Work travel balance is tough.
So … after an awesome solo trip to Sweden in September last year, I was all hyped up and started coming up with ideas for the next solo trip. The ideas got me more hyped up and I was sure the next solo trip was gonna be just an epic one. October came and I made my 2nd futile attempt at summiting a mountain in as many months, this time with colleagues, at Gunung Rinjani (might write about it another time) in Lombok, Indonesia. Nonetheless a nice trip with with possibly the easiest people to travel with (which is hard to come by). Anyway, back to the topic, post trip, work started piling up, I got caught up with some other interesting matters, and conveniently allowed travel planning to slip down the priority list.
March soon arrived. I have to clear a couple of days of leave from 2016 this month, and had a few to spare from this year. A little late for an epic 2 week solo trip out into some wilderness/ wildness. So I did the most sensible thing, grabbed ‘Eat Pray Love’ from the library and flew down to Bali. That’ll probably be the next post but as a quick summary, I skipped all the attractions, found myself in an area seldom frequented by weekend tourists but packed with long term visitors, found couple of interesting things to do, and left after 5 days, possibly as one of the shortest staying visitors to the area. It was something new for me, a trip without any sights to tick off the list, just things to experience. Maybe I should do stuff like that more often. Not the part on forgetting about travel / leave planning. But building trips around experiences rather than attractions. We’ll see.
There are few places in Bali where you won’t see the sea, but this wasn’t one of them.
Next week though, I’ll be heading for the first time to the Philippines, to a region that seems somewhat overlooked by most tourists, offering landscapes vastly different from what Philippines is regularly known for. Pretty excited for that trip, with the same awesome group as the one to Rinjani. 1.5 years since graduation, I’m starting to realize that it isn’t easy planning epic trips while immersing in a full time job (even as I enjoy it). We’ll be having guided tours for the trip as this was decided late too and we’re short of time to do our own planning, racing to complete projects before we fly. Regardless of how it turns out, I’m confident there’ll be interesting material, so stay tuned!
Back soon with lots of love,
Aaron
