Have Our Feelings About Living in Bali Long Term Changed?

Bali Life: Do We Still Want To Live In Bali Long Term?

A few people have asked us recently if, after recent incidents (read about Eira’s accident here and the earthquakes here), our feelings for living in Bali long term have changed.

A few months ago we were absolutely in love with Bali- we even wrote 10 reasons to move to Bali with kids. We loved the weather, the chilled people, the cost of living, the beautiful architecture and abundant nature. We had started planning to come back next March, if we could find employment that allowed us to stay here longer term. Mum was thinking of teaching yoga here and for the first time ever, we could see somewhere that we wanted to settle.

So, has anything changed?

The short answer is yes. Patrick and I were talking the other day about our feelings for Bali now, and the two feelings we have are those of fondness and disappointment. The best way I can explain it is if you were completely in love with someone, and they cheated on you. Part of you would still be in love with them and the other bit would want to forget about them. That’s pretty much how we feel now.

As much as I encourage people to travel with their kids, the fact is that some countries are physically safer than others. Obviously the UK doesn’t have earthquakes of any significance; it also has better followed health and safety laws. It also has better healthcare. Those things, although they on most days won’t affect people too much, can make one hell of a mess when they all cave in on you at the same time, as happened last month. That and the language barrier make a significant number of obstacles when considering whether or not to live in Bali long term or travel as we have been with kids.

We have no plans to return to Bali in the near future, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because we have made fabulous friends here and there are many elements that create a great lifestyle for kids- namely the outdoorsy-ness. There are also ample opportunities for getting involved in projects to help and serve the community. That said, we can find those wherever we are in the world, and as part of our new perspective we know that we will make the most of anywhere that we end up living.

For now we do, to a point, want to forget about Bali. We had planned to get the girls some of the little wooden musical instruments that are made locally, but when I saw them the other day the overwhelming feeling was that I just don’t want anything related to Bali in our home. It’s not remotely logical and I was surprised at that feeling because I’m not the sentimental one in the family, but it is what it is and for now the fewer reminders, the better. We feel exceptionally lucky to be citizens of the UK and have somewhere stable and safe to return to.

We’re really looking forward to getting photos printed off of our adventures over the past year and I think having some kind of collage of the incredible moments that we experienced will go a long way to re-framing our travels. Full time travel was extremely intense, with  intensely good bits and intensely frustrating bits, and living in Bali was a good balance of enjoying outdoor life and warm weather, without a gazillion beaurocratic issues and the general challenges of travel in Asia.

It’s certainly not the ending that we imagined to our travels, but among the sadness there are so many good bits. This blog has developed a lot since we left the UK and I’m proud to say that last month I had close to 100,000 page views. More and more people are reading each month and it is something I love and will continue working on- posting about fun learning, homeschooling, general life, veganism, mental health, and our travels (suffice to say it won’t be Asia for a while ;)). We’ve got a fantastic community of readers and followers on Instagram and I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done to create it.

We’ve had once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and I’ll do a separate post on our travel highlights of the past year, with photos.

We’ve also met some of the most amazing people in the past year- charity workers in Thailand, friends in Sri Lanka and Bali, local people and travellers from all over the world. We’ve seen and experienced some incredible acts of kindness and meeting new people is definitely one of the coolest things about our year. I’ll do a separate post about people we’ve met and their stories, because they are worth telling.

So that’s our thoughts, squished into a blog post! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our adventures over the past year and that you’ll continue to come along on our journey.