It has been some time since I last wrote anything on this site and I apologise.  This has in large part been due to not quite knowing where to start.  I was recently lucky enough to visit Bali and I thought I would get a number of amazing stories to share and a number of great images that I would be able to put on the website and Facebook and I have to admit that when I got there I was very disappointed.

A scooter with gas bottles for delivery

As I was visiting Bali to attend the wedding of a couple that are very dear to me, and for whom Bali is very dear, this disappointment left me in a quandary about what to say and what to write.  I want always to be fair to the places I visit and represent here, but also need to be true to myself with what I post and so I had to work through this one in my own time.  I have finally done this and realised that my opinions of any place are exactly that – my opinion. They are not fact and everyone who visits a place will have their own experience and all I can include here is my own perception of a place based on the experience I have had and, as such, here is my first Bali post.

I initially stayed in Kuta (just off Poppies 2) and then in the more salubrious environs of the Legian Beach Hotel, before a trip to Ubud and a return to Kuta.  My over arching feelings really comes down to two things.

Firstly, we went in late July/early August and everywhere was incredibly busy.  The tranquility I had expected – particualrly from Ubud – was not my experience.

Sundowners at Kuta Beach

The second is that the place seems to have lost most of its soul somewhere between a Bintang vest and a penis shaped bottle opener.  In these highly commercial areas, it has without a doubt sold out its unique Balinese culture for trinkets meant to make adolescent backpackers titter and childish bumper stickers based on name calling and toilet humour.

As such I had to search much harder than I want to when on holiday in order to get away from the massage and tattoo parlours that seem to adorn every street corner to find the kindness, good nature and beauty that is the Bali of one’s imagining.