Back to Australia

My Bali trip is over. My body will be forced to adjust back to a life without continuous massages, fine Asian cuisine, and hot & humid acid rain.
Overall the trip was great. I got a chance to catch up with my cousins, buy plenty of Bali Bintang shirts and drink plenty of watered down Bintang beer. Towards the end, I became an expert at haggling – you know you’re good when a majority of the shops refuse to sell you a shirt because your price is too unreasonable, whereas and a few other stores reluctantly accept. I got 5 Bintang singlets, a necklace, a beer opener ring, a wrist band and an American Yankees hat which I conveniently lost on the airplane.
While I was in Bali I got several flash backs of living in the countries capital, Jakarta. I was reminded of the awesome and totally unusual school I attended back from 2000 – 2004, the great friends I had, and the really unhealthy lifestyle I lived due to safety and environmental reasons. I was also reminded of the wide spread poverty, too. It really hits you the second you get into the car and look out of your window. You see kids begging in the streets, people bathing in sewers, and beggars relentlessly trying to sell you anything for $2. Perhaps what I found most shocking about the poverty was how short of a time it takes to become desensitised to it. It’s impossible to avoid noticing just how widespread the poverty is when you juxtapose it with the small spikes of teeming wealth, but after a while you just care less. The unnatural and abrupt change from broken down streets and open sewers to 5 star hotels hits you hard at first, but by your 4th drink, you care significantly less about everyone else around you. I don’t think it’s because I’m a lightweight, I think it’s a mix of the lifestyle I’ve lived as kid, and natural human thinking. I also went to an elephant park where I got to see elephants transport people around and perform simple circus tricks. The sight was nothing short of spectacular, I’ve never seen an elephant up close before, and it was really amazing to see how they eat and move. Sadly, I noticed a few ‘behind the scenes cruelty’ acts on the elephants by the locals who worked there. This inspired me to look up elephant safari parks online when I got back to the villa. I found out that almost all elephant safari parks within south east Asia are hubs of secret animal cruelty. The ‘crushing’ phase, for example, is where the locals intentionally sleep deprive the baby elephants and separate them from their mothers to ‘domesticate’ them.
Despite this, the trip was still amazing. My favourite part was probably bike riding which involved riding down from the volcano Ulan Batur for a good 20km. We went pretty slow because we were forced to move at the speed of our slowest relative – Marcus – who is 12 years old. I wasn’t there to see it, but apparently he stacked it over some rugged terrain and did a Peter Griffin moment clutching his knee going “ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh, ooh, ooh, ooh…”
Oh yeah, I’m 23 now.