Staying Long? Our Bali Long Stay
Part of our strategy in travelling as a family with young children is to mix longer stays of around one month with periods of more frequent movement. Our thinking is that this will allow us to visit many of the destinations on our bucket list while also ensuring that we’re not perpetually exhausted on this “life break” (perhaps more aptly described as “life beginning”).
Knowing that we would be totally drained at the start of this trip from both the 26 hours of flights and the hangover from our frenetic lives back home in Toronto — full-time work in demanding jobs, parenting young children, and juggling social commitments, all while planning for this trip and packing our lives into a storage container — we chose to start our trip with a long stay in the beachside city of Sanur, Bali.
We picked Sanur because we’d read that it was a good spot for families, with many affordable cafes, restaurants, and services; calm waters for the children to play in (a long reef protects its beaches from large waves); much less traffic than somewhere like Canggu or even the southwest coast in general; a miles-long beachfront walking and biking path; a good variety of private villas and hotels; and a much more relaxed and family-friendly vibe than some of the other tourist hubs in Bali.
And now, having travelled around the island a fair amount and visited a number of other popular tourist destinations, including Ubud, the southwest coast, Nusa Dua, and Uluwatu, we’re confident that our choice was the right one for our family. The ocean here is much calmer, the prices on our meals are significantly lower (lunch on the beach for four is very possible for 20–30 USD), and the traffic is very manageable (no traffic jams yet, fingers crossed!).
We chose to stay at a private villa we booked via Airbnb instead of a larger hotel. This has allowed us to cook some of our own meals, enjoy the use of our own pool and garden, and have two separate bedrooms with an abundance of space for our family to spread out. Another big consideration for us is that Airbnbs also typically offer a substantial discount (often around 40–50%) on the nightly rate for month-long stays, which is a huge bonus.
As a result of our long stay here, our family has had time to fall into a pleasant rhythm, with our “normal” days starting with breakfast at home (after the kids or urban animals wake us up at the crack of dawn), swimming, schoolwork with the kids, going to the beach for lunch, coming home for the kids to do their reading (20 pages a day, using ebooks borrowed online from our local library back home), taking another swim, and cooking dinner or ordering in via Grab. And for full transparency, just in case all of this sounds too utopian, we also typically do a few hours of remote work in the evenings after the kids are in bed.
We’ve already had the chance to explore a lot of what Sanur has to offer and to gain a bit of an appreciation for the local way of life here. By staying in an area that’s home to mostly locals and expats, away from the hustle and bustle of the main tourist streets, we’ve had a slightly more traditional living experience, with all the good and bad that comes with it (we have admittedly already spotted a decent-sized and possibly venomous snake in our garden and had a small monitor lizard camp out in our kitchen, but those are stories for another day!).
That said, we might not choose to stay in this exact location again, if we had the opportunity, given that there is effectively a highway without proper pedestrian crossings that separates us from the beach/main commercial area of Sanur. But we are close enough that a Grab car can easily be ordered to take us to the beach for under 3USD (including a 50% tip for the driver), and the lower price of rentals in this area more than offsets this inconvenience.
In any event, a Grab usually beats a long walk in the heat on the road, with no sidewalks and all forms of motor vehicles flying past, anyways!