Eat Pray Love in Bali
Bali bookended our Asian adventures, allowing us to shavasana and recharge our souls (#yoga) before heading to Australia and New Zealand.
Ubud
Our time in Ubud was spent at a yoga retreat, the Yoga Barn. Over the course of 5 days we attended 10 classes, and only left the complex twice. The Yoga Barn has classes starting almost every half hour and an incredible vegetarian cafe so we spent our days eating tropical fruits and vegetables, practicing yoga, relaxing and reading/coding. The clientele was a mix of Australian vacationers and European “digital nomads” who live in Bali and do yoga while working remotely — it was a really interesting community and we greatly enjoyed the people watching and chatting with strangers at the communal tables. Our favorite classes included acro yoga where I balanced on Gil, aerial yoga where we balanced on ropes, and a power yoga class that we swear was filled with only yoga instructors (but we kept up!)
We had a long list of tourist attractions to see, but were enjoying our yoga-focused days so decided to lay low and namaste at the Yoga Barn. We felt that Bali overemphasized Instagram tourism (e.g., some temple tours use mirrors to create fake reflecting pools for a perfect picture) which seemed fake to us so we decided to spend our time working on our chaturangas. After our 5 days barely leaving the complex we felt clean, energized and sore.
Gili Trawangan & Seminyak
While researching Bali beaches we came across Gili Trawangan and decided that we had to go because it doesn’t have any motor vehicles (so figured it would be as peaceful as Fire Island), and it shares Gil’s name. Unfortunately, this experience was the first miss of our trip. The “fast boat” which claimed to take 1.5 hours was really an un-air conditioned, bumpy 3+ hour journey with 50% more passengers than fire code so we started off on an unsteady foot. We were staying at a “luxury villa” with a beautiful private pool, but we had to switch rooms 3 times over the course of 2 nights since the AC kept breaking. And with a lot of bugs, a few other scams, and some odd experiences (ask us if you really want to know…), we decided to head back to the main island early and spend our last 36 hours relaxing by the beach in Seminyak.
Key Stats
Average miles/day: 3.7 (like we said, didn’t leave the yoga retreat much…)
R books completed: 16 (Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones)
G books completed: 6 (Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath… Gil is slacking, but coding during reading time so still semi-productive)
