Christmas Holiday- Bali

This year I opted to not go home for holidays. The cost of the plane tickets were sitting around $3000+ and that was just too much money quite frankly for me to fly home. I opted instead to do a small vacation to Bali for less than half the cost of flying home.

Caira and I went to Bali for 10 days. The weather there was very humid and rainy-- I was surprised to feel the humidity as I thought I was used to it having lived in Dubai for 2.5 yrs at this point. We had a nice vacation-- lots of sleep and we explored a number of interesting places. 1 day we did some white water rafting down a gorge with a dad and his daughter. The sides of the gorge were all carved with pictures from various Hindu stories. We stopped in 1 spot and swam under a waterfall which was amazing. We had a nice chat with the dad and his daughter and ended up going back to their hotel and meeting his wife and youngest and sitting and chatting with them for some time.

Another day we went to the top of a mountain near the island's big volcano and biked 26 km down to an elephant sanctuary, biking through tiny Balinese villages. The people came out of their homes and called and waved to us as we biked through-- that was pretty cool. We also spent time shopping in various villages for items like silver, batik, wood carvings and such.

For me the best spot on the island was Ubud. It was such a neat mix of things going on-- while we were there there was a big temple celebration for the god of arts so everyone was dressed up and going to the temple and there were parades on the street. There were lots of little shops to check out and crafts and clothes being sold for cheap. We also went and visited the monkey sanctuary but truthfully I didn't enjoy that as I found the monkeys really agressive and they scared me somewhat.

We also visited a couple of temples along the way and got to see a cultural show (the Ka-chuk). It was so cool and we just laid back and enjoyed ourselves without feeling the need to do too much. On our way back home we stopped in Singapore for a day just to check it out-- we hit the night zoo and walked around Orchard Road for a bit.