Many people have reached out to me to talk about this story, but some feedback kinda made me think. In fact, it was one in particular. It happened not so long ago, I heard someone saying that “this story is getting so heavy that it is difficult to follow”. We wondered whether more people share this thought and I decided to do something about it. First, “I told you so”, and I did it in the very chapter One. It ain’t a pretty story, I know that, but you need to know every bit of it in order to understand the rest. But believe us, we know the feeling. So for today, we’ll tell you something cool.
There is something that I have always been very proud of and that I like to think of as a branding point of our journey around the world. It makes us laugh in times of holidays and helps us with making the best of our memories in new places. It is about the first time we went to Bali.
Going to South-East Asia, specifically to Bali, was one of the things on the top of our bucket list. Funny enough, we ended up going to Asia many more times after that, but that one had a special touch. We were living in Australia at the time and we took a small holiday to Bali and Singapore. To me, I was flying to magic, exotic people and a entire “I don’t know what to expect” kind of trip. It felt like I was flying for the first time, although we all know the irony of that already. We landed and there he was, our tour guide: a short young man on his late twenties, with a very nice smile and friendly welcome. He showed us the way to his car and so our adventure began.
One thing I heard some years later is that “In Asia, everything sorts itself out”. As a control-freak, you can imagine that this was something really hard to overcome and to live up to when you face an entire nation of opposites in front of you. Fact is that the statement was very truthful from the very beginning. First, we hired a tour guide, but the guide had a driver and his car had a baby chair in the backseat. We were like, “okay, but do we also need to pay for the driver? How does that work now? This is definitely not a taxi!”. We had so many question that only a squeezed smile was able to come out. But fine, new country, holiday, woohoo!
That was just the beginning! Many more unexpected things happened along the way. We had different cars to take us around, one with a dog in the open trunk, another with fruits and vegetables from the market, but we always ended up safe and sound wherever we needed to be. In the end, we had a blast. Amazing places, breathtaking sights and friendly people. Indonesia was and still is one of the most peculiar countries I’ve ever been to, essentially because you need to pay to get a visa to enter and another leave. It is cute how they want to hold on to you forever in case you cannot pay for getting out of the country.
All those worries from the beginning went away as swiftly as the days, totally disappearing while we sat by Kuta Beach watching the orange sunset of Bali. What a place, what a holiday. From that moment on, we knew that there was no border we couldn’t cross and no place we couldn’t be. Our bucket list had many items, but one of the top three had just been crossed and we were anxious to cross even more. Little we knew that Asia would become such an important place for us and that many times more we would come back to delight ourselves with their amazing food and culture.
And in the end, the certainty of the return as well as the knowledge of broad horizons gave us the confidence we needed to plant the tree of travels inside us and let it grow with a promise to never, ever settle for less excitement. We then vowed to never stop moving.
