In Reply to: Melbourne posted by dinginbintangbagus on Sunday, 31. December 2006 at 07:23 Bali Time:
When people ask me why I always go to Bali for holidays, I tell them that it's because I can't afford to go to Rottnest [an island a few kilometres off the WA coast, out from Fremantle]. OK, we've had some great times at Rottnest years ago and my comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but with more than a grain of truth.
Same for Broome, we've had some great times there too, but Broome is basically just a big country town with a nice beach. If you're there at Shinju Festival time, [third week of August] there's plenty to do in the evenings, otherwise Bali beats Broome hands down and costs so much less.
Some of us may remember the TV series, Who Dares Wins. I dobbed my wife in and we were flown to the Gold Coast and stayed at a nice motel at Burleigh Heads, all free of charge. Fortunately, something went wrong with the "dare" and it had to be cancelled at short notice. They wouldn't tell us what we had missed, but from comments made, we got the impression that it was bungy jump from a helicopter, something which wasn't really on Kathy's list of "must do" experiences!
We had never seriously considered a holiday on the Gold Coast, the wall-to-wall skyscrapers along the beachfront wasn't our idea of what we wanted to see. But we enjoyed ourselves immensely and I must say that if you can't enjoy a Gold Coast holiday, then maybe you've forgotten how to enjoy yourself at all. But everything tends to be more enjoyable when it's free, doesn't it?
Yes, I can reminisce about happy times with Kathy, who I sadly lost a few years ago. But I'm not drawn back to the above holiday hot spots, nor to Exmouth, Coral Bay, Dongara, Dunsborough, Yallingup, Margaret River, Denmark and Albany, all places where we had plenty of good times. Maybe, in my mind, these towns are Rex and Kathy places and that puts a different slant on things.
But Bali was very much a Rex and Kathy place for me too, in fact Kathy initially had to pursuade me to go, because I'd lived and/or worked all over WA and felt comfortable with the places I knew. But from literally our first few minutes in Bali, I just loved it and could hardly wait to go again. Bali is that kind of a place, isn't it?