I was already feeling like an inferior human being. This mainly thanks to having spent Sunday at Ku De Ta. A place so striving to be cool it can’t even spell itself correctly. A place so filled to the brim with the beautiful people that it hurt to look for too long in one direction. …
Ok. Today was a bad day. It went like this. Lula woke at 6.30. We had our first screaming episode of the morning over suncream. I’ve managed to win the insect repellent battle by convincing her that the bugspray is perfume. She submits to lashings of the citronella now because she thinks Egg, her amour, …
Driving in Bali is like playing space invaders. Cars, dogs, scooters, chickens, trucks and bikes are all sharing the one lane road with you and they’re coming at you from every direction trying to kill you. If you get distracted by the 7 year old driving past you on his scooter with his three year …
We have gone up in the world. We are staying in a dead posh hotel. We know it is posh because Alula’s first words upon tearing through the room and discovering the bathroom were, ‘YAY! There’s Loo paper!’ (Mine were, ‘YAY! There’s a minibar!’, John’s were: ‘Yay! There’s wifi’) That says it all really doesn’t …
For the first hour my feet didn’t do one single rotation on those pedals. And I spent that hour smiling to myself at the genius of the entrepreneurial Balinese who’ve set up Downhill cycling tours. I mean what a canny understanding of Western culture. We’re fat and lazy. For the most part I mean. Obviously …
Jack Bauer style The alarm bells should have started to ring when he straddled me. It wasn’t sexual, don’t get me wrong. It was more like he was getting ready to carve a particularly large parma ham. And it hurt. This man knew pain. He was on first name terms with it. There was a …
‘It is today right? The picnic is today?’ We stop in the middle of the rutted road that runs to Alula’s nursery. ‘Yeah. It said Thursday on the invite. It’s Thursday today isn’t it?’ ‘I’m not sure. Is it?’ ‘I don’t know. Hang on. It might be Wednesday.’ ‘Wait. I can figure this out. What …
It is the dead of night. The moon is shrouded with cloud. Eerie Gamalan music is drifting through the trees. We are stalking through mud, smacking into branches and tripping over ditches. The high priestess is ahead of us, springing like a mountain goat over the puddles and broken ruts. She is balancing a basket …
‘Do we just text 118 118?’ ‘Where in the yellow pages would you even look for one?’ I tweet to see if anyone can help but Balinese priests don’t hang in the twitterverse apparently. Richard, John and I are in the back of a van touring the back lanes of Bali. We’re talking priests because …
Al Gore is visiting later this month. Richard Branson popped by for tea a few weeks ago. The dude from Ben & Jerry’s ran an ice cream-making workshop a month or so ago. So you know, they’re used to visiting dignitaries. We fit in well. The Green School in Bali – it kind of defies …
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