Our Arrival in Bali — The Beginning of Our Adventure

We arrived in Bali at 2 am local time after 26 hours of travel, with our two exhausted children in tow. Stepping off the plane, our senses were overloaded by a cloud of warm, sticky air that was thick with a sweet fragrance that we recognized, but couldn’t quite place.

We’d just flown to Bali from Los Angeles, via Manila. It hadn’t been a great series of flights. Our first flight had been delayed at LAX, which meant that making our connection in Manila was a virtual impossibility. By the time we were supposed to arrive in Manila, our connecting flight would have already left. So we’d spent much of the first leg of the flight worrying about how we were going to manage navigating the inevitable hours-long delay at an unfamiliar airport in the middle of the night with two kids who were already so tired they couldn’t even stand. But we got lucky — half the people on our plane were also on the connecting flight to Bali, and the airline decided to hold the connecting flight until everyone from the first flight could board.

As we snaked our way through customs in Bali, it dawned on us. This was the day that we had been dreaming about for years. We were here.

Almost. After collecting our luggage, we attempted to exit the airport. Unfortunately, we had missed a sign somewhere along the way letting us know that there was an app that we were supposed to have downloaded and filled out prior to exiting the terminal — essentially a customs declaration form. So we had to stand aside, on the wrong side of a gate that stood between us and our freedom, and fill out what may be the longest customs declaration app form on earth, times four. Or at least that’s how it felt at the time.

And then, we were through. Starting our trip of a lifetime.

We avoided the gauntlet of local merchants positioned around the exit — most of whom were hawking kitschy souvenirs you can get wherever you’re staying for a much better price — and quickly found the driver that we had pre-arranged to take us to our Airbnb in Sanur.

Driving through Bali in the middle of the night was a trip, being thoroughly discombobulated after 26 solid hours of travel, and having no idea where we were. The silver lining to our late arrival was that there was none of that Bali traffic that you hear so much about. But even at that time of night, with minimal traffic, there were scooters and motorcycles zipping all around us in what at first seemed to be total chaos, but what we would soon realize was a carefully orchestrated cadence that was decidedly foreign, but also oddly calming. It was the first of many times that the push and pull between order and disorder in Bali — and the resulting harmony between two forces so at odds with each other — revealed itself to us.

Somehow, we made it to our villa, put the kids to bed, and abruptly passed out. Our sleep was cut short a few very short hours later by a mix of jet-lag and the cacophony of urban wildlife — roosters, feral cats, stray dogs, songbirds, and any number of other creatures big and small — welcoming the first signs of dawn.

We got up, stepped out into the garden, and revelled in the beauty of our new surroundings in the light of day. As we explored the area around our villa, we noticed the many small offerings put out on the laneway by our neighbours — intricately designed palm-leaf baskets filled with flowers and treats arranged with precision, each with a small stick of incense burning on top.

It was that moment that we finally placed the exotic yet familiar scent we were welcomed by when we stepped off the plane, and which thickened the air with a sweet, smoky fragrance everywhere across the island. And we realized that our new life had finally begun.