Bali has provided me with a chance to wear a sarong for the first time in my life, and to look ahead to my homecoming and an end to all this indulgence. The sarong was a brief experience, brought about by the fact that some temples won't allow visitors to enter without one. I was loaned this shiny turquoise number with pink trim, and walked around the beautiful Batwan temple as part of a day tour to the town of Ubud on Wednesday. I think David Beckham carried off this particular fashion statement rather more convincingly than I did, but the temple was certainly worth it.
Bali continues to be a wonderfully relaxing place to visit, and has contrasted neatly with my mad dash around New Zealand. The slower pace of the week has allowed me to give more detailed thought to my return to the UK on March 28th, moving back into my London flat, and getting back to work.
Everyone I've spoken to who's taken a career break offers the same advice: when it ends the best thing to do is to throw yourself back into your former life...assuming you've kept it, and haven't set about dismantling it entirely. If you arrive back in the UK and have too much time to contemplate that a few weeks earlier you were climbing across a glacier or watching surfers on Kuta beach you might just turn around and run off again.
I've been lucky too. Bosses who said they'd like me back have been as good as their word. My approach was to leave any significant contact until the end of January, giving them two months to think up sufficient excuses to suggest I stay where I was. When the end of January came round I fired off the 'remember me' e-mails, and the replies I hoped for came back. Some of them even quite quickly.
My tenants have agreed to move out of my flat on March 31st, so I'll be back in there within a few days of my return. For a short while I'm imagining it'll feel like a new home rather than one I've lived in for nearly ten years. I'm also contemplating how quickly I should look to buy a car. I sold the last one before I came away, because I decided that the five thousand pounds it put in the bank was more useful as travel spending money not to mention the savings accrued as a result of insurance costs disappearing. In a fortnight's time, though, I may have to consider some new wheels.
One other little pledge; I want to continue the Spanish...or perhaps, more accurately, I want to resurrect the language I learned for a fortnight in November and which I am now in danger of forgetting. Conversations in Spanish with Australians, New Zealanders and Balinese were always going to be at something of a premium, and the three months which have elapsed since I sat in that Buenos Aires classroom haven't done a great deal for my espagnol. It's in my mind because an e-mail arrived earlier this week from the teacher whose flat I lived in for that fortnight, and I have to reply...in Spanish. Of course it's possible to cheat via the internet these days, but as you can imagine that thought hasn't even crossed my mind...
Finally a photograph from the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary near Ubud in Bali. Unlike the 'Koala Walk' in Kangaroo Island, Australia, where there was a growing sense of despair because we couldn't see a koala for love nor money (we did eventually), this place well and truly lives up to its name. There are Balinese macaque monkeys everywhere. I captured this one with his mouth full, but I'm sure he'll be very handsome when he grows up...