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Lovina, Bali

Posted by Jim St. George on January 22, 2017

Posted in: Asia, Indonesia. Leave a Comment

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

Perth (and Fremantle)

Posted by Jim St. George on January 15, 2017

Posted in: Australia, Oceania, UNESCO World Heritage Site. 1 comment

Downtown Perth from Kings Park & Botanic Garden

After six weeks we flew to Perth out in Western Australia for our 11th and final stop in Australia. “Why fly?” you might ask. “Why not take a bus?” As we’ve learned, the distances in Australia are massive. From Adelaide in South Australia to Perth in neighboring Western Australia it’s nearly 1,700 miles. In other words, driving from the capital of one Australian state to the neighboring capital would be like driving from Boston to Wichita, Kansas.

And yes, Western Australia is big: at over 1 million square miles it’s the second-biggest subnational entity in the world after Russia’s Sakha Republic (capital, Yakutsk for you Risk players…). To put that in some context, the two largest states in the U.S. (Alaska & Texas) together are just 932,000 square miles. So yeah, it’s big out here.

Now, as for Perth. Meh. It’s a big western boom town, with over 2 million people in the “Greater Perth” area. It’s first big population boom was the result of late 19th century gold rushes, and mining remains the center of the still-booming economy here. But there really wasn’t much to do out here.

We’ve seen more interesting street art in Australia than just about anywhere. This snake was just one example.

And then there was this…

We tried. We looked into renting a car and driving out into the great vastness of Western Australia. The goal, though, was the Pinnacles Desert and it was a few hours outside of Perth and, if that wasn’t bad enough, you needed to be there in the early morning to appreciate it. We weren’t interested in leaving Perth at 3:00 AM, so that was out. Then we thought maybe we’d rent bikes and enjoy some of Perth’s bike trails. But the bike rental place wasn’t where Google Maps said it was and when we walked 30 minutes to where their own website said it was, the hostel there said “Oh, they haven’t been here in months.” And by then it was 90 degrees and we weren’t that excited about biking anymore anyway.

We did, though, take a relaxing boat trip down the Swan River from Perth to Fremantle out on the coast. Fremantle is the main port in the region and we’d heard great things about it. Meh. Nothing that exciting, for us at least. It does has a UNESCO World Heritage site, an old prison that dates back to the age of Australia as Britain’s penal colony, though it operated until well into the ’90s. Worst tour ever!! We didn’t learn anything useful and the guide was way too interested in showing us how witty he was to be interesting. We were so annoyed, all we could think was “God, when can we get out of this prison?” So maybe that was the plan after all, to be so annoying we’d experience what it was like to be an actual prisoner.

Yup, that’s a prison

There was one nice spot in Perth, the Kings Garden and Botanic Garden. At just over 1,000 acres it’s nearly 20 percent bigger than Central Park though, to be fair, the population in Manhattan is somewhat denser than that of Perth. Nonetheless, the Kings Garden was a nice little interlude in an otherwise pretty boring city.

So. The boat ride down to Fremantle was the highlight, mostly because the cool breezes made for a lovely place to sit and read. Food? There were slim pickings. There was a good enough Greek restaurant, and a genuinely good Thai place, though with prices you’d expect more in Paris. And, to our surprise, a fun lunch place out in Fremantle that we went to twice, the second time just because it made more sense to take the train back for lunch than settle for what Perth had to offer.

Desperate for something interesting to do, we walked out to Perth’s modern art museum. To discover that it was closed for a few weeks, setting up the next big exhibit. Instead we want to the Art Gallery of Western Australia. It was … nice enough.

Oh, enough bitching. We’re leaving Australia. It’s been good, despite restaurant prices that were just not warranted given the quality of food. But we’re itching for exotic adventures again so now it’s off to Bali which we’ve always considered one of the nearly perfect places on earth. We’ll come back to Australia in a couple years; we still didn’t get to Tasmania or Uluru in the center of Australia. For now, though, we’ve had enough of everything being in a sort of English. Time for adventure!

I enjoyed getting to know some of the statues out in Fremantle

Including this little guy

The cells in the Fremantle prison were pretty grim. The last resident here, though, was given permission to brighten his up. Pretty nice!

Some local color, at the entrance to a classy Thai restaurant in Perth

And finally, the beach at Fremantle. What’s interesting here is that after six weeks and 11 stops this was the first time anywhere that we saw beach chairs and umbrellas in Australia. Alas, the beach was kind of sucky, though, so we didn’t use them.

Adelaide

Posted by Jim St. George on January 12, 2017

Posted in: Australia, Oceania. Leave a Comment

Me & Mark with Pip, Raffy, and Anna

Adelaide, the capital of South Australia (the driest state on the driest inhabited continent) completed the Mark & Jim Friends Tour with a bang.

There are a lot of reasons to come to Adelaide. An Australian city that doesn’t trace its roots back to convicts, it has a long history of progressivism: South Australia was one of the first places in the world to give women the right to vote, and it was the first Australian state to outlaw racial and gender discrimination, to legalize abortion, and to decriminalize gay sex. Still, it’s known as the “City of Churches” and has some great 19th century architecture (the 19th century is what passes for “old” in Australia). As we learned, it has at least one remarkable tapas restaurant, making you feel as though you were in Spain for the night, and a nice Argentine restaurant too, with great live rock & roll as the night grew late. And, as if all that weren’t enough, some of the best wineries anywhere in the world.

Adelaide’s botanical garden made for a beautiful last-morning stroll before we headed further west

Lots to like.

But we came here to see Pip. We first met her back when our world consisted of our Regent St. loft, our Davis Square office, and Gargoyle’s restaurant, strategically placed between the two. After we befriended her there she eventually came to work for us, left, came back, and left again, this time to return to her native South Australia. With all this time in Australia, no way we’d miss a chance to visit with Pip.

Pip took us for a drive, and as you can see that didn’t work out so well.
(OK, that wasn’t really our car, just a Mad Max-like burned out hulk we found when we stopped at a viewpoint overlooking the vast areas south of Adelaide.)

And, to our delight, some of her family, too. We took a train down the coast to Port Willunga where Pip, her mom, and her nephew Raffy met us for a day tour of the area. Beaches, wineries, hilltop vistas – it’s a great area. But mostly just a chance to visit with Pip and her peeps. Her mom Anna was a firecracker; get her on the subject of religion or Donald Trump or immigration and you learn quickly this is a woman I can relate to. Raffy was almost enough to make me rethink my belief that children are more trouble than they’re worth; he even laughed at some of my jokes. And there’s nothing like reconnecting and catching up with a wonderful friend like Pip, now working on a Masters Degree in Education.

Pip’s mom Anna and nephew Raffy

There’s one piece of Adelaide’s history that really struck me. The city is named for Adelaide, queen consort of Britain’s King William IV. He was the third son of crazy George III, he of American revolutionary fame. George’s eldest son, also George, served as regent while the elder George was incapacitated and later succeeded him in 1820. George IV, though, had no legitimate sons and only one daughter, who had died in childbirth in 1817. Thus George III found himself (to the extent he was aware of much at that point) with nine children and no legitimate grandchild. The race was on to see who could spawn a king for the empire.

Did I mention that it was hot in Adelaide? Here’s my AppleWatch at 5:30 PM and it’s still 102 degrees. And note that wile it’s 5:35 PM in Adelaide, it’s 2:05 AM in Boston. South Australia is one of those weird places in the world that is a half hour earlier and later than its neighbors. Made it almost impossible for me to figure out what time it was in the rest of the world.

Number One son, George IV, had a miserable relationship with his wife, so there were no more kids coming there. Number Two son, Frederick, had a truly miserable relationship with his wife and they had no children. Number Three son, William, who would succeed George IV, was obviously fertile; he had a long-term mistress with whom he fathered 10 children. But that relationship was a bit on the rocks, and the kingdom needed an heir, so William went searching for a young bride. He found one in Adelaide.

As others in similar circumstances have found, Adelaide had but one duty: to have children. And she got pregnant plenty of times. A premature birth and quick death of the child in early 1819. Another pregnancy and miscarriage later in 1819. A daughter born in 1820, who then died just three months later. Stillborn twins in 1822. Truly a tragic story; ultimately she had no surviving children though she became a highly sympathetic figure in Britain at the time. With William & Adelaide ultimately unable to provide the kingdom with an heir, it fell to Number Four son, Edward, who died before William but had successfully sired one legitimate child, a daughter they named Victoria. And thus history was made.

So that’s Adelaide’s story. The modern city isn’t quite so sad. It was HOT, though, with daytime temperatures up over 100 degrees. Two of our days we spent with Pip & her family, but one day I went down to the local beach where sitting on the sand in the sun was insanely hot. For a while I moved up into the shade of some trees where I saw people out on their daily runs. Seemed a little insane to me.

And thus ends our time in Adelaide. We have one more stop in Australia, Perth way out west, before we move on to Bali. If this heat continues we’ll be plenty ready to leave.

Approaching the beach in Glenelg, a quick tram-ride from Adelaide. Beautiful skies, but it was baking. There is a great Indian restaurant on the main street near the beach, though, if you’re ever hanging out in Glenelg.