Not Your Average Honeymoon

Without any conscious effort to do so, we had spent our entire honeymoon in countries that drive on the left. Also, each place we visited (other than a brief layover in the Narita airport) was new to both of us. On first-time visits, I tend to get a bit antsy like there aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish everything there is to do. Not this time, however, and that has to do with the nature of how we "planned" the trip. We sort of chose Bali as our focal point of the honeymoon, but the dilemma was how to get there.

There are no direct flights from Los Angeles, so we bookended it with Singapore and Sydney, cities which don't have copious museums or attractions like a Paris, a Tokyo, or a Rome. I mentioned in a previous post that the mass transit system somehow made the top 10 on TripAdvisor for Singapore. And having rode aforementioned transit system, it's nothing to write home about. It's clean and efficient, but if you're going to have credit card and mobile pay options at the ticket kiosks and then only accept cash, the bugs have not been completely ironed out.

Point being, Singapore and Sydney have one or two "must-see" attractions, but beyond that it is whatever you make of it. For Singapore it was Gardens by the Bay, and for Sydney it was the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. This made it easy to find time to relax because after seeing these "must-sees," we could just see where the day would take us. I was relaxed, Nicole was relaxed, and as a whole, the trip was stress-free, in spite of six different flights being involved and some standby ticket woes.


I want to ensure that I do not sound like I'm picking on Singapore and Sydney. They are, in fact, very interesting cities, which turned out differently than expected. Singapore, which calls itself, "Asia's World City," was an interesting mix of old and new -- heavily favoring the new. And due to its small size and geographic location, it has a unique culture that is really a blend of multiple cultures -- Chinese, Malay, Indian, and even a small European faction. The food reflects this, and every meal is some kind of fusion. Nicole kept pointing out Italian restaurants and saying, "Look!, Italian is really popular here, so if you want an authentic meal, we should get Italian!" Clearly, this is nothing more than Nicole up to her old tricks. She surprisingly did not join me in eating Hainanese chicken rice with curry.

Singapore is often talked about as being one of the cleanest cities in the world. Nicole did remark on how her pack of gum mysteriously vanished after processing through customs. I was reading that the cleanliness of Singapore is almost a necessity due to its muggy tropical climate. Any garbage left stagnant for any length of time becomes a health risk. Steep fines are imposed for littering, and they are enforced. The punishments for crimes in Singapore do seem a bit much for the crime committed, but perhaps it is working. Our customs forms to enter the country said, "Possession of illegal drugs is punishable by death." And that's no joke. At a minimum, one can face some good thrashings by caning (a bit archaic, but perhaps preferred to life in prison or . . . death). They have used the death penalty on more people for drug offenses than murder, and this includes drugs like marijuana, which is now viewed in the U.S. with the same reaction as Diet Coke. It does all seem a bit harsh, but then again, the policies are working. Crime, drug use, and even smaller offenses like littering are extremely low. I also saw no homelessness. A lot can be learned from Singapore, but maybe the caning shouldn't be one of their exports.

With Sydney, we found familiarity -- a virtual Los Angeles down under, but somehow friendlier, more accessible, and disturbingly more expensive. The food was almost exactly the same as our systems were accustomed to eating back in LA. We ate burgers, pasta, waffles, muffins, and pancakes . . . basically the main staples of my diet. Surely things outside Sydney change a bit, and the Outback/Uluru, the Great Barrier Reef, and other sites would make our to-do list on the next excursion to Australia.

But as previously mentioned, Bali was the center point of the trip, a place where we felt we could spend a lot of time relaxing and recovering from the chaos, stress, and people-pleasing that consumed our lives for the past year. We did not want to be at the beaches, which seem to be the more popular destination in Bali by far. They just seemed to be a little trashy, crowded, and had a weird vibe. . . not to mention a fairly high rate of crime. We chose Ubud as it seemed (on paper at least) to be more relaxed and removed from all of that. Our hotel was amazing with a bathroom alone larger than a good number of hotels I've stayed at. It was immaculately landscaped and decorated to look like an aged temple. Going to the pool felt like an Indiana Jones adventure. Once leaving the property, however, the town of Ubud is perhaps not what either of us was expecting. One, the sidewalks are extremely narrow, so this results in walking in the street a lot. Two, the streets are not particularly safe due to pretty erratic driving -- the worst offenders being western tourists who mistakenly believe they can ride a motorbike. Three, white/hippie/dime-store yogi/instagram tourism has completely taken over the town of Ubud and it is just the worst.

I had not seen Eat Pray Love, prior to our trip to Bali, but having seen parts of it the other day, it is pretty accurate. While the viewer of the movie is supposed to take away that Julia Roberts character is becoming enlightened, centered, and balanced, one cannot ignore that the only people she speaks to in Bali are all white people looking to find the same things (whatever those even mean). It is extremely disingenuous and hypocritical for these hippie conquistadors to just march into a country, claim an area as their own and then act like they are part of a culture they never knew anything about. In fact, they have essentially influenced Ubud so much that the town now revolves around white people pretending to be something else. Nowhere was this more evident than Zest, a vegan restaurant with rave reviews and terrible food. The clientele dress in sarongs as their token nod to Indonesian culture, and wear jewelry or do their hair in such a way to look different than one would walking through the streets of America or Europe. There are two problems with this. In their quest to all look different, they all end up looking the same. The second issue is that it's all an act. They pretend to be zen, take a selfie, check how many "likes" they receive on said picture, and plot out their next fake "experience," such as visiting rice paddies that are no longer in use for making actual rice.

They have, in a sense, created an entirely fake life in which they have devoted all time and effort to their pseudo life that exists on the internet, where they try to impress people they will never meet. And it's not just the tourist crowd that rubbed me the wrong way. The hypocrisy continued with religion. There are numerous Hindu temples around Ubud, many which are closed to the public. The few that are open to visitors have a strict dress code . . . sometimes. It is inconsistently enforced because at night, there is money to be made in the dance shows. If you turn someone away for baring too much shoulder, that's 800,000 rupiah ($50) of revenue lost. I understand money talks and all that, but if it's ok at night, it should be ok during the day. You cannot be both welcoming to all, and hours later turn away a woman for menstruating because they're considered too "dirty." The entire local population has been reduced to assimilating into perpetuating a myth that was created by white western tourists for white western tourists. It is as real as Morocco in Epcot or Paris Casino in Las Vegas. It was once a beautiful area with rice paddies that reflected the sun's glow without some guy from Montréal wearing a rice hat for a photo op or some woman from Portland hosting yoga retreats for other western tourists.

Many people come to live in Ubud because they have been led to believe that it is free-thinking, artsy and carefree. This is true on the surface. Ubud is where one can swing toward the heavens without a care in the world ($35/Limit 12 swings). The traffic is bad (and frankly dangerous) for a town of its size. The newspaper reported on two men being arrested for running a Facebook page as a means for gay people to find each other. Had I not met up with one of my Indonesian students from flight school, I wouldn't have had a single authentic Indonesian experience during our stay. The restaurant he took us to was the only one during our visit where Indonesians outnumbered western tourists. So, Ubud is polluted, intolerant, and simulated. If the westerners who flock to Ubud wouldn't stand for these kinds of things back in London or Marseilles or Seattle, why are they ok with them thousands of miles away in another country? It is simply one big lie that people simply fail to realize or choose to ignore.

When we stopped short of taking a United flight home and instead hopped on a flight to Fiji, we
thought we were being a bit crazy. And yet, there we were on our own island in the middle of the South Pacific, watching the vibrant and clear blue waters from our hammock. But it wasn't real. I mean, yes the ocean was real. The hammock was real. But I have the sense to know that this is not daily life on Fiji. It was delightful and relaxing and all those wonderful things, but I am not going to move to Fiji tomorrow and pretend that the Fijian way of life is all coconuts and paddle-boarding. Having visited and lived on Hawaii, I know that there is a pretty significant difference between perception and reality. When I lived on Oahu, I never drank a Mai Tai, only surfed twice, and subsisted on SPAM and plate lunches (none which included pineapple).

The point is this...in spite of what it may sound like from this post, we actually had a fantastic time on our atypical honeymoon adventures. The point is to use caution when evaluating your experiences as a traveler. There is a growing trend of people my age pursuing an "authentic" experience without much regard to what reality actually is. People can go to a place like Ubud and take a cooking class to make Indonesian food! Super authentic! Or is it? . . . Did these overpriced cooking classes exist before the influx of western tourists? Methinks not. I am reminded by a quote from fake movie president Andrew Shepherd in The American President:



Lewis: They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

Andrew:...People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.



And that, ladies and gentlemen, is really the point I'm trying to drive home. You can have a great time on vacation, but recognize that your experience may not reflect daily life. I really liked Cuba. Cuba has a history of human rights violations. I liked Israel. Israel is always involved in some sort of controversial settlement dispute or military action. I have always enjoyed Japan. Japan refuses to accept responsibility for the war crimes it committed in the past and has a habit of ignoring its own faults. I am an American. America favors special interests, enjoys putting people in groups for electoral gain, and is somehow simultaneously free, welcoming, and forward-thinking, and yet incredibly backward, racist, and misogynistic. Any country has the potential to be great, but every country is not without its own problems. And for one's honeymoon, one is supposed to sit back and relax. We did just that, but we did something else. We questioned things. And that's ok too.

Singapore and Beyond

It was a quick trip to Singapore and we had to check out by noon today. In the morning, we spent about an hour just trying to pay for a ticket to ride the MRT downtown. You see, despite a credit card slot, and despite a super fancy system of being able to use one's phone as a ticket (supposedly), neither method of payment actually worked. We went to an ATM and I thought the $10 SGD notes would be fine for paying for a $5.60 SGD metro card, but the machines refused anything larger than a $5 SGD note.

After going to a hotel for change, we attempted the machines once more and were finally on our way downtown. We had a short walk in the 90 degree heat to find the Merlion, a mythical creature symbolic of Singapore. After all of our efforts, and my constant vocalizing of the word, "Murrrr-lion," Nicole was suitably annoyed and perhaps thought this statue was a "Meh"-Lion at best. From Merlion park we walked to a different metro stop and headed back to the hotel.



Now would be a decent time to remark that in spite of Singapore's modern ambitions and the whole cashless society thing, it has really failed in areas of basic directional needs. The signage is poorly placed. Every time we were following a sign to something, the signs would abruptly end and you would have to make guesses at the next intersection. For example, if the last sign you saw said to go straight, you could reasonably assume that you are to continue straight until told otherwise. This is not the Singaporean thought process, however. You are to go straight until you end up blocked by a science museum, realizing you've gone too far, turning around, then noticing that only after making a u-turn, do yo see a sign oriented your way now telling you to make a right and go down an escalator, which then leads nowhere, until you reverse again and see a sign telling you that it meant the elevator, which is TOTALLY different.

This pattern continued at the airport, where we had some time to explore. It has been repeatedly ranked the #1 airport in the world by various publications. The bar had been set high for our expectations. Check-in was easy enough, especially considering we were flying standby. Nicole had a bit of trouble clearing emigration because her fingerprints from the entry did not seem to match her thumbprints on her way out. I kept close watch on her until they just shrugged their shoulders and released her into the terminal. In an unrelated note, all gum in her possession mysteriously disappeared and it's
unclear at which stage of our travels this occurred. My nail trimmers were confiscated as well. I rolled my eyes when told it was too sharp, which was a dangerous move on my part. One that is surely punishable by caning.

In any event, we had a few hours to explore Changi Airport, and it was fine, clean, and adequate, but it didn't knock my socks off. In many areas, the ceilings were very low and the carpeting was something out of the 70s. Places that had been promoted by the airport's main website underwhelmed. A cactus lounge, for example, an outdoor space with . . . cacti, was really just a smoking area. After killing some time, we boarded our KLM flight to Bali, a two hour flight away, which for some reason, required a Boeing 777-300ER to make the trip. After clearing customs, we were assaulted by taxi hawkers.

One basically followed me into the bathroom. I was very much losing my patience for this kind of thing, and I refused to reward their aggression. We approached a quiet older man standing next to a large sign with fixed rate cabs and called it good enough. After dealing with a surprisingly large amount of traffic, we arrived at our hotel in Ubud more than an hour after leaving the airport. It is our hope that the masses of crowds from earlier ended up just staying in trashy beach hotels and that we found a bit of an oasis up in the hills. So far at least, our place is very relaxing...

The H-Moon

Although United currently boasts one of the longest non-stop flights from LAX to Singapore, we elected to break up the long flight, by stopping off in Japan. We weren't entirely sure if we'd have another 7 hour flight in us after arriving, but ultimately decided it would be less stressful to just push on and not have to worry about going back to the airport the following day. We arrived in Singapore around midnight and took a taxi to our hotel, where we promptly collapsed.

After a night's sleep, we were recharged (at least temporarily) to go out and explore the city. We were about a mile and a half from the Gardens by the Bay attraction, which other than eating and shopping, is pretty much the only major thing to do in Singapore. Even TripAdvisor recognizes this fact and lists the MRT (the city's subway system) as one of the top things to do. By noon, we'd seen it all, including the Cloud Forest section of the park, which is an extra fee. It was quite hot and humid out, and Nicole was struggling with her shorts, which seemed to be a few sizes too big.

We walked aimlessly around the Marina Bay Sands Hotel/Resort and Shopping Center, but the stores were a bit high brow. Nicole was kind of looking for a belt so as to not accidentally moon someone (which is a crime punishable by caning presumably), but neither of us had the budget to buy a $1000 belt from a store like Versace. The Loft and the GAP certainly did not have a presence here. Singapore is kind of a crazy place. It's like the entire city was built in 2012. It's only in tucked away back streets, that a hint of old architecture seeps through. Everything else is just some kind of massive glass architectural wonder less than ten years old.

After recharging back at the hotel, we ventured out once again -- first for crepes at a French cafe nearby. Then we walked back to Gardens by the Bay because they light up all the fake trees at night. They also have a sort of light show that they do to music, but having been previously underwhelmed by such light shows, I didn't make it a point to sit around and wait for it to happen. The same could not be said about the hundreds of people that seemingly showed up out of nowhere to do just that.

Nicole and I kept walking to less traversed areas of the park to escape the crowds. We could still see the fake trees from a distance and could witness how one would periodically change colors or light up its branches every once in a while. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that was worth getting bumped into over and over again while simultaneously ruining 30 different selfies at any given moment.

We timed our exit from the gardens poorly and ended up in an ever growing mass of people who then merged with the crowds from the shopping center at Marina Bay Sands. Soon we felt very overwhelmed and the MRT kiosks would not accept credit card for a single ride and the line for taxis was about 100 people long. Luckily the line moved fairly quickly and we got dropped off near our hotel, where I grabbed a bowl of Hainanese Chicken Rice with Curry. I cleaned my plate and my sinuses before going back to the hotel to collapse once more.