Bali

We left Melbourne directly from work in 38 degrees to head to the airport. Normally a tropical holiday includes an increase in temperature compared to home but in this case we dropped about 13 degrees between starting point and destination.

The 6 hour flight took us across the red centre of Australia. It's immense size is really misleading until you fly across for hours seeing the ground continue in its barren state forever. We remarked that hopefully we soon will attempt to drive this continent and really experience its amazing landscape. We saw the enormous Lake Eyre which is completely dry at this time of year and stretches out for miles. There was also the Marree Man( look it up for its history). Landed in Denpasar at 8.30 pm in rain but warm and a 25 min ride into our hotel where we collapsed into bed. Bali is 3 hours later than Melbourne so was a big day. The room aircon is efficient. In fact it was 16 degrees and much too cold for us so that was turned off immediately. I'm yet to work out how to warm it to a suitable temperature.

After a really good sleep we both woke early to Julie's special day. Breakfast after a walk to familiarise ourselves with the resort. Melia Bali has over 400 rooms and set in 4 ha of spectacular gardens. There are probably twice as many staff on duty as guests at any one time. We have so many greetings everywhere. The staff are fully engaged and attentive to their guests. Breakfast brought a lovely surprise when the waitresses brought out a birthday cake for Julie and sang in English and their native tongue. Really sweet.

We then wandered down the beach and started searching for a shopping area we had been told about. We finally stumbled on it but realised later that we had walked a long way to find shops that were actually within 400 metres of our resort. We treated ourselves to a Balinese massage so an hour of strong hands found our tender bits.Read more