Selamat datang to Bali!
Welcome to Bali!
Dear Readers, we hope you are enjoying this blog and will enjoy our stories of Bali. We should warn you now though, this blog will likely have no end. We are never leaving Bali.
Why, you ask? 30 degrees every day. Surrounded by beaches. Fabulous food and killer coffee. Cost of living 1/10 of what it is at home. And apparently, there are monkeys here too.
Bali is an island in Indonesia (for those of you who don’t want to admit you don’t know, we figured we’d make it easy). Over the next month, we’ll be visiting a number of islands (there are actually 18,000 of them in Indonesia) and in typical Brel fashion, we will be experiencing the extremes of life here. Our booked accommodations range from $15 a night to sleeping in a shared cabin on a boat to $215 a night. Below $15, you can’t book in advance. And above $215 is just not within our budget – but that doesn’t mean we can’t drink at the hotel bars of the $1,000+ a night places.
So of course, we start our trip at the top. After Japan, $215 seemed positively cheap – but in Indonesia, that means you get a 1,200 sqft private villa with private pool and a staff that stops at nothing to please.
We are staying at the Elysian (www.theelysian.com). For those of you who’ve followed this blog for some time, you know we’ve vacationed with celebrities in some of Central America’s swankiest places (albeit not on our dollar). Surprisingly, the Elysian surpassed our already-high expectations. We’re not sure how they do it, but they actually have a staff that CARES – genuinely, truly, cares that we are enjoying ourselves. (the HR person in Mel is dying to know how you motivate/compensate/recognize people to get these types of results).
The photos of our rock star room, lush grounds and grotto pool kinda speak for themselves. Enjoy – we sure did.
Tags: Indonesia
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