Bali - Pick a School and Find a House - Fast
We arrived at our permanent destination - Bali, Indonesia. Although this time would be a temporary stop with the goals of 1. Selecting a school for our kids to attend and 2. Finding a house to live in through December.
I’d read a lot about Bali traffic, so I picked a house via AirBnB to stay at - the Ocean View Yellow House - on a property outside of town. This was also an opportunity to see if this house might work for our long term rental. However, we arrived in the middle of Balinese kite festival which was taking place next door. In Bali, they take their kites seriously. I’m talking dozens of kite teams with about a dozen people per team. The kites are about 30 feet / 10 meters each and are held to the ground with a piece of rope and 6-8 people holding the line. With the amount of tension in play between the wind on the large kites and the people holding the end of the line, the ropes (made of nylon or metal or something like that) humm loudly. It’s pretty cool to hear.
The kite festival meant our GoJek (Bali’s version of Uber/Lyft) couldn’t take us all the way to the house we’d rented so we needed to press our way through hordes of people with all of our luggage for the remaining 500 meters. Splash landing in Bali.
The house and area was very rustic and a nice calming intro to Bali. It was in the middle of rice fields and next to a black beach, which was cool, but it ended up being a little too far outside of town, for us. After 3 days we moved to the Inna Beach Garden Hotel in Sanur where we booked two adjoining rooms due to the smaller standard bed sizes in Asia.
From the two residences, we checked out the two areas of greater Denpasar (the major city in Bali) in which our two target schools, Bali Island School and Canggu Community School, were located. We would be choosing from Sanur on the east side of Denpasar and North Kuta on the west side. The two areas were VERY different. The western side is where most of the tourists stay. There are tons of restaurants, hotels, hostels, shopping malls, surf shops, and other amenities catered to westerners. The waves are large, great for surfing but dangerous for kids, and there are lots of bars on the beach. However, there was tons of traffic and the area was virtually unwalkable. Many of the roads didn’t have sidewalks so you were walking on tiny streets with tons of traffic passing in both directions. I’d read about Bali traffic, but I couldn’t believe this. The issue is that the population has expanded significantly due to westerners moving to Bali as well as Indonesians moving here from other parts of the country due to Bali’s strong economy. However, the roads are very narrow and the buildings alongside the roads have been built long ago and abut against the roadside making any road expansion very difficult. Alas, no road expansions occur for the most part and Bali’s traffic worsens each year.
The Sanur side is smaller and more tranquil but still has an area developed for westerners with restaurants and the like. It’s more of the family-oriented side. The beach is protected by a reef so the waves are virtually non existent so you can let the kids run wild. The commute to school would be easy. No brainer, right? It actually turned out to be a difficult a hard decision because we had met some great new friends on the Canggu/North Kuta side - Lucas and Teresa - who were from Soledad’s hometown of Santiago Del Estero, Argentina. Plus, Lucas and Teresa were also already introducing us to others in the area.
In the end, we chose the Sanur side. The idea of moving to a new place and being bombarded with traffic and having to vigilantly watch the kids anytime we went to the beach was too much.
Both schools likely would have been good enough. Although the Bali Island School had the stronger reputation for academics and bing a close knit community of parents and students.
Decision one made - Bali Island School.
The second decision, where to live, proved difficult. We now knew we wanted to live in Sanur near the school, but we also wanted to live within a block or two of the beach. AirBnB villas were expensive to rent long term, and real estate agents seemed to rep and show only the houses they or their company listed (versus in the US where an agent will take you to any house). Doing this work with kids was going to be very slow and very stressful, so I took the home search alone and Soledad hung out with the kids. I hammered dozens of web sites, sent messages to real estate agents about properties that proved to not actually be located in the listed area or were no longer for rent. Because I knew where we wanted to live, I then just started walking the streets. I talked to cab drivers - cab drivers know everything. And suddenly I was seeing 5 different homes. But, none of them were great. Too small, too dusty, not sufficient for a family of 4 for 5 months. Slow moving.. I started to stress a bit because I felt we were losing our summer looking for a rental house.
Finally, I ran into a French expat. I met him by walking up to his office asking if it was a house for rent (yes many of the businesses offices look like nice homes here). He told me he’d had the same issue long ago and that I should go to https://www.balimoves.com/. They are a real estate agent that specializes in the Sanur area and placed nice long term rentals to many westerners.
I checked the rental properties on Bali Moves, felt optimistic, got hooked up with one of their gents, and we looked at several houses quickly. One was very Balinese, had good style, a shared pool with 3 other villas, and was a block from the beach. At $2,000 per month, it was more than I was hoping to pay for rent, but my decision making was on a clock and we were asking to rent for only 5 months, whereas most Bali long term rentals are minimum 1 year and sometimes unfurnished. We signed the contract and then I had to wire money in U$ currency. That also proved time consuming.
In this middle period, Soledad and I did have a gut check discussion about whether or not we should pull the rip-cord on Bali and move somewhere else. The difficulty in finding a house and the amount of traffic were a bit shocking. That said, Sanur was very good traffic wise. However if we left Sanur to visit other parts of the greater Denpasar area it would mean time and traffic (e.g., 50 minutes to go 10 miles). We admitted that Denpasar wasn’t the idyllic version of Bali that we’d ideally hoped for. That Bali had gone away 20 years ago. However, we also acknowledged that the old Bali likely wouldn’t have had 5-6 international schools to choose from nor as many international restaurants steps outside our new front door.
The bank I was using for wires - E*Trade Bank - wouldn’t allow me to complete a wire transfer fully online. I needed to call and/or fill out a PDF document, upload it, upload my drivers license, and also take a call in the middle of the night to approve the wire transfer. I was still working out the US to international lifestyle kinks and was paying for it. Because the effort to make an international wire transfer (with my current skills) was so great, I wanted to wire the deposit and full rent money at the same time. My real estate agent wouldn’t let me do that. So, I wired the $1,000 deposit, signed the contract, and then moved my efforts to our next stage - where would we go with our remaining summer vacation time?
Decision two done. We would live on Jl. Kesari No. 1, Sanur.
It was now June 28. Classes at Bali Island School started on August 5 and we wanted to be back a week earlier on July 28. So, we were looking at a month of summer vacation and counting. My original thought for this portion of our trip was to take one of the numerous, easy cheap flights to Bangkok. From there we would rent a car and explore Thailand and Cambodia. We’d also work in a round trip to Myanmar which we had visited in December 2015 and adored. However... (there were many howevers early on in our travels as we learned the regional ropes), I learned that Thailand, Cambodia,and coastal Myanmar were in their rainy seasons. Crap! At this time, Milagro’s whines about wanting to go snorkeling with her dad, instead of alone, were increasing. And, I still had more work to do.
Thus, eight hours of internet research later, multiple travel site reviews, multiple itinerary version adjustments, and one stressed out Michael, we found the solution. We would continue to stay in the Eastern area of the globe so as to not have to readjust dramatically to time zones again in the lead up to school, but we’d go north of the monsoons.
We would fly to Mongolia via Hong Kong for 2 weeks. Then, we would head to northern Myanmar via Beijing for two weeks. Our plane left in 1.5 days. Time to get in some power beach time and find a place to store our bags while gone.
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