In Reply to: Bali Blast from the Past Challenge posted by suew on Saturday, 19. February 2005 at 22:11 Bali Time:
- almost endless 'first time' stories posted on it. I lost the link about 3 hard-drive crashes ago and can't find it now. Maybe someone knows?
I wrote about our first time, a dirty weekend that lasted 2 weeks and wasn't really too dirty because one of us was crook.
It starts off - -
On October 12, 1979, I knew all about ‘Bali Hai', from the stage play and the film ‘South Pacific'. The white sand beaches with the dinky little waves splashing in from the clear, ice blue seas. The wet boles of serenely slanting palms that shaded oddly pale skinned natives and American servicemen as they whiled away the days in supposedly innocent pleasures.
I really knew little else, but on that day nearly 22 years ago I left for Bali, armed with a brand new passport and a certified Birth Extract, pumped up with vaccinations for cholera and typhus.
I didn't even know where Bali actually was except that it was ‘up there', somewhere. ‘Up' where the fathers of friends had spent the war years that I vaguely remembered and could see in old copies of ‘Pix' magazines stored in the big tin trunk in the motor shed down the back by the chook house and the fruit trees. I didn't know how big or small it was, although I thought I would probably walk around it one day while I was there and perhaps find that little curved cove from the film. Surely someone would know where that was!
I didn't know about the people, their culture or histories although I knew from the film that they spoke English, perhaps with an odd sort of accent like Rossano Brazzi. I didn't know about the geography (except that it was a little island) or the flora (except for leaning palm trees and carefully mown lawns), the fauna, or what a tourist did when one got there. I knew that the weather was nice and warm and it rained heavily when things went wrong, or were about to go wrong. I knew that from the film.
I knew that we were to stay at the Bali Beach Hotel but I didn't know if there was a choice or if that was the only place there in which to stay.
A holiday in Bali was a strange exotic overseas adventure and everyone I told about it reckoned would be ‘ a bit of alright'.
- - - and you'll find the rest of it, with some photos, at the link below.