Superstarxtala Production #18: 💙Love Bali💙 (Eat·Pray·Love Capital...

Hello again, dear Steemians!💙

I was drawn to Bali when I first watched Eat Pray Love in 2010. Primarily, I was a fan of Julia Roberts, but when I learned that the movie was adapted from Liz Gilbert’s bestselling book “Eat, Pray, Love”, which is her memoir, I became more drawn to it. Not that I was married and got divorced, but I was undergoing pretty much the same situation at that time, a little lost and confused about my life that I wanted to do something bold, something out of the ordinary like what she did.

In the early months of 2017, I just had the same feeling again and since I was also turning 30 that year, I thought of letting myself do just that, something bold and out of the ordinary (well, for myself). As soon as I saw a seat-sale for Bali, I just booked that ticket and started planning the trip alone. This was supposed to be my first solo travel.

However after a few months of planning, that feeling of being lost and confused seemed to go away. Perhaps, like what I always say to myself, it’s only a phase and it will pass. Then when I was booking my hotels, most room rates were already good for 2 persons. While the hotel prices in Bali are relatively cheap, I felt like it was still such a waste that I am paying for a room for two when I’m only travelling alone. At first, I just thought of bringing my mom with me, but I do not want to spend the entire 6-days just with her, we might drive each other crazy. Haha So I just then decided to bring her and my dad instead.

Okay, to be honest, aside from that, I was also a little scared to be really doing it alone. Remember I wrote about this in my blog about my first solo travel experience? Lastly, it was going to be my 30th birthday and I just realized it would be a little sad to celebrate alone. And that’s how I ended up in doing this travel with my parents.

Similar to my previous posts about my first solo travel, I will be writing about this in parts. I am hoping though than I can cover my 5 full day tour in just 2-parts.

So we had an early flight from NAIA Terminal 3 on a Saturday at 4AM in the morning and arrived in Ngurah Rai International Airport at 7: 50 AM. It was almost a 4-hour flight from Manila. Since I was travelling with my parents who are already in their senior years and it would be difficult for them to just travel like I’d usually do with my friends (DIY), I decided to just book a tour that includes almost everything, from airport transfers, hotel transfers, entrance tickets to the places we were going to visit, free daily lunch and drinking water supply (mind you, sometimes a bottled water in Bali is more expensive than a bottle of Bintang!).

The tour was very convenient because you wouldn’t worry too much anymore about getting a ride and argue with the cab drivers about how much they would charge you. Based on my research and sadly, it is known that some cabs in Bali would charge a hefty price for a ride and Uber by the way is not welcomed in the island. If you plan on booking one, you need to do it discreetly because otherwise, you and the driver might get mobbed. Another good thing about the tour is that your driver can also be your instant tour guide because they already know so much about the places, plus instant photographer! We all know that sometimes it’s just hard to ask strangers to take your photos, right?

You can know more about this tour here. I only availed the 5-days and 4-nights tour because I also wanted to spend a day in Nusa Lembongan Island, which unfortunately they did not offer.

What’s also good about them is that they allow you to make some adjustments on the tour depending on the schedule of your flights, like what I did. I also asked them if it’s okay that I squeeze in my Nusa Lembongan Tour on our Day-4 in Bali and just take the remaining days of the package in the following day and they agreed. Our driver also assisted us already in looking for an organized tour in Nusa Lembongan. By the way, depending on the traffic on a day, the driver might suggest that you already visit some places that are scheduled on the other days, which is actually convenient to save time.

The entire 5-day tour cost us 165USD each, while our Nusa Lembongan day-trip tour cost us 65USD each. So it’s a total of 265USD each, which was pretty okay and since all tours already included our lunch and while our hotels also included daily breakfasts, we only needed to spend for our dinner for each night. Food prices in Bali are a little more expensive than the food here in the Philippines. Our daily budget for dinner for the three of us was 500,000 Indonesian Rupiah or 35USD per night (or 11USD/person x 5[1-lunch plus 4 dinners] = roughly 60USD), but we were surprised that we would always end up saving some Rupiahs each night. Overall, we spent 325USD/each for the 5 full days and 5 nights (our 6th day was already the day we leave the island, which was also considered as the 5th day of our tour package).

I will talk more about the places I visited on the next part, but for now, here’s our itinerary and some snaps from our first day in Bali.