Author: Adam

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Bali Travel

Bali Travel Overview

As a bit of a Bali tragic, I do my best to tell anyone and everyone about this fantastic island set amongst 17,000 others in the Indonesian Archipelago. The main reason being that here in Australia, Bali has a very poor image – one of boozy tourists with no shirts on, making fools of themselves whilst destroying the local culture. There is no denying that this is the case in very small parts of Bali. And for those that enjoy this sort of relaxation, good for them. For most others, it’s unappealing and also very avoidable on a trip to Bali. There is so much to say about Bali that I’ve never attempted a blog post before – it’s too big.  This time, I think I’ve got the perserverence to make it happen. So over the coming weeks, I’ll write a number of posts about the different areas of Bali, the food, the accommodation, the things to do. This should be fun.

Kuta, Legian & Seminyak

Bali: Fishing on Legian Beach
Bali: Fishing on Legian Beach

The main boozy shenanigans happens in Kuta and Legian. Move further up the beach to Seminyak and the booziness turns more expensive, hedonistic and snobby. If you’re into boozy nights, these are the places to head and there is fun to be had! But for me, it’s in small doses only.

Ubud

Bali: Ubud Ricefield
Bali: Ubud Ricefield

When people from around the world (aside from Australia) think of Bali, they think of an exotic island with phenomenal people, volcanoes, verdant rice fields and a unique and mysterious culture. Ubud is the place that has all of these elements come together in a tourist-friendly environment. Yes, Ubud is tourist-central, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It does the tourist “thing” so well that whilst you get all the tourist creature comforts like hot water, western toilets, clean rooms and unbelievable food, you get a sense that behind the tourist veneer there is a fully functioning Balinese village(s) in operation. And this is true. You will often see ceremonies in full swing with processions, dancing and an assortment of cultural things going on at all times of the year.

A short walk in any direction from the centre of Ubud lands you in the middle of seemingly endless ricefields. Sometimes green, sometimes flooded, sometimes mid-harvest.

The East

Bali: Tirtagangga Water Palace
Bali: Tirtagangga Water Palace

The East of Bali is visited predominantly by Europeans and hence is very seasonal in terms of visitor numbers. That is, outside of the European Summer, East Bali can seem dead. The main towns are Candi Dasa and Padang Bai although you could probably class Sidemen as part of this as well. Most people visit East Bali to be near the ocean and for a more authentic Balinese experience. The culture here is said to be more traditional than in other parts of the island, but that said, I only notice more poverty and perhaps this is what forces people to rely more heavily on their religion. Needless to say, the entire Eastern landscape is dominated by the 3000m+ (10,000ft) Gunung Agung. It is truly an awe inspiring site.

The North

Bali: Lush valley near Amed
Bali: Lush valley near Amed

The North generally stretches from Amed to Lovina (and further West for some) and is a  much drier part of the island than the South. Rice is much harder to grow here and you’ll therefore see other crops on the landscape such as corn (jagung) making for a totally different feel to the rest of the island. It can also be brutally hot in these parts adding to the more barren feel of the landscape.

Everywhere Else

Bali: View of South Bali from near Mt Batukaru
Bali: View of South Bali from near Mt Batukaru

The rest of the island, and I’m talking about a vast area, is relatively untouristed (Sanur excluded). It’s great to cruise around the empty roads on a motorbike (US$4/day) or car (US$10/day) and just explore. There are accommodation options in some of these areas catering to tourists and they generally offer a more relaxed and “authentic” experience, but this may be too much for a first time visitor that hasn’t seen the activity-dense hotspots of Kuta, Legian, Seminyak and Ubud.

So that’s a little taster of Bali for now. I cannot emphasise the extent to which most people are captured by this place. Words such as “magic”, “heaven” and “paradise” are thrown about with such regularity that we must ignore them – nothing could be this good. But it is.  The way I like to describe Bali is that I have a small pain in my stomach when I think back on all the fantastic experiences I have had there. A yearning to return again and again.

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Lifestyle Design

What are Lifestyle Designers Searching For?

Today, lifestyle designers have embarked on a journey. Primarily due to dissatisfaction with either their own lives or the lives that they are expected to lead by society. We all know what on the surface causes this dissatisfaction. These surface issues are things like having to work the 9-5, little or no flexibility to do what you want to do and the monotony of the consumerist lifestyle. But these are just surface issues and if we fail to delve deeper, we risk treating these surface issues with surface solutions such as quitting our job and running away for a jaunt around the world. I’ve done it, we’ve all done it or are about to embark upon it. Quit your job, sell the house and run away. To account for the gap in income, go and start a new innovative business that avoids those surface issues.

It all sounds so perfect.  All my surface issues are gone and I’m excited about the prospects for the future. But soon the lustre of the new wears off and we are left with feelings that bubbled to surface in our first bout of dissatisfaction. But hang on! We’re now talking about our emotional state, our internal world, rather than our material world of work and home which are our external world.  We’re now starting to dig deeper. Of course there are ills in our external worlds, but without attention being given to our internal state, perhaps what some would call a more important and difficult proposition, we risk living an unbalanced and hollow life filled with ephemeral and fleeting gloss.

Hollowness, emptiness, the feeling of there being more out there…  it all resonates with the Lifestyle Designer. These are internal churnings that need attention directly rather than being glossed over as problems caused by a  poor job, a consumerist society or a lifestyle dictated by cultural norms. I wish I had a solution for this, but I don’t.  And at the risk of alienating myself, I have a sense that it revolves somewhere around two things that most will probably find scary and off-putting .  Community and spirituality.  <gulp> The reason I am sensing that these two things are central to resolving the dissatisfaction issue is that these two things have really only recently disappeared from Western society.

So with that said, I think I owe it to myself to explore these concepts more closely. Does this make sense, resonate with you or sound like waffle? I’d love to get some feedback on my musings here.

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Lifestyle Design

Explaining Lifestyle Design = Uncomfortable Discussion

Whenever I get into a discussion with people about what I do for a living and I explain that I do “a bit of this, a bit of that”, the conversation often drifts towards the whys and wherefores of my situation. Why I don’t have a traditional job, why I’m travelling down the path I’ve chosen etc. Mixed in with these discussions are my views on shunning debt, working 9-5, living more deliberately and exploring passions. The problem is that that can sound very preachy and sometimes as is if I’m gloating. Perhaps it comes from a sense of my own insecurity.

People often get defensive about their chosen path and whilst I respect their chosen path, it’s diametrically opposed to mine and therefore being defensive about it makes the whole discussion rather uncomfortable. So what generally happens is that I try and downplay my arrangements so there are no feelings of envy or inadequacy. As a result I just end up sounding like a lazy bum with nothing better to do with my time than sit on the couch (not an entirely false assertion!).

So something that I’m so excited about is now something that I can only really talk to like-minded people about. Perhaps people just freak out when they start thinking about their own lives. Whatever the case, I think it’s important for all lifestyle designers to keep the preachiness factor in mind when talking to people that might not necessarily want to look at their lives with a critical eye.

I’m not sure if anyone else faces these situations, but I’d love to hear about it.

Categories
Cakes and Pastries Food

Three Bags Full – Raspberry, White Chocolate and Coconut Cake

As I’ve stated previously, I love cakes but I rarely eat one at a cafe that I can rave about. Continuing my quest for cafe cake and pastry perfection, I headed to Three Bags Full in Abbotsford, a few kilometres from the centre of Melbourne. On offer was a Raspberry, White Chocolate and Coconut cake. Exactly the sort of cake that promises the world because of the mouth-watering possibilities of the flavours, but then so often disappoints due to flavour imbalance!

This cake was moist. This cake was pleasantly chewy because of the coconut! (as well as a subtle tropical flavour that only coconut can give). This cake was also slightly tart on account of the raspberries which also provided the odd pop of sweetness.

Cake: Raspberry, White Chocolate and Coconut from Three Bags Full
Cake: Raspberry, White Chocolate and Coconut from Three Bags Full

OK, so the part of this flavour combination that almost always fails is the white chocolate component. The main reason being is that people often try and make the white chocolate the dominant flavour like one might do in a normal chocolate cake. But really, white chocolate is usually so sweet and so sickly that it ruins your palate after one mouthful. So it was with great trepidation that I took my first bite of this Three Bags Full cake… The white chocolate was only slightly there! Great! It was actually just enough for me to realise that it was contained within, so it just sort of buzzed along in the background without jumping out and becoming a nuisance. It did its job just nicely.

The star of the show for this cake is the raspberry flavour – playing a decent second fiddle is the coconut texture. An all round satisfying cake that I’d be happy to go for again.

Three Bags Full is on Nicholson St, just up the road from Viet restaurant central, Victoria St Richmond.

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Myanmar Travel

Myanmar (Burma): The Capital

Naypyidaw. This is the capital city of Myanmar. A city that hardly anybody would be able to rattle off in a game of trivial pursuit. The reason being is that it’s a relatively new capital, the name is hard to spell (many variations) and pronounce and also the fact that there is nothing there except for the military junta’s bureaucracy. Most Embassies and High Commissions don’t even recognise it and have therefore kept their presence in the more suitable city of Yangon.

As I’ve stated more times that I care to remember, Myanmar’s roads are in the main terrible. Goat tracks. But there is one stunning exception to this. The Government has built a road from Yangon to Naypyidaw strectching over 300km – and it’s almost dead straight. They just simply ploughed this road straight North to the captial and spared no expense. It’s massive. It actually makes this part of any bus journey relatively easy. But when you see some of the poverty in the country, the extravagance of this road is bewildering.

Myanmar: Quite Street near Mandalay
Myanmar: Quite Street near Mandalay

If the road is bewildering, the actual capital blows the mind. It is spread over many kilometres, complete with its own Shwedagon Paya replica. Sprawling boulevards capable of handling Los Angeles style traffic volumes, luxurious manicured garden roundabouts protected by armed military personnel, enormous shopping complexes. It is just staggering to see. Especially when it is populated by a reported 20,000 people. The apparent cost of construction of the capital is US$500m. And every citizen that travels from Yangon to Mandalay has to witness this act of sheer lunacy. Everyone cranes their necks to get a better look at the extravagance and mouths hang open.

How can a Government afford such oppulence when the people are so poor? The people aren’t stupid and I think it just heightens their discontent with the current political situation.

Why the Relocation?

No one really knows why the Government moved to Naypyidaw. Rumours abound of the junta’s fear of a sea-bourne invasion of Yangon. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true. But there could be countless reasons for the them to make the move and at the end of the day, no answer will seem rational. One thing we can be sure of is that a large amount of self-interest will be at the heart of the decision as is seemingly always the case with these sorts of things.

Naypyidaw is not a tourist destination. It is a source of deep resentment for the locals, however, and you can expect plenty of discussion around it.

(just quietly, every time I think of Naypyidaw, I can’t help but thinking of Canberra, Washington DC and Ottawa!)

There were plenty of military types with weapons in Naypyidaw and consequently I opted not to take photos. What a wimp! If you’ve been there, let me know what you think!

Categories
Lifestyle Design

Remaining Positive About Lifestyle Design

Lifestyle Design is about dreaming of a future free from the restraints that are placed on us by societal norms. That is, free from a job we hate, stepping away from rampant consumerism and discovering things about ourselves that we never thought we possessed. Whilst dreaming, Lifestyle Designers begin taking steps to make these life changes a reality and along the way there are inevitably a whole range of hiccups that many of us don’t like to talk about for fear of appearing to be a dismal failure. A recent post by Adam Baker (When to Quit Traveling) about giving up travelling the world earlier than planned and returning “home” to start a normal life again is a great post because it highlights the hurdles that Lifestyle Designers face when trying to find a different life. And it’s authentic – something that is so often missing in the entrepreneurial/Lifestyle Design world.

In the same vein, I face issues which question the very nature of Lifestyle Design. After recently splitting with my good friend and partner of 12 years, my visions of Lifestyle Design have been turned on their head. My plans were interwoven with my partner’s, my financial plans were based on a couple sharing expenses and my whole future was about living independently, but as a couple!

So what happens when you decide to split with your partner and you’ve already started down the Lifestyle Design path? My immediate panicked thoughts turned to the “normal” life.  A full-time job, a nice house, retreating to a place I was familiar with… It all sounded so comfortable and it’s what I thought I needed immediately after a break-up. I think I also seriously questioned whether this whole Lifestyle Design gig was for real or just a charade to mask deeper-seated discontentment. It was almost as if I had switched to believing that a life of discontentment was actually OK because it’s what everyone else is doing.

Well, I’m here to say that I was able to pull myself out of that temporary lapse of sanity. But things are different now and I look forward to the challenges of Lifestyle Design with a different set of eyes. Certainly, life in the future seems a little more open to my own whims – but this question keeps coming up. “Why bother with Lifestyle Design?” And the only answer I can come up with, and it sounds logical, is that it’s too easy to settle into discontentment and that true happiness is something that needs to be strived towards. And that by definition requires effort and perhaps a journey with a myriad of hurdles.

But it also begs the question.  “How does one remain positive about lifestyle design when the chips are down?” It’s certainly something needs exploring as the new breed of Lifestyle Designers journey forth into the unknown and these obstacles present themselves.

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Myanmar Travel

Myanmar (Burma): Mandalay & Bagan

The Road to Mandalay

Looking at the map, Bagan and Mandalay are fairly close to one another, but the bone-crunching reality is that between these two places the road is like a goat track. One shouldn’t be surprised by this given that most roads in Burma seem to be of the goat-track kind! The journey between the two areas is about 7 hours on a local bus along a largely unpaved, dusty road which travels through endless dry plains and poor villages.

Mandalay

Mandalay is the second city of Burma and sits at the heart of the country. Most tourists will pass through here at least once as it serves as a transport hub for all points in every direction. Many of the people I spoke to before arriving in Mandalay had a generally negative attitude towards the place and I think this mainly evolved from the alleged below-par palace charging unsuspecting tourists US$10 to enter. Again, another Government sting but given that it’s not worth visiting anyway, there’s probably no harm done.

Mandalay is HOT in the dry season and the temperature reaches more than 40C (104F) most days. At night, it is also VERY hot and because the electricity in Burma is very sketchy, there is a better than even chance you will spend some sleepless nights in a lather of sweat. No air-conditioning, no fan. Just heat and humidity.

Myanmar: Wooden Bridge
Myanmar: Wooden Bridge

The food in Manadalay tended to be quite cheap and of a fantastic quality. The best by far was the mutton curry from the Chapati Corner. A small dish of oily mutton curry, a couple of freshly made chapatis and bit of biriyani… One of the best street side meals I have ever had. Another good place was the Nepali Restaurant listed in the Lonely Planet. Good food, good price.

Myanmar: Mandalay Monk
Myanmar: Mandalay Monk

OK, so why travel to Mandalay? Are there any sites? Well, yes. I’d recommend going to see the big wooden bridge at sunset and visiting a bunch of the old royal capitals. None of it was spectacular, but definitely worth a visit and easily enough to occupy a full day of touring. One cool thing to observe were the package tourists at the monastery in Amarapura. OK, it wasn’t cool. It was actually quite shocking. At 11am, the monks from the monastery gather to have a feed and there is a bit of ceremony about it. Well, bus loads of tourists roll up to have a look (us included!). But the manner in which people were interacting with the monks was hideous. Hoards of people sticking their cameras in monks’ faces, yelling and asking them to move or pose in a certain way and generally treating the whole situation like is was some sort of zoo exhibition. If this doesn’t make you cringe, nothing will. But at the same time, it was interesting to observe and gives the opportunity for self-reflection. Are we any better? Probably not.

Bagan

I’ve read many stories comparing Bagan to Angkor. First of all, there is no comparison. Totally different feel. I preferred Angkor much more for the following reasons. Firstly, Bagan is not set in a jungle. When we were there, it was like it was in the middle of the desert complete with searing heat. We got a horse and cart around the sites, although some had suggested a bicycle (like in Angkor!) – needless to say biking was out of the question.

I really wanted Bagan to be magnificent, but the polish was removed when travelling into town on the public bus from Mandalay, all foreigners were ordered to leave the bus 5 miles out of town to pay money at a checkpoint. It felt really uncomfortable to be on a bus packed with locals only to be asked to disembark to pay a fee. And the handful of foreigners on the bus felt similarly uncomfortable – especially when one went to pick up a brochure on Bagan and was asked to pay another US$5! Funny in hindsight, but a symbol of the lunacy of the Burmese Government.

There are plenty of reasonable budget accommodation options in Bagan, but food tended to be on the expensive side and was generally of average quality despite the multitude of options. Perhaps this is due to the predominance of package tourists in this small, rural town.

Myanmar: Bagan Temple
Myanmar: Bagan Temple

OK, so the temples – how were the temples!? To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed. Sure, there were thousands of them. But many of the biggest and best could not be fully accessed due to structural concerns. Ordinarily, this would be reasonable – but given the amount of money being generated down the road at the checkpoint from tourists, surely there is enough to fix some of these temples. Sadly, it seems very little of that money goes back into temple restoration/improvement. Many of the smaller temples lack atmosphere and your entry into them is often interrupted by locals selling paintings. Not vastly different to Angkor, but at least in Angkor you could find solace once past the invisible line which is the entryway. In Bagan, no such line exists.

Whilst I’m generally negative about Bagan, it is worth a visit. As is everywhere in Burma. Just don’t expect to come back gushing. Rather, expect to come back questioning everything about the place, just as you do when leaving places like Yangon, Mandalay and Kalaw/Inle Lake.

What a very interesting place this is.

Categories
Money Travel

Is it Really Worth Saving a Dollar?

When travelling through South East Asia and probably other parts of the world, you meet all sorts of different travellers.  You meet the package tourist, the flashpacker, the stinky backpacker, the know-it-all backpacker and also a bunch of “normal” backpackers.  But there is a subset of these people that I am really interested in.  It’s the stingy traveller.  The type that will do anything to save a dollar. At times, I’m this person and it annoys me no end because in most cases it’s nonsensical.

Myanmar: Local Transport
Myanmar: Local Transport

I’m particularly frail when it comes to transport – taxis, tuk tuks, becaks, etc.  I will tend to argue for extended periods of time, refuse countless offers of transport and even walk miles just to prove the point that I won’t be ripped off by a taxi driver.  Ripped off, as in, not paying an extra 50 cents or a dollar over what I believe a reasonable price to be.  And I base my pricing on the wages which I know the local populace are getting.  Now, in the heat of battle, it all seems fair – why should a local person get an extra dollar for a short ride when the daily wage is $3?  And from an economic perspective, it does make sense.  There are farmers slogging their guts out in the ricefield for $3 in the beating sun, yet a taxi driver lounging under a tree all day waiting for a tourist to sting can make double that for a short ride.  From a moral perspective, however, it’s probably not right to quibble over a dollar and from a convenience perspective, I’m certainly doing myself a disservice!

Myanmar: Budget Accommodation
Myanmar: Budget Accommodation

As far as saving a dollar goes, the same issues apply to accommodation.  Sure, you can screw down prices to almost nothing, but if you spend an extra couple of dollars when travelling in SE Asia, you can really boost the quality of your digs.  Moving from $4 to $6 can mean attached bathroom, better outlook, less noise and a generally more pleasant stay.

What about food?  Many places in Asia are dirt cheap.  $1 for a substantial meal.  But occasionally, it’s nice to have an even nicer meal that might cost double.  Yes, $2!  I’ve met lots of people that will refuse to pay the extra dollar because it’s essentially a doubling of the expenses for the night.  But come on…  it’s an extra dollar.  And for an extra dollar, it might mean an even more awesome meal than the dollar meal.  More food, better produce and perhaps some meat that might otherwise be missing.

Myanmar: Samosa
Myanmar: Samosa

Some will argue on the flipside that the cheaper you travel, the longer you can travel.  Spending $20 vs $22 per day means you get to travel for 10% longer. For some, this might be wise, but for me…  I’m usually getting travel weary in the last 10% of my journey anyway and getting home a little earlier is no big deal – and I get a more pleasant experience while I’m at it.  What’s your view on saving a dollar?

Categories
Myanmar Travel

Myanmar (Burma): Political Situation

What an incredible place.  Myanmar is right at the junction of Bangladesh, India and South East Asia and it shows this geographical uniqueness in its food, culture and people.  I visited there in mid-March for three and a half weeks despite some people deeming travel to this country counter-productive and asserting that it was tantamount to handing foreign money directly to the military junta.  Perhaps so.  But also perhaps not.

Myanmar: Walking Across the Lake
Myanmar: Walking Across the Lake

The Junta

The Military Government in Burma control the state in a much more subtle way than I was expecting before arriving in the country.  There are few uniformed military personnel patrolling the streets, few uniformed police, very little visible Government presence at all.  In fact, if you visited the country without a suspicious eye, you could be fooled into thinking that everything is just fine.  And for the most part, it is.  People have jobs, they work their farms, the markets operate well, most people are well-fed.  But dig beneath the surface and an amazing level of subtle control exists. Informants and spies are apparently everywhere – but you wouldn’t know for sure forcing the populace to be on edge and paranoid.  Everyone fears that everyone else is an informant, so no one is game to organise opposition, agitate or even just chat about events.

There are checkpoints throughout the country where the military check citizens’ ID cards.  They don’t record anything – they just check.  Seemingly there is no other reason than to let the populace know that they are not free to go about their business without big brother watching.

There are sometimes random searches of buses – plain-clothed men rifling through passengers’ luggage whilst timid citizens search for their ID cards hoping they won’t be spoken to.  On a bus I caught, they simply rooted around in a few bits of luggage for 5 minutes in the middle of the night and then left the bus.  Everyone on the bus sat to attention and were visibly uneasy.

Myanmar: Ceremony
Myanmar: Ceremony

The Revolting Burmese

Despite the paranoia of the populace, I felt they were desperate to share their stories with foreigners – this is in stark contrast to what the Lonely Planet guidebook had advised to be the case.  I had gone to the country prepared for no discussion about the Government, but arrived shocked that so many people expressed their absolute discontent with the authorities.  I sincerely felt that below the surface of a happy people there lurked the rumblings of revolution.  In this regard, it is unsurprising that the monks rose up in 2007 and it would be unsurprising if a bigger proportion of the populace revolted in the next few years.

Is the Junta Propped Up?

One of the recurring themes whilst travelling through Burma was that Government officials only benefited to the extent that they do by selling the country’s resources to foreign nations.  The main concern from citizens is over electricity (Burma is in blackout most of the time), mineral resources (oil, gas and gems) and wood.  The accusations are that the major buyers of these resources is China and India.  These two countries together make up over 30% of the world’s population and no other country is going to stand up to them in order to help the Burmese people.  So the people themselves are going to be forced to take matters into their own hands – and this necessarily means much blood.  Further, it means that China and India will have blood on their hands.

So there’s a brief and simplistic tourist view of how things are unfolding in Burma.  The Junta will not give up power whilst they are allowed to rape the country of its wealth and the populace will be forced into violent revolution.  A sorry state of affairs for the lovely Burmese people.

Categories
Relationships

Demarried on Facebook!

When my wife and I recently decided to separate, we knew there were going to be some awkward moments ahead.  Many of these we knew were going to be focussed on letting friends and family know what was going on and making them feel OK about it. But we’re now in a brand new social networking era where if you update your status in a certain way, people are going to be able to read into it without having explicit knowledge of what is going on.  And this specific issue caused us a bit of a dilemma.

We didn’t want to announce to people that we were separating prior to us getting our heads around what it really meant for us, what our immediate plans would be and what sort of reasons we were going to give to explain this unexpected event. So in order to not give the game away too quickly and be left with awkwardness, we chose not to do status updates on Facebook for a good few weeks. But after a while when we’d figured out what we were going to tell people and how we were going to tell them (a status update for us wasn’t going to cut it) we decided it was time to act.  So we directly messaged as many people as we could, emailed friends and family (we’d previously spoken to our immediate families) and then did the funniest thing I’ve ever done. We demarried each other on Facebook. What an absolutely bizarre and ridiculous thing to do. I just found the whole thing so odd – and I don’t even know why! Also had a good laugh.  Ridiculous!

Why is this such an odd thing to do? Any budding psychologists out there?