We Finally Get Our Just Deserts (No, that's not a spelling mistake. Read and understand.)

Morocco kicked all sorts of butt. If you recall, my one complaint with Bali was that we had already seen pretty much all that the island had to offer on some previous part of the trip. We needed something different. Well, we got it. Morocco was a completely new experience for all of us. The only thing even remotely close for me, in a lifetime worth of experience, was Israel, which I visited almost exactly thirty years ago. As did Asia, Morocco provided us with our fill of Mother Nature and with plenty of religious grandiosity. But there was no overlap in the details… at all.

The reasons for going to Morocco were entirely about the desert and the camels. And that part of the adventure did not disappoint in the least. (Wait a second. If something doesn’t disappoint, shouldn’t that mean it “appoints”? What is up with that? Oh. I’m sorry for ruining the train of thought. Let me begin again.) Neither the desert nor the camels disappointed us in the least. In fact, the desert rocked, literally and figuratively, though in the literal sense the rocks were more of a conglomeration of zillions of eensy-weensy jobbers that were so fine, they were almost soft to the touch. But I am getting ahead of myself. My point was that we were drawn to Morocco by the desert, but we ended up enjoying much more than that. So as always, I shall have to begin, again, at the beginning.

Side joke: “How do you get a cat in the refrigerator?” Answer to come.

The flight from Bali to Singapore was quick. The layover at Singapore airport was too short and altogether sublime. We love that place! The flight to London was long but as pleasant as a flight in cattle-class can be. I watched four movies. Enough said. London was all about recovering from timezone-warp. We had two nights and one day and did little besides eat and sleep. A lovely Indian food restaurant did three of us some good, while Carol just stayed in the hotel and slept through dinner. We did make a quick visit to the Natural History Museum as it was quite near our hotel. I remember an over abundance of dinosaur bones and a crazy astronomy display, nothing more. It is all one big jet-lagged blur.

Back on another plane, and we were in Morocco before you could say "tally-ho," or whatever those crazy Brits say when you leave. The flight was short and sweet. It included some lovely views of the Iberian peninsula. And then, just like that, we were in a new continent yet again, and ready for new experiences.

Answer to joke: “Open the door, put the cat in, close the door. Simple!” Not funny? My children disagree, based on their reaction when they heard this whilst sitting under the stars in the middle of the desert. There is more of this to come. I apologize in advance.

We caught a taxi that was supposed to take us to our hotel, but that instead dropped us off on some unmarked dirt road surrounded by stone walls.  Luckily there was a man waiting for us there who took us down one dark alley (though the sun was still high in the sky) after another.  Each alley was progressively narrower than the last, with lower and lower archways between the walls.  If we didn’t know any better, and really, we didn’t, we would have expected a mugging at that point.  We really shouldn’t ever have seen our luggage again.  It was crazy.  Even the alleys have alleys.  The hotel door, just like dozens of others that we’d passed, was an unmarked full metal rectangle (albeit intricately detailed) five feet high and three feet wide in the middle of a giant stone wall that looked no different than the previous two hundred meters of wall after five or six unmarked turns.  Five-o-clock news, here we come.  Is that guy salivating on us?

Broad daylight, I swear.  These alleyways are scary.

I guess we didn't get a picture of the first hotel door.  This was the door to the hotel on the fifth night.  Much larger,  but same idea.  No markings anywhere on the endless wall other than that number.

But when we stepped through the hotel door, we stepped into a wide-open oasis of charm and culture. We were bombarded with fantastic sights and wonderful smells all around us. The fountains and pools and ceramic sculptures and murals and tapestries and wall paintings and gorgeous tile work were well, 100% contrast from the walls outside.  And that was just the courtyard.  The rooms were equally charming.

Side joke #2: OK. But how do you get a camel into the refrigerator in four steps?

We loved all of the rooms that we stayed in while in Morocco (there were four if you are keeping count), even the one that had genuine Saharan sand as the floor.  The character of each was over-the-top authentically Moroccan.  So Cool!  So what makes Morocco, well, Moroccan?  To start, it is a mix of French culture, Arabic culture, and the local Berber culture that thrived there before the conquering influences made their mark.  English was a distant fourth on the language usage scale, but we had no trouble finding people who spoke it fluently.  The official language is Arabic, and everything is written in that beautiful script.  I’m not even certain Berber has a written language.  We never encountered it. 

OK, Carol tells me there most certainly is one, and it is character based and reads from left to right, rather than the right to left of Arabic.  But I swear it is never used.  But most Moroccans speak in Berber to each other, or so I’m told.  Not that I can hear a difference between that and Arabic.  Every local who sees the white folk coming immediately bursts into French, and only defers to English when given that eyes-glazed-over look.  But they all seem to speak English as well.  At least they speak enough to be able to sell you stuff you don’t need, and don’t want, but may buy anyway, just to get them to stop trying so hard to sell it to you.  When I say all of them, I mean all of the men.  We almost never spoke to, or were spoken to by, a woman.  They all wear the ubiquitous Islamic head coverings and do not make eye contact, much less interact, with foreigners.  Rather than editorializing on that situation, I shall take it for what it is, and comment no further.

Just as in Asia, religion was everywhere, but not in the form of statues and idols and over-done temples.  There were two or three mosques on every block, but they were so understated that the kids didn’t even realize the mosques were anything other than houses.  The women’s clothing was an obvious nod to Islamic tradition, but even the men were garbed in such a way as to promote tradition over comfort.  The call to prayer would come blasting in over the loudspeakers in whatever town you found yourself six times a day (once two hours before dawn!, and once each at dawn and midday, once in the afternoon when shadows are as long as the object casting said shadow, once at sunset, and once when the last light of day has disappeared). “God is Great.  There is no god but God. Mohammed is the Prophet of God.  Come to prayer.  Come to salvation.  God is Great.  There is no god but God.”  Over and over and over again.  And you thought I spoke not a word of Arabic.

Answer to joke #2:  Open door.  Remove cat.  Shove in camel.  Close door.  Problems?

Side joke #3:  What do I call my delectable cheddar? 

One shot of the bazaar from a cafe terrace.  That's one of those unassuming mosques dead center, by the way.

Endless wares to ogle.

Thousands of "stalls" just like this one.

Chloe is trying out her bedouin look in a scarf shop.

This guy didn't want us to pass through this way.  He was kind of an ass about it.

In the main square of the old walled part of the city of Marrakech, and branching out in all directions from there, was a bazaar just like you see in the movies.  Endless stalls filled with colorful wares and even more colorful salesman made for an experience I shall never forget.  Josh learned how to haggle.  Carol got swindled into buying a couple of scarves she wasn’t even looking to buy.  We all got schooled in the art of only looking at things in your peripheral vision so as not to attract the salesman.  On our first day we sat on a veranda on the second floor of a café so that we could watch the hustle and bustle from on high.  After that we got braver and joined in with the fun.  We never saw a snake-charmer as was promised, but we did see a number of performers and countless toothless beggars and endless men wearing the garb of the sand people in Star Wars.  The pointy hoods made us smile every time.  My favorite part was the staggeringly large group of guys who sell nuts.  We’ve got a picture to show you how that worked.

Nice hoody.  Definitely a crowd favorite.

The nut guys have a little hole through which they crawl to be in among the fruits and nuts.  We stocked up on both.

Answer to joke number 3:  Nach-yo Cheese!

Side joke number 4:  How do you make a tissue dance?

Moroccans eat the same two meals over and over again.  One is couscous with vegetables and either chicken or lamb.  The other is a stew called tagine that is potato based but usually contained chicken or beef or lamb as well.  Both are excellent.  I had a tagine cooked at a stall no bigger than a kid’s lemonade stand once, and it was top-rate cuisine.  Though upon finishing I noticed that the method of cleaning the dishes before re-use was to rub with a napkin.  Ouch.  All tagine is made in little ceramic pots with lids that look like the pointy hats all the wanderers in the market wear.  Those cooking pots were also sold in seemingly every other stall in the bazaar.  We would have bought one as a souvenir if we could have handled the extra weight in our luggage.  But alas, souvenirs are not to be had.

This is the lunch stall to which I referred.  Yummy!

The bazaar in Marrakech was pretty much our entire Morocco experience for the first day and the last day of the five-day trip.  The middle three days, however, were all about the Sahara desert adventure.  I will leave the telling of the camel part of the journey up to Chloe.  But it wasn’t all about the destination.  The journey in and of itself was worth an account.

Answer to joke #4:  Put a little boogie in it.

Side joke #5:  A lion was having a jungle party and a truce was called so that no animals would need to fear being eaten for one night.  All of the animals of the jungle and the forests and the desert and the savannah were invited.  Almost every animal came.  It was a total rager.  But which animal never showed up?

For starters, the SUV we made the trip in was actually in motion for a grand total of about 27 hours over three days.  If you want an epic adventure, you’ve got to be willing to put in the effort.  It wasn’t particularly grueling, however.  We had three other people on the tour with us: Mohammed, our guide/driver, and two Swedish ladies in their mid-twenties named Johanna and Emilie, who were extremely friendly.  All three were wonderful traveling companions.  We also made one interesting stop after another, which really helped to break up the monotony.  And the scenery was incredible.  We had sweeping mountain vistas and enormous canyons and endless deserts with bright blue skies and orange sands.  There were hundreds of villages where the buildings, which were made of the surrounding clay, blended into the hillsides so well that you’d have to be looking for them specifically if you wanted to even notice they were there.

A typical town in the hills.

The Kasbah from a distance. 

A closer look.

A list of the movies that featured this particular kasbah.

Do you think it was built to code?

We were taken to an extremely famous Kasbah that was built in the 11^th century and that has been used in countless Hollywood movies.  We got to climb around on the roofs and pretend we belonged in the land of Lawrence of Arabia.  We were taken to a canyon so magnificent that that other one near Vegas seems like more of a ditch now.  We went through mountain passes with endless switchbacks that seemed at time like the Colorado Rockies at others like the Swiss Alps. 

Impressive mountain views.

Mohammed even brought us into his own home and fed us a Tagine that was out of this world good and cooked by his wife.  We, of course, never got to meet her.  But the personal touch was not unappreciated, especially in a culture that is so private.  We did get to meet his adorable daughter, though.  I guess three-year-olds are still allowed to be sociable.  Also, in his hometown, we went to a warehouse where they make everything you can think of out of fossils mined from the nearby rocks.  We got a lesson in Pre-cambrian archaeology during the tour.  Again, we would have stocked up on souvenirs if we could have carried them with us. 

Mohammed and I appreciating the blue skies.

The canyon.

Lunch at Mohammed's house.  That is the dynamic duo, Johanna and Emilie, our new BFFs.

Josh is chiseling rock away from fossil.

We finally arrived at our destination, a town called Merzouga, which was only about 20 km from the Algerian border.  We were to ride into the heart of the desert on camels and stay overnight in a traditional Bedouin tent city.  But as I hinted at earlier, Chloe is in charge of that part of the story.  So without further ado…

Chloe:  Riding a camel through the Sahara Desert is the most amazing experience I have ever had.  After a long drive, we arrived at the edge of the desert.  When we got out of the car, we all saw the majestic camels sitting peacefully in a row. We all looked at them longingly waiting to mount, wondering which camel would be ours.  Mine was particularly fuzzy which I liked. When I got on my camel, I felt just how much you get jostled around when the camel stands up.  It doesn’t rise all at once, but first stands with its back legs lurching you forwards and then its front legs, evening you out. It almost feels like riding on a living and breathing rollercoaster. Just to add to that fact, once they started walking it was a bit jolty. I rode for a while, gripping on tightly to the bar in front of me worried that I might fall off. But eventually, I got into rhythm with the camel, and didn’t need to hold on, even when we were going down hill. After a while we decided to name our camels. My brother named his Bobby, for no particular reason. My dad named his Kasbah because of the amazing Kasbah we had seen the day before. The two Swedish women that we were travelling with named their camels Scarface and Black Beauty. One had lots of scars and the other was completely black. My mom named hers Turban because he was wearing a turban earlier, and I named mine Fuzzel because he was a very fuzzy camel.

I loved watching the beautiful sand dunes all around us with the amazing color contrast. The orange dunes paired with the bright blue sky seemed too perfect to be real.  About an hour and a half later we arrived at the campsite, dismounted our camels and explored the campsite. It was made up of many different rooms.  One for cooking, one for eating, three for sleeping, and one large open area in the middle for sitting. Soon after we arrived it was time to go and watch the sunset. We started walking up the sand dunes, and discovered it was much more difficult than it appeared when the camels did it. When we finally arrived at the top, and were waiting for the sunset, Josh decided to roll back down the hill completely covering himself in sand. I almost followed him until I thought about the hike back up, and that the campsite had no showers to de-sand myself. So instead I decided I would slide down on my butt after the sunset. That way I wouldn’t get as sandy, and I wouldn’t have to walk back up. When the sun set the sky turned a beautiful pinkish purple around the edges, while the rest of the sky was still blue.

After the sunset, we were served a lovely meal of couscous, chicken, veggies and potato.  Once we finished dinner, we all headed to the middle of the camp to play drums, tell jokes, and look at the stars.  First, we all played the drums, which kind of failed except for the guides, who had played many times before. It was still fun trying though. Next we looked at the stars, which were very bright, due to the fact that there were no lights on the ground to block them out. We found three different constellations, and made up two of our own (the camel, and the puny dipper). Then we told jokes many of which were from the guides and were pretty funny. After we had finished, we all went off to bed, to get ready for the day ahead. When we woke up the next morning at 5am, you could still see the stars. As we were riding the camels back, to the car, we watched the sky change from a dark blue to a purple and then a light blue. When we had walked about half way, we stopped to watch the sunrise. Soon enough we were leaving the desert, and saying goodbye to our camels. I still miss Fuzzel.

Haven't seen one of these in Marin.

Josh, Johanna, Emilie, Carol, Chloe and yours truly, in that order.

It was cooler when I did it.

No words... 

Beach without the ocean.

Our tent in the desert.  You can see the sand at the left wall.

Fuzzel. 

Just after sunrise, so the shadows were pretty sweet.  

Steve:  So there you have it.  Chloe wasn’t exaggerating when she said it was the best experience of her life.  She really feels that way.  It was pretty darn awesome, I have to admit.  The ride back was long but epic.  When we finally had to say goodbye to our traveling companions, it was nearly a teary-eyed one.  We had shared so much in so little time that we all felt like old friends.  But all good things must come to an end.  And so do mediocre things, like, say, this blog post…

Answer to joke #5: Duh!  The camel.  He was stuck in the fridge.

These were the jokes told that magical night in the desert. We told jokes three and four.  We heard both of them for the first time at “Mike Wyzowski’s Monster’s Inc. School of Humor” attraction at Disneyworld.  The other three jokes were provided by our Bedouin hosts.  The kids were in stitches.  Laughter is always better in the good ‘ole outdoors.

Catch you later!  Next edition in Europe!

Bali High

If you’ve never seen the classic musical, South Pacific, then you have no idea what the title to this post means.  Rather than making it easy for you, I’ll direct you to find the video in your local library and to watch it in its entirety.  I had to play in the pit band for this particular gem not once but twice, so I think it is only fair that I force you to suffer through it if you want to attain complete enlightenment. “Some enchanted evening…”  

Bali was wondrous. It had everything we could want. It is a one-stop tourist's dream. If you need a little of everything on your vacation and you have only a week or two, Bali is your place. But sadly, and this is entirely my fault, not Bali's, it was just okay for me.  What I mean is, if you hadn’t noticed, we have been out and about for a bit more than a week or two at this point. Eastern culture was beginning to get old for me. Now I’m not saying you should erase Bali as a destination from your bucket list.  By all means, go! You will have great fun!  The island is littered with impressive temples. It is just that the temples in Cambodia and Thailand are an entire level up on the impress-o-meter.  In addition, Bali does indeed have excellent scuba diving and snorkeling.  But our dive was not as good as ones I've been on in Hawaii or Mexico or the Caribbean.  The food was quite good, but no match for Thailand.  Bali has gorgeous mountains, but if you want that, I can think of dozens of easier locations to get to where the mountain scenery is equally majestic.  Bali’s people are incredibly friendly, but not quite so friendly as the Kiwi’s of New Zealand or the Ticos of Costa Rica or the Cambodians or even the French. Well, OK, maybe not the French. Just a little bad tasting humor there.

I know what you're thinking, and you've hit the nail on the head.  I’m a little jaded.  I’ve had too much of a good thing. Why shouldn’t you go to Bali and get nearly the best of all of these reasons to vacation in a one-stop shopping spree on one small Indonesian island?  After all, not everyone can spend a year traveling the globe seeking out the best of everything. But here is where my blog comes in handy.  Now you don’t have to seek out the best.  We’ve done the hard work for you!  Now you can just go directly to the best, without having to look for it!  You’re welcome.

In point of fact, we (yes, I am including myself) had a great time in Bali and are glad we saw it.  But for me, there was really very little that was new after six weeks of traveling in Japan and southeast Asia. We will go back to Hawaii again and again for the great weather and the beaches and the tropical island feel.  And those things are comparable in Bali.  It is just that Bali is so freaking far away, and there was really nothing to see there that we hadn’t seen already, only bigger, and better.  Again, I’m not sad we went.  How else would we have known?  But there you have it.  And I still do have details of our time to record.  So here it goes, and enough with the editorializing.  Just the facts:

We arrived at the airport and were picked up by a personal driver who drove us immediately to Ubud, the artistic center of the island, about an hour inland.  He dropped us off at our hotel and offered to give us a tour on another day; a proposal to which we agreed, with a smile.  Our hotel room was absolutely amazing.  It was huge when judging against most of the other places we’ve stayed.  It had a central living area and two large separate bedrooms each with its own full bathroom. The walls were twelve feet high, but not connected to the ceiling which was a sloping bamboo/thatch affair that towered a good twenty feet above us in the center, and left us with an open air feeling to the place.  There were exquisite hand carvings on the furniture and all of the dark wooden walls.   We loved the place, which was good, because our last day there was a national holiday and an annual day of rest for the locals.  This meant not only that we would not find anything open, but actually that we were by law restricted to our hotel room for the day.  No going out on the street was permitted.  Everyone was required to stay at home for the day.  So it was really fortunate that we loved our room.

Breakfast in the dining/living room in our fancy-schmancy suite.  Yes, that is an open air non-wall.  The kids' bedroom is through the doorway at the top of the picture.

Here's a different view, highlighting the roof.  You can just see the doorway to our bedroom at the bottom left.

This is that doorway when shut. That is all carved into the wood, and that kind of workmanship was everywhere in the hotel.

The day before the day of rest was a day of celebration.  It was a time to bury all of one’s demons and banish them to the underworld so one could start a new year fresh from fear and guilt.   The Balinese take this literally. Every Balinese village participated in building intricate yet enormous statues of plaster that were called Oga-Oga (which basically means monster or demon).  The locals paraded them around the streets at night, telling stories with song and dance.  We attempted to watch some of the parade but were so thwarted by the massive crowds that we gave up after about an hour and half having only seen two Oga-oga.  We had seen dozens of them in the days leading up to the big night, so we weren’t devastated, just a wee-bit disappointed.  In theory, the locals were supposed to burn their demons at midnight to banish them forever.  We did, however, see quite a few of these magnificent monstrosities still standing the next day.  It seems many people can’t bear to part with their creations after putting in so much hard work to build them.  

A couple of Oga-oga, each about 15 feet tall.

Here's another beauty.

And hard work seems to be a recurring theme in Bali.  We asked a few of the locals if they had ever been off the island, much less out of Indonesia altogether, and the answer was always “no”.  But the explanation was what was interesting about their answer.  Eventually many of them cited lack of money as a big reason for never travelling.  But that was never the first reason cited.  They always said that they, the Balinese, were too busy to go anywhere.  And I truly believe that.  They are constantly preparing offerings (often just artsy arrangements of flowers and plants and sometimes food) for their Hindu gods and they are putting in a tremendous amount of effort making these offerings.  They also seem to spend more time in prayer than seems possible while still going about your daily life.  But this is just “what you do” if you are Balinese.  They seem to reap enjoyment from it, so who am I to question it?  I simply wanted to explain what keeps them so busy day in and day out, so that they have no time for the frivolity of something like travel.

This stone carving in a temple wall had about a dozen "offerings" scattered about beneath it.

I think the best part of all of the offerings is the sheer number of beautiful statues that riddle the island.  There are easily more Buddha statues on the island then there are people.  They range from thimble-size to two-story building size.  But on top of that, there are also millions of carved or molded or otherwise created renditions of hundreds or maybe even thousands of different Hindu gods.  You cannot stand anywhere on the island and look about you, without spotting at least one statue somewhere, whether it be carved in stone, or wood, or made of gold or bronze or silver or pewter.  The artistry is brilliant.  But again, nothing we hadn’t seen, although in much less abundance, in Thailand or Cambodia or Malaysia or even Japan.  I imagine India to be much the same in this regard, as this is from where the Hindu gods originated. Morocco will be a marked change since the Muslim tradition requires that no images or likenesses ever be created. But enough about idols and religion.  Where’s the action?  Where’s the drama in this post?

We went river rafting one day in Ubud.  The rapids were small, but incessant, and so we had a lot of fun.  The highlights were supposed to be the waterfalls that emptied into the river on either side as more often then not we were between high cliff walls as we floated, and they were definitely beautiful, but we are really jaded when it comes to waterfalls at this point.  I imagine I’ll never go to Niagara, as it would be too much of a disappointment for me.  Maybe after a few years, I’ll have lost my tolerance for the things and will be a cheap travelling date once again. 

Josh got to kayak for half of the river while the rest of us had to stay in our raft.  That's him in the little boat.

For me the actual highlight of the rafting trip, other than winning the splashing war against the nearby boats, was the plethora of intricate carvings in the cliffwalls themselves.  No description would suffice.  But the carvings went on for at least a kilometer and went up many meters from the water level.  They were pretty cool.  I’ll let the pictures do the talking here.

Carvings like this went on forever on the cliff walls at river's edge.

Here's more.

And more.

What the heck.  One more with the goose.

We also went to the famous monkey forest in Ubud.  It was a very short walk from our hotel.  Hundreds of monkeys lived there and ate fruit fed to them by the tourists who could buy the fruit from vendors along the way.  We watched the baby monkeys for nearly forever.  We watched teenage monkeys wrestling with each other and with the tourists. We watched crotchety old grandpa monkeys who couldn’t be bothered to do anything other than bare their teeth at us.  It was all pretty cool, but again, we were already pretty monkeyed out before this, after the close encounters with monkeys in Costa Rica and in Cambodia and even in Kuala Lumpur.  I did have one little guy jump up and sit in my lap for a while. Then he sat on my head for another not so short while. And then, after all of that buddying up, he decided that he suddenly didn’t like me.  So he bit me on the arm.  No, he didn’t break the skin, so no, I won’t be foaming at the mouth any time soon.  And the biting monkey wasn’t nearly as bad as the monkey ten minutes earlier who decided to pee on me which I didn’t notice until I was nice and soaked.  But the temple that the monkeys lived in was quite impressive and the baby monkeys were pretty darn cute, so we had a splendid time all in all, despite the urine.

Told you they were cute.

The guys on either side of the staircase, not so cute.

OK, now we're talking whole new levels of cute.

Other than the monkeys and the rafting trip, Ubud was about chillin’ at our beautiful hotel, getting some homework done, and making arrangements for our Europe trip.  We did do a lot of window-shopping and would have loaded up on beautiful artsy souvenirs, but alas, our suitcases are too full to fit anything new.

Our personal driver finally did give us that tour of the southern half of the island.  It was mostly more temples and more waterfalls.  One temple was called the temple of the Holy Water.  There were hundreds of natives all squished like sardines in a swimming pool fed with water pouring out the walls of the temple.  The line to get in the pool was enormous.  I guess that Holy Water really works.  We never did figure out what exactly made it holy.  When Carol asked, the driver’s reply was that it was because it was in the temple.  So which came first?  The temple or the water?  Why is the water in other temples not considered holy?  We’ll never know.

You'd think it was holy tequila or something, with this many people wanting in.

On our little island tour, we did get to stop at an especially beautiful rice farm where the terracing of the rice fields was exquisitely done.  That was new for us, since we decided to skip Vietnam.  You had to be there to appreciate the beauty of it.  For the kids, even being there wasn’t enough to make appreciation happen.  But I guess I could say that about a lot of the stops we’ve made on this trip. 

All that stuff that looks like grass?  That's all rice.

If you want to enter one of the temples, you've got to put on a sarong.  I make this look good.

Even the trees in the temples have to wear a skirt.

This one is called the elephant cave temple.

After the tour, we said a teary goodbye to our driver and he dropped us off at our hotel in Denpasar.  We had three days to appreciate the beach.  Carol and I did just that on our second night when we ate dinner literally on the beach (sand in our toes) as we watched the sunset while we chowed down on every kind of seafood known to human beings in one meal.  I distinctly remember an entire fish (eyeballs and all), shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, calamari, and scallops.  I’m probably forgetting something, but really we were paying more attention to the sunset then we were to the food.  The sunset was “brilliant”, as our new British friends are fond of saying.  Sadly, we didn’t have our camera at the time, and we didn’t get back the next night.

Here's a sunrise at the airport when we had to leave.  Not quite as good as the beach sunset, but not too shabby either.

Even more sad, however, was the next day, when we went back to the beach after it had been raining for awhile.  It was less a beach, than a dump.  There was so much trash in the ocean and on the sand that you couldn’t take a step without touching something plastic.  Josh tried to get in the water once, but he was quickly grossed out.  I was so depressed, that I had to go back to the hotel immediately.  Carol continued to walk along the beach for a mile or so.  She says that the trash situation was not a problem much further down near a resort hotel.  I guess the hotel pays people to clean up their section of the beach.  But her story didn’t lighten my mood any.  I just get so worked up when I am reminded how poorly we as human beings do at our duty as stewards for the Earth.  Bali is supposed to be a little bit of heaven on Earth.  Instead, at least at that stretch of beach, it was just nasty.  No, I didn't take any pictures of this.  I don't want to remember it.

The only activity we did while staying in Denpasar was a morning scuba trip.  We were picked up from the hotel and driven about an hour and a half to a cozy little cove where a boat awaited us.  Carol and I did an hour scuba-dive and the kids snorkeled under the supervision of the captain.  The visibility was perfect.  The number of creatures was impressive.  But the variety was only so-so.  We saw garden eels sticking their heads out of the sand.  I saw a lobster, but only for a split second because it scooted under a rock and out of sight.  I had no idea lobsters could move so fast.  We saw a baby reef shark.  There were thousands of jellyfish that were fun to squish (think Dory in “Finding Nemo”) and about a dozen or so species of tropical fish including Nemo’s (clownfish).  It wasn’t the best dive trip we’ve ever had, but it was good fun.  For the kids, the highlight had nothing to do with ocean-life.  While we were heading back to shore, the captain let the kids sit on the stabilizing rails that hung out from either side of the boat.  Rather than trying to explain what I mean, I’ll let the pictures show it all.

To get an idea of what I mean by "stabilizers" on the boat.  Look at how beautiful the water is!

Josh flying back to the beach.

One gratuitous underwater shot.

Even a couple of days before we left Bali, I think we were all ready to go.  This was to be our last stop in Asia (if Indonesia is even considered part of Asia).  We had had our fill of Eastern culture, at least for a while.  Carol and I were looking forward to Morocco and then Europe and all that Western culture brings.  The kids were looking forward to the Singapore Airlines flight and to the Singapore airport itself, which is more of an amusement park and shopping mall than it is an airport.  We have had maybe too much of a good thing.  We slept in eighteen different places in six different countries in Asia.  We have that feeling you get when you’ve been out in the sun all day and are now bone-tired.  Only we’ve been out in the sun for six months and could really use some sub-thirty degree (Celsius) temperatures for a bit.  Not that the Moroccan desert will cure what ails us.  But at least it will be a dry heat, which is a whole lot different.  Sub-hundred-percent humidity will be nice too.  And how could we not look forward to a camel ride in the Sahara?

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Steve