Holiday school

I am at “holiday school,” Michael keeps telling me. This is where I learn to be on holiday, a lesson that the last 40 years have not prepared me for. I am sitting looking out at the sea, which isn’t all that uncommon, granted, but in this case it’s the Indian Ocean, which does strike me as rather unusual. There are seaweed farms in the distance and the sound of the pool basketball game’s occasional highs and lows wafting up to our 10th floor room. This is Bali.

There are so many things that strike me about being here. There’s the sheer beauty of the place, the millions of colours of blue of the sea, the rumpled and rich tangle of greens in the wild space next to the hotel. There’s the gilded luxury of this resort, the nicest place I’ve ever stayed. I was disgusted that we were going to Nusa Dua, a gated resort community in the south of the island, designed to corral the upscale tourists in a manageable space. But this hotel was picked while I was working in Sydney, and it was selected for the 30 metre water slide and the interconnected series of pools. It seemed like a kind of Bali-lite to me, Disney Bali. And so it is, but geeze, how magnificently done this place is, Disney Bali or no.

We arrived yesterday, gasping into the heat and humidity of the afternoon. Bali, for those of you in the Northern hemisphere who think of New Zealand and Australia and Bali as close neighbours, is seriously far away from New Zealand (the key lesson here being that EVERYTHING is seriously far away from New Zealand). Three airplane rides—one of them 10.5 hours in a Singapore airlines plane that was state-of-the-art 10 years ago—and 20 minutes in a taxi and we were here, in the lofty open-air lobby of the Nikko Bali Resort.

I spent the whole trip not doing work. I didn’t particularly do anything else—there were no movies I wanted to watch or books I wanted to read—but I felt how strongly I was not doing work. It was like an itch I’m used to scratching or a hunger I was used to feeding and I was feeling the raw desire for it, the blind press to do something that I usually do. It was hard to resist.

This trip wasn’t planned originally as a way to test my holidaying skills. It was originally Naomi’s trip, planned for the time following her Bat Mitzvah to take the sting out of the fact that she would have her Bat Mitzvah far far from the centre of her Jewish life, far from her Jewish family and friends, far from the place where Bat Mitzvahs were a regular part of a teenage experience—rather than the semi-freakish event they are in New Zealand. But the press of the oddness, combined with everyone’s dissatisfaction at the lack of family at the event, made us postpone the Bat Mitzvah into a time in the future when we might hold it in the US. But then the question: What to do with the airplane tickets to Bali?

So Naomi’s trip became my trip, a celebration of my 40th birthday and a test of my capacity to be on holiday as this one is nearly twice what any holiday has been before (nearly 2 weeks). I’m not supposed to do anything that I feel like I’m supposed to do. This morning I didn’t work out. On the plane I didn’t work on my book. I put a vacation notice on my NZCER email. In one stunning move of self-restraint, I left my beautiful laptop at home. Zowie.

And so I’m here. Today, on our first full day, we splurged at the hotel breakfast buffet. We sat in a garden overlooking the sea, eating fruits we’d never seen before, and wondering at the range of breakfast-desires this hotel needs to serve: American tastes (eggs and bacon), Asian tastes (noodles and pork and hotpots bubbling away), European tastes (chocolate croissants, yoghurt, French cheeses). There were flower petals strewn on the tables. My tea was English, the juice guava, the water bottled. The waiters bowed as they saw us and opened doors as we walked through them. I changed into my bathing suit and went down the water slide with the kids again and again. I played pool volleyball (or, er, I tried to play pool volleyball but there wasn't as much volleying as you might want). To coax the kids out of the hot sun, we took them to the thing called a mall around here, another toe-dip into the actual Bali culture. Naomi had her hair braided into cornrows. Aidan had a henna tattoo of a dragon painted onto his bicep. We fingered sarongs and wooden carvings and tried to do the conversion math. What did it mean that the sundress was 149,000 rupiahs?

We wandered to a public beach where the sand had not been scrubbed so clean and the people in the water were as many shades of brown as there were shades of blue in the sea. (Here at the hotel there are many shades, but most of them have crispy pink undertones marking them as pasty-tourists unprepared for the Bali sun.) This is the more real Bali, and leads to conversations about poverty and wealth and what it means to be a developing nation (and what DOES it actually mean to be a developing nation?). And then for dinner, a little restaurant on a main street just out of Nusa Dua, is more real Bali still. Aidan’s half chicken was a seriously half chicken. Michael’s fish still had their heads. My veggie curry made me sweat more than the humid night air. Naomi ate rice. And we talked and laughed and ate and wandered with cars and motorbikes whizzing past. So THIS is holiday, when you just hang out with your kids and laugh and eat strange foods and listen to every kind of language all around you. This is my first test in holiday school. I think I will enjoy the next one.

ps careful readers will see aidan's new short hair. More pictures tomorrow!