So it's the shortest day of the year; the start of winter.
Aptly, our clear, warm days have abruptly turned into BloodyHellit'sFreezing cold and pouring rain.
Yes, oh scoffing northerners, we do have winter here. Today only got up to 18 degrees Celsius! That's only 64F!!
Thankfully we have a roaring fire to snuggle up in front of.
The journey was long and arduous – not so bad, as far as international travel goes, but still about 14 hours all up, with two flights and a 3 1/2 hour stopover in Darwin, all overnight.
So it was a rough night. Littletree slept through the meal, and then wouldn’t eat it later when she was hungry because it was cold, and then wanted to save it for later, but it was seized by customs in Darwin (because a vegetarian pasta airline meal poses a threat to national security). So she was hungry and she whinged a lot. But she still managed to sleep for most of both the flights and the stopover.
In Bali, they wouldn’t let me take my mandolin as a carry-on and I was terrified that it would be damaged if I checked it in, but it did arrive safely, as did all our luggage, and us.
Lady Demelza and Uncle CJ were waiting to pick us up at the airport (so lovely to be met at the airport!) and whisk us home to our beds.
We got home totally exhausted, but happy to see that in our absence, Lady Demelza had spent a lot of time decorating our house and preparing it for winter.
Winter-weight curtains up in the living room
pictures up on all the walls
Littletree’s crafting and studying nook all organised and prettified
Books sorted into the bookshelf
And the whole place spic and span and scrubbed spotless.
So glad to be home again, and sleeping in our own beds. Though we do miss our “second home” on Gili Air.
I finally got all the photos uploaded, you can see the whole album HERE
So after our last night in Gili Air, which we enjoyed under a full moon
And a fascinating breakfast alongside the cutest tiny little ants ever which were kind enough to clean up the drips of honey Littletree spilled from her pancake
And Littletree had said her billionth goodbye to the Indonesian kids in the family who ran our villas
We got on the boat to Bali…
It was not the best boat ride ever; of course, they were overbooked and we couldn’t get seats – I managed to make enough hullabaloo for the guy to let us sit up on the roof so we could at least sit down, and lo! There were seats up on the roof anyway; no idea why they just wanted to keep the rooftop vacant.
We landed on Bali to find it pouring with rain and many of the streets flooding
(So glad we were in a minibus and not on a moped!)
And happy to arrive to our hotel to relax after the journey. The next morning, it cleared up a bit and we spent the day wandering around, ingressing and sightseeing a little, marvelling at what counts as a petrol station on Bali
– I even found a bar that was made just for me
And having hacked all the portals we could, and gotten more massages than should be humanly possible, we set out for the evening to find the awesome night market we ate at last year, only last year, we’d gone there with some people who knew the way, and I only vaguely knew the rough area we needed to go to. I tried googling, but ended up somewhere very, very not where we thought we were going.
A surprise adventure!
By sheer chance we found ourselves wandering after dark around a random neighbourhood; thanks to googlemaps on my phone I vaguely knew where we were, but no idea how to get to where we wanted to go. At the point that Littletree was fed up with walking and just wanted to eat, we walked into the first place we came to, but Littletree got a bad vibe from it and wouldn’t even walk though the door.
Next door to that place we tried again, and it turned out to be a duck restaurant and we got the most delectable dinner ever! Duck fried rice, duck fried noodles and a spicy green curry duck. Oh, it was divine!
And finally, after even more massages; time to get on the plane back to Australia…
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