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.