My Toughest Assignment Yet

We had to go check out hotels in Bali last weekend for a conference being organized for later this year. My brother Joe had just spent a month in Bali so I got some tips from him (it was an amazing coincidence that we both ended up in Indonesia this summer, but bad timing because he left Bali within a week of when I got to Jakarta). One of his suggestions was to go to Nusa Lembongon, an island about half hour boat ride from Bali. That was our first stop off the plane. The island was beautiful. I met this chef there that had one of those archetypal stories about the high flying professional who gives it all up to discover himself in far off lands. He had worked in a five star restaurant in Paris. He tired of the pressure and decided to start a restaurant with a friend in Nusa Lembongon. Now his days consisted of cooking and surfing.

In Bali, we were put up at the Melia Bali, but our original booking was full, so we got upgraded to the villa suites. We checked out the conference spaces there and at a few other hotels in the area. We also spent a lot of time hanging out at the beach and a night out in Kuta, the super-touristy part of Bali, not that the rest of Bali isn’t touristy. It was tough to go back.