Today is our last day in Bali. I’m writing this from Bali’s soon-to-be-replaced airport terminal (which will be a huge improvement, I’m sure). We have a late flight tonight, thereby giving us a mostly full day in Bali to use.
Sightseeing? No. Too long of a drive from Nusa Dua.
Swimming at the pool or beach? Nope. The doctor banned Libby and Emerson from water-related activities for a couple of weeks.
We spent the day doing basically nothing. And, it was surprisingly blissful. Emerson played happily with her dinosaurs in our hotel room, and Libby and I got caught up on work. Plus, I could leisurely get us repacked and organized for our return to a cooler climate (as Sydney should be in the upper 40s to upper 60s this week). That was a real bonus as I’ve been previously prepping us during the darkness of night for our early morning flights.
We checked out of the hotel around 2pm today. The bill was $800 for our pool-side room, airport transfers, a number of meals, full day private tour, and the aforementioned doctor’s bill. And this is the peak tourist season! Bali is a great value…
After checkout, we returned to the Bali Collection and wasted some time. Libby had a “fish foot spa” that she really enjoyed. Basically, you stick your feet in a fish tank, and the fish give you a pedicure. We’ve seen it malls all over the world… Stockholm, Dubai, etc. She says she’d do it again.
We then returned to the beach and explored the temples and statues on the point:
After this, we returned to our hotel, had dinner, said goodbye to Adi (the friendly waiter), collected our bags, changed into our travel clothes, and left for the airport. We had the same driver as yesterday. Check-in was painless. We had to pay 450,000IRP as a departure tax (about $15/pp USD) to leave the country. This was on top of our $25/pp entry visas. This is still better than some countries like Argentina and China.
If all goes well, my next update will be from Australia. It’s the final country of this trip (#84 overall) and completes our visits to all seven continentson Earth. Very cool!
The distance we’ve traveled so far seems to play with put sense of time. It seems like we left Tampa ages ago. London too seems in the distant past ( though it’s really been only a little more than a week since we landed in Asia). It will be fascinating to see what effect another long, overnight flight has on our perception of time/space.