The Virtual Vacation

This tropical deluge woke me up today… Delightful. Turn up your sound. I guess we’re not going snorkeling this morning after all! Seems like an excellent morning to write!

While our remaining travelers were making their way to Lotus Bungalows in Candidasa today, Laurie, who arrived last night, and I headed to Tenganan Village to witness the Mekare-Kare Pandan Wars, an annual ritual for the boys and men of the village. Three hundred people live in Tenganan Village. They are an original aboriginal village,

I have been a huge fan of WhatsApp for years. Having a daughter who travels and lives on the other side of the world makes me so grateful for this versatile communication app that lets you text, leave voice memos, send photos and videos, and make international phone calls, with video or without, all for

I came to Bali with my friend Nancy Gertz a week before my students were set to arrive. In the course of that week, Nancy and I became friendly with a couple from Holland and the four of us enjoyed meals and conversation. The three of them, in Bali for the first time, were sharing

This is me after my final three scuba dives of this trip. I’m still drifting on the currents, swimming with schools of fish, watching octopi and bright blue eels poke out of crevices while the most amazing manta rays swoop and glide around me. I hadn’t gone diving in six years and thought maybe I

My co-leaders and Bali partners Judy and Surya gifted me with this “aromatic flower bath” at Andre Bali Spa in Manggis. The spa sent a car to pick me up at my hotel and drove me about ten minutes up the road. The treatment started with a foot washing. Then I was taken to a

Today, I had two more dreamy scuba dives. I saw two large sea turtles, schools of fish, and best of all, brightly-colored living coral in many configurations—despite what I expected, not all coral is dead and bleached after all. When you scuba dive, you have to clock in “surface time” between your dives, at least

Today I got to scuba dive for the first time in six years. Yesterday, I had a little refresher class in the pool—how to wear a BCD, hand signals to use underwater, how to keep my buoyancy, how much weight I need to carry on my weight belt. Today, I went on a two-tank dive

Some photos of the incredible Balinese rice fields I visited today

Thanks to Ativan I slept through my first night in Bali and woke up at 5 this morning, which is pretty close to when I awaken in California. I did my business in the outdoor bathroom, checked around for geckos (nope, haven’t seen any yet), threw on some new light-weight harem pants, a green linen