We’ve been in southeast Asia for about 16 months and this is our second “rainy season.” But we’ve both agreed that rainy season was NOT what we expected, and though it can be a nuisance, it has only kept us inside a few times, and been mildly annoying. Over the course of almost 500 days we’ve had probably less than 5 that confined us or restricted our day. But the last few days have us eating our words since we’ve had 4 days of torrential rain and lots of flooding. It kind of messed up our last few days in Bali, unfortunately…

There have been several places on our agenda to visit, so we decided to do them as we were exiting Indonesia next week. Candidesa Beach was one, a popular expat haven about 90 minutes north of Sanur, our home for the past month. Another was in the city of Sideman, more inland and native, with a room overlooking rice fields and nature. We planned to stay in Candidesa for 3 days, Sideman for two, then return to Sanur to prepare for our exit. The rain mucked it up, forcing us to cancel both rooms along with our scooter. But this was more than just a storm; they’ve called it a cyclone, which sounds ominous, but it’s more dangerous and irritating than a conventional storm. Sunday morning, the first day, it pretty much rained all day, while we went into Denpasar to meet some friends who were nice enough to bring us a “care package” from the US. The ride to meet them was scheduled to take 35 minutes, but took over an hour.

Along the route traffic slowed, then virtually stopped, due to a large tree that fell right across both our lanes, plus one lane on the other side. It forced us to do a short cut through a parking lot, and narrow our two lanes into one to make that detour. Once we were through it was clear sailing. Unfortunately the two places we planned to go are OUTSIDE the city and go through quite a bit of jungle and windy roads, so that is what made the final decision to stay put until we left.