Bali – Benoa day 1, and a curveball

Our second stop on Bali was in the tourist hotbed of Benoa. This won’t be a standard writeup of our day, as our plans hit a snag here. I’ve always thought that flexibility is the most important quality for a good traveler. So much of life is out of our control, and so much of what happens to us is pure chance. We can choose how we react to what happens, but we cannot choose what does happen.

To set the stage for this we have to go back to early November of last year, nearly six months prior. I was working through our visas and got to Australia. I submitted them all, and Liz, Thomas, and Devin all got theirs right away. I did not. I followed up with Australian immigration but all I ever got was notices that some visas “take time.” Googling around revealed that some can take many months or even years. I assumed that the longer wait times were for more complex visas dealing with working, studying, retirement, or whatever, not a simple tourist visa for a very limited time. But here we were in late April and I still had not had my Australian visa approved. With the ship’s help we contacted Australian officials and made it clear that this delay meant splitting up my family. But their response was that this was not sufficient grounds to escalate the processing.

The upshot of this was that I could not stay on the ship as it went to Australia. I could not even stay on past Benoa, as there would be no Indonesian immigration to handle disembarkation in the final two ports. This was, needless to say, a shock. I had assumed that the worst-case scenario would be that I’d stay on the ship while we went through Australia. But no, I was being banished. This hit hard. The longest I’ve ever been apart from Thomas is three nights when he went to science camp on Catalina Island. The longest I’ve been apart from Devin is one night for sleepovers. To be away from them for nearly a month was difficult to imagine. Not to mention missing out on all of the Australian ports.

But I can’t control what Australian immigration does. I can only control how I react to it. And of course look for help! Elizabeth has been beyond amazing, stepping up to be a single mom for a while. Other passengers have offered to help in any way they can, and I fully believe that those are not empty promises. There are some very good people on this cruise and I know they will sacrifice their own time and change their priorities to help my family.

For myself I’m on my own in Bali for a while. There are far worse places to be stranded. I booked a simple hotel for nine nights – a somewhat arbitrary time as I’m still holding out hope that the visa gets sorted and I can rejoin the ship in Australia. If that does not happen I’ll eventually fly to New Zealand and meet them there.

This is all very sad as I love my family dearly and dislike being apart from them. It’s not tragic, though. Nobody has died, and we will get through this one way or another.Read more