though we really don’t use it much. There’s a huge patio with a couch and chairs and dinner table where we spend time if we’re not at the pool. And if we’re at the pool, well that’s just pure heaven. On top of that we have a housekeeper who cleans up, does our laundry, cooks breakfast, and either lunch or dinner if we want her to. Did I mention laundry? After all these years of too often washing clothes in the hotel sink, we drop our dirty clothes in the laundry basket and by noon it’s hanging out in the sun drying. Amazing! And she’s not the only staff person: we have a part-time gardener/pool boy who comes daily, and another guy who comes in the evening to sleep in a little house next to the entrance gate. Security, you know.

And the pool when it’s not raining. Pretty nice, huh?

In other words, crazy inexpensive.

We’re here a bit off-season; this is actually the rainy season in fact. And while it’s cloudy part of the time pretty much every day, it only rains a little. And then it’s sunny again and then cloudy and then sprinkling maybe … and then sunny. It’s not bad.

The one down side is the paucity of good food. When we started thinking about spending a month here Mark observed that there was a well-rated Greek restaurant just 15 minutes by foot. I guessed – incorrectly, it turns out – that if there was good Greek there would be other good food too. Not so much. There’s a nice Thai place where we eat lunch pretty often, and a great place called “Secret Garden” that’s too far to walk at night. Solution? They send a driver for us and then drive us home after dinner. For free. Yeah, I love Bali.

Lunch at Jasmine Kitchen. If you don’t have wine, a big lunch runs maybe $22. With wine it skyrockets to $35 or something like that.

I’d expected that we’d find at least one decent grocery store where I could find food I would recognize so we could do some cooking on our own, but that hasn’t worked either. There is surprisingly limited fresh produce available, and even less of it that I would have any idea how to cook. In the city maybe 30 minutes east along the coast there’s a larger supermarket but even there the selection is really limited. I did find a jar of olives so we could make martinis at home and the girl at the checkout counter was puzzled and asked what they were. “Do you eat them?” she asked. So it was pretty unlikely that I’d find smoked salmon or cream cheese here.

Except for the fact that we’re going to get genuinely bored by the food choices though – and that’s not a trivial matter for us – it’s definitely a slice of heaven.

This is what we pass through walking into town for lunch

One of the questions we had before arriving was whether we’d ever want to leave. Maybe we’d love it so much we’d want to buy it. After 10 days the answers are pretty clear: yes and no, respectively. Four weeks will be plenty. And we understand why the Dutch owners have the place up for sale. It feels like paradise, but there’s only so much paradise you need in one year.

After we’re done here we’re going to stay in Bali for a while longer, five days at a resort on the beach and then eight days at another villa in the much-busier southern part of the island. But four weeks of paradise will be enough.

Heading off into town through the rice fields

Google Maps shows that as the “road” into town. Seriously.

Lest you ever forget you’re in Bali there’s always temple-kind-of-things around

Lots of this kind of stuff

And did I mention the rice fields everywhere?

Oh, and one shot of me at the edge of one section of town