Bali diaries, September 2015

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

The month I spent in Bali was both peaceful and intense. In view of the situation that I found myself in, at a point in my life when having a good plan seemed the most important thing, I had to learn to be patient and let go.

The plan at first was to spend a week or two in Bali making time while waiting for the Australian visa to be ready, which supposedly shouldn’t have taken long. But things got delayed and I ended up spending the whole month. Waiting, hoping.

As the days went by uncertainty became more and more unbearable, it began to look increasingly possible to have the visa denied and see all my plans fall apart. At first, this idea scared the hell outta me because after all, I had no plan B. Australia was IT. But then my perception began to change and I adopted a different point of view, one much more useful. I accepted that I couldn’t change the situation, I couldn’t control it. And what I had to do was focusing on things that only depended on me. For instance, enjoying my time in Ubud, a place that I had been dreaming about for so long. Now I was finally there, so I decided to really use my time and energy wisely.

Many days were spent just wandering, exploring the island. I would rarely make plans beyond the next day. But now I remember with special affection the moments of peace and calm of the days in which we only went out for a ride to the market or doing the laundry, or I was laying outside our door on the bench writing or reading a book. I don’t know how many books I got to read while I was there.

The important thing was to see the silver lining. If it wasn’t for the whole visa drama, I would have never had the luck to spend a whole month in Bali, which just a year before would have been a dream. I really think it got to a point towards the end where I didn’t even care anymore about the visa and Australia, I could only see infinite possibilities and imagine new adventures, make new plans.it

In the end, one of the best things in life is how wonderfully unpredictable it can be if you don’t try to control everything.

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This is my last post of Bali. and with this one, I finish the diaries of the months I spent traveling Asia. It makes me both happy and sad. I could not explain it. I just wish I would have written more of my travel diaries in this blog. I’m more keen to share my writing now than I was a few months ago. And I think I may go back to some older posts and write some of my thoughts from my travel journal to go with the photos because I’m not so concerned anymore about how good or bad my writing in English is, it is just one more learning process I enjoy, both writing and sharing.

Video by Albert N. Romero