Hanging Out

Long term traveling is an interesting psychological experiment. You go through different phases of feelings about your trip. Or at least, I did.

Early on, the first few months, I was caught up in the excitement of being out of the states for the first time in memory. Even Mom and Dad had that feeling of excitement to a certain extent. We took way too many pictures in our exhilaration.

In Europe that excitement began to fade a bit, but I was still excited about the trip. By the time I got to Morocco, my excitement began to really fade, and I first started to want more hang-out time than we previously had.

I really crashed in Egypt. In fact, I was almost considering skipping the Great Pyramids! It was hot, and my interest in the trip was fading.

Our one week stretch in Dahab really helped me regain excitement, and the time in Crete was fantastic as well. I lost my enthusiasm quickly but regained it partly in Bulgaria. What I really needed was month or so to hang out and do nothing. We promised to do that in Thailand, but that seemed ages away.

But I survived, and got a lot of energy back in Ko Phangan. That was great. I had a lot of my travel-tolerance back for Southeast Asia, but totally lost it in India.

I was good for Nepal and Hong Kong, but, as well as the rest of the family, wanted to spend another month in a Ko Phagnan-like place.

Our fellow long-term-traveling-family from Breckenridge that we had met in Laos was hanging out on a Balinese Island called Nusa Lembongan. The beach was apparently not really great, so I wasn’t too excited about it, but I was pleasantly surprised when I actually saw the beach:

The Sands of Lembongan

Dad and I hunted for some places, and I had in mind a beautiful hotel like Dolphin resort. Alas, we did not find one like that, to my great disappointment. We also had no Wi-Fi, making schoolwork difficult. (And Internet playtime, but school is my excuse).

The place was very nice though, as well was the whole island. We met our fellow long-term-traveling-family every day and would play on the beach, go out to dinner, watch movies on our laptops, and, most fun of all, head out into the ocean during low tide.

Although not quite the same as the scuba diving we did there, the tide pools were infested with crabs, sea stars, star fish, sea urchins, hermit crabs, and more crabs. We also spotted a few weird worms and sea slugs.

The wierd sea slug we saw. When it lifted up the sides of it's upper body, there was something there that looked kind of like a tentacle.

Sea Stars (Bingtang Lao in Balinese)

The other cool thing we noticed during low tide were the local seaweed farmers. They’d tie the seaweed to wooden stakes in patches, which was apparently really hard work, and they only made two to three dollars a day.

But it was fun to see the seaweed stakes protrude from the water like half submerged fences and the farmers carting seaweed in their boats or in baskets balanced on their heads.

Scuba diving was exhilarating, the high point seeing mantas swim inches away, close enough to touch. But Dad’ll pretty much cover that in his vastly more detailed Nusa Lembongan post. Moving on.

It was fun to relax for a week or so, and meet the other family there. Going out to dinner every night and swapping stories of travel and travel recommendations was always fun. As was most everything we did there. The only thing that limited our stay was money, since there was no ATM on the entire island. We managed to scrape together our cash and make it for as long as possible, but eventually we had to pack and leave on the same tiny boat we came on. From there we went to Bali mainland, easily got a Taxi (As there was no shortage of them) and went to Ubud, where we are residing now. It’s a great place with lots of natural things to see here, and it’s been really fun. We’ll try and get the next few blog posts up as soon as possible.

-Bjorn