F**ck Bali

Six days on the supposedly paradisiacal island of Bali and I'm a nervous twitching wreck.  This is not entirely Bali's fault, but it hasn't exactly helped either.  We didn't get off to a good start when we arrived on an evening flight from Singapore to find Air Asia had left everyone's baggage at Changi.  In the confusion I forget to take my debit card out of the ATM I was drawing cash from, which I didn't discover until two days later.

Fast forward to a hideously overpriced beach restaurant where we were presented with the first bill I've ever had that came to over a million.  One and a half million Indonesian rupiah to be exact, admittedly this is only about £100, but that's still a lot for a dodgy lobster and some fish.  Out came the credit card, which didn't work, followed by my debit card, not my proper one but my previous one which I'd stupidly forgotten to destroy and now thought was my current card.  Obviously this didn't work either, resulting in a fruitless ride around all the local ATMs on the back of the restaurant manager's scooter.  We finally got out of the place having paid a million in cash and with a promise to come back with the rest the next day.

That night I finally managed to get the bottom of the confusion with a series of desperate Skype calls to various agencies of my bank in the UK, most of which got dropped at the crucial moment in the conversation.  It was at this low point that it began to dawn on me that I'm becoming a stupid old fool.

Perhaps it's unsurprising under the circumstances that I find Bali to be a dirty, unpleasant, traffic-choked shithole.