Bali: A Lesson in Taking Risks, Hardship, and Appreciation • Nomads With A Purpose

Is visiting Bali a risk?

Over and over, before we even set foot on this trip, I wondered, “Should I even go to Bali?” Bali’s just not me.

We knew better. I’d already learned this lesson (4 years ago in Nicaragua) and I didn’t feel the need to learn it again.

On April 23rd, 2018, we traveled from New Zealand to Bali, something we’ve repeatedly noted to be one of the most extreme transitions in travel.

New Zealand: wealthy, immaculately clean, tidy, mountainous, cold.

Bali: poor, tropical, polluted, chaotic, hot.

What were we thinking when we booked this?

Well, the thing is, unlike the rest of the trips we’ve taken, we didn’t decide and book things all at once.

Should I Go to Bali Part 1: A lesson in taking risks, hardship, and appreciation

It started with a plane ticket to Hawaii. Then it was a ticket to New Zealand, then a plane from New Zealand to Bali. Next thing you know we’ve got a 3-month trip planned. All of these flights cost a mere $200 per person from place to place.

In our pursuit of budget travel, we also snagged a beach house at Medewi, a renowned surf spot, for just $750 for the entire month.

However, this impulsive booking would pose its own challenge.

We had no idea it would be so expensive to get back home from Bali. The cheapest price we could find from Bali to LA was $500 each. For about 3 months we worked our butts off at home to try to be able to afford tickets to get home and all the while we seriously contemplated losing the money and ditching Bali.

I can’t tell you the number of times we went back and forth between going and not.

We weighed the pros and cons repeatedly, questioning if Bali would truly be worthwhile, knowing it wasn’t our ideal environment. Sure, Bali has tropical beaches, but we’re mountain people at heart. However, we are still surfers, travel bloggers, and a family that seeks adventures & new experiences.

Additionally, my older brother Daniel, nearly 19 and homeschooled all his life, sought independence by planning to volunteer on farms over the summer. This might be the last time he travels with us.

So the supporting facts on the pros side of our Should We Go To Bali list were:

If we wanted to see Bali, we needed to do it now, because with what we’ve learned about ourselves, we know our hearts may never guide us back to Bali.
If we wanted 1 more chance to travel as a family, the 7 Robledos, we needed to go to Bali.
If we wanted to surf one of the best left-hand point breaks in the world, we needed to go to Bali.
It would go against everything we preach if we don’t go. Bali is a risk. And risk is good. We have the money to get through Bali, but when we get home, we’d be at $0. We’d be completely starting over, and in some way,s that was also a pro to us. A very, very scary pro.

None of us (okay, well maybe my dad) wanted to go back to San Diego and the lifestyle and routine we had there. What we had in San Diego let us live our dreams this long, but I think I can speak for my siblings and my mom when I say we were done with it.

I knew—we all knew— that we couldn’t grow as people if we came back to San Diego… and growth is what we wanted.

So we had 3 ways to play our cards.

Don’t take that big of a risk, ditch Bali and fly home from New Zealand (almost half the price for those plane tickets).
The second option, go to Bali and not book tickets home until we get there. This would basically be our wild card, our way out if the going gets tough. But this too involved some risk; we managed to make enough money for flights home, and although it would give us a way out early if we wanted, we’d be taking the risk that plane tickets would go up in price.
The third option, handled by my mom and me, was to book tickets in advance for better prices. Subconsciously, we understood this choice would compel us to change our future.

1 month before departing, we chose the third option.

In just a few hours of being in Bali, everything we feared would be coming true.

Now, keep in mind you never truly know what to expect when you visit any country. People can tell you, ‘Oh you’ll love it,’ or ‘It’s beautiful there,’ but you really don’t know a place until you get there.

So here we are in a van with a hired driver. It’s rush hour on the busiest and craziest road in Bali, and our driver is insane.

I’ve been in cars navigating through countries with intense driving, such as Costa Rica, Italy, and US backcountry dirt roads. However, nothing compares to the chaotic driving in Bali. Despite my usually calm demeanor as a backseat driver, my stress levels reached an unprecedented high. The roads, nominally two lanes, function more like four (and at times even six) due to the prevalence of motorbikes. Given their small size, cars and motorbikes often drive side by side with minimal breathing room.

Cars crawl bumper to bumper at 40 km/h, yet our driver recklessly overtakes slower vehicles, ignoring safety norms. In Bali, passing is impulsive, with little concern for oncoming traffic. My older brother, who hates all things driving, almost died from stress on the ride.

Arriving In Medewi

We had a setback arriving in Medewi. It was far from the touristy areas, and when we went searching for groceries, we found only limited options—a small store lacking fresh produce or meat. Grabbing essentials like rice, peanuts, and a few eggs, we quickly resumed our journey, following the house manager to a narrow driveway nearby.

We parked by a bustling 2-lane road and strolled past trash piles to a stunning 2-story house amid rice fields. Despite its beautiful views of the beach and a nearby point break, the segmented rooms trigger memories of Nicaragua. It’s an odd discomfort, contrary to the enclosed comfort we’re used to in the USA.

Putting the layout issue aside, we were starving, so the manager brought us down the concrete pathway lined with the greatest amount of litter I’ve ever seen, to the beach where there was a little warung (restaurant). Little did we know that we’d be eating at this restaurant multiple times a day every single day.

The restaurant was extremely cheap and was run by two Balinese women. The food was delicious, not 5-star restaurant delicious or French delicious but delicious in a way that the food was flavorful and you were just so damn hungry that you wanted to eat and were happy to be able to eat a lot.

When evening came, we were all a little bit scared to sleep in a really dark room all separated from our parents, but I was able to rationalize the childlike fear to go to sleep that night.

I went to bed feeling pretty hopeless to the fact that this month was going to suck.

Another big thing to note is that the house we rented had no Wi-Fi and the world’s slowest cell service. I don’t mean to sound like an iPhone-obsessed teenager; in fact, I feel I’m quite the opposite. I don’t like how technology drives the world and how many, including myself, depend on it to make a living.

For bloggers, workaholics, and entrepreneurs, not working on your website/business for a month is a struggle. Success in these fields demands constant nurturing. Without Wi-Fi at home or nearby, we couldn’t tend to our blog/business due to a lack of transportation.

The Airbnb is also located in a Muslim community, not a problem until we realized just how close our house was to the 2 surrounding mosques. The loud sounds of prayers woke us up that morning before dawn, which didn’t help our fatigue.

I knew that if I was feeling this hopeless and distressed about our situation, my mom was going to be 10x worse. I feared even going upstairs because I thought she’d be in a mini-panicked state. She was.

The real icing on the cake, though, was that morning when the electricity and water went out.

We contacted the house manager, who would later come to fix the electricity and water, but all our phones and computers were pretty much dead.

All morning I just kept thinking,Why are we here?

Why would we have decided to stay in a rural town as far as you can get from the part of Bali everyone else goes to, in a house with no Wi-Fi, and no car to get anywhere?

Eventually, I got off my whiny ass and we went to find a place to eat and more importantly, we go surf. After all, that’s why we were in this rural, 3rd world village. We came for the world-class break that can become the longest left in Bali (in case you didn’t know this, my mom has a thing for lefts).

My parents were a little nervous to leave the other kids at home by themselves. We just got there and we didn’t really know how safe it was. So we decided to bring them when we went to go surf.

We walked down the pathway through the rice fields, then headed east and walked along the beach. The air smells so pungently of burning trash you try not to breathe too deeply.

We walked past houses that were more like shelters than buildings. People were sitting in shacks they called their homes—no water, electricity, chairs, or comforts every day of their lives. Their homes must’ve been so incredibly hot in the constant 80+ degree weather. People sat on the ground, covered in dirt, staring at my family as we passed, because what else did they have to do? Many kids were squatting down naked, happy, and playing in the dirt.

Despite the painfully impoverished lives these people lived, they’d smile and say, “Hallo” to us as we passed, and we’d wave and smile back.

I felt like I was back in Nicaragua again.

When you see that kind of poverty, it would be impossible not to be moved by how people so poor can still manage to find some happiness.

If you were able to not feel appreciative of the life you have after seeing poverty like that, I’d be shocked.

The short walk seemed to take an eternity because of how harshly the sun beat down here. Finally, we reached the river mouth, which luckily we had no trouble crossing since it was low tide. We found a restaurant at the point and ate breakfast there. The food was 3-4x as expensive as the large dinner we ate the night before, but at least the restaurant had a meager WiFi signal and electricity to charge our phones.

At that point, we didn’t want WiFi to work, we wanted a way out.

Get Me Out Of Here

My mom already had 5 different ideas of how to get out of here, but I wasn’t really buying any of them. Sure, they all sounded great—a Kickstarter, a product launch, a donation-based webinar—but they were far out and we weren’t going to be able to make an extra $3500 to get tickets to leave Bali early. As I said that I thought to myself, Do you know how entitled that sounds?

First of all, there are hundreds of Americans caught up in the rat race who half-heartedly wish they could be in Bali, though not this part of Bali.

Second, I just walked past dozens of poor people who will be stuck here for the rest of their lives, and here I am wishing I could leave early.

Making a ridiculous sum of money was unlikely to happen, and if we did somehow, spending that money on extra plane tickets instead of folding it and putting it in our pocket would just be dumb. My mom caught herself, too.

Surfing Saved Us.

We paid our ridiculously expensive check and went to surf.

I hopped down the rocks to paddle around the side to the point with my mom right behind me. As I’m performing the rock dance, I’m thinking, no problem, just like Raglan. I get a little deeper and the rocks get a little mossier.

I’ve done this a hundred times. I put weight on my board to take the weight off my feet, then suddenly I slip slightly and instead of quickly catching myself and continuing, I catch myself but think, shit, I just sliced my foot open. Ugh, whatever, suck it up, Gabi.

We were warned: the rocks are really sharp in Medewi. But what do you do, not surf?

It’s not like this was a really big issue. Surfers get reef cuts all the time. But it’s little things like this that keep arising. Aaaaand the cuts did take like a month to heal.

Consistent little hardships like these in our days make the rewards of travel less “worth it.”

Scariest Walk In The World

We finished our surf at mid-tide. Repeatedly, people had told us that you can only cross at low tide, and we unwisely listened to them. So we walked back on the road, the same 2-lane road with insane drivers.

Among multi-pitch climbs, getting lost in caves, and surfing 10-foot Sopelana, that might top the list as the scariest moments of my life.

We faced a challenge crossing a narrow bridge, waiting for gaps between cars to sprint across. Exhausted, we reached the house, collapsing on the porch, questioning our decision to come.

Needless to say, the first 48 hours were hard. Tell me, if this were you, would you not be a bit uncomfortable, angry, distressed, or frustrated in this situation?

This just so happened to be the time that I was reading the book, The Rock Warrior’s Way. And though I was already aware of everything the author spoke of in the book, the timing was ironic.

The book is mainly about having a learning based mindset, which is something I’ve valued ever since I started traveling.

But it very much felt like a sign from the universe that I was reading this at the time…or it maybe it was a coincidence.

Having a learning based mindset is the idea that no matter what you love to do—travel, rock climb, write, whatever it is—it’s about enjoying the challenges involved in that passion, not achievements. Because if you value achievements or don’t even value challenge, you will never be truly happy with where you are.

Though I help my mom make a lot of our travel decisions, I don’t consider myself the one who gets to, or has to, make the big decisions. So, for the next few days, I simply worked on trying to personally enjoy this learning process and value this challenge.

Medewi wasn’t all bad.

The next morning, I woke up and looked at the sunrise from our balcony in a different way; it really was as good as a sunrise could get.

I was grateful for the simple things like electricity and water.

I went surfing, this time walking only along the beach, which was much more pleasant and beautiful. I cut up my feet again, but scored some rad waves.

We had lunch and smoothies at the warung as a big, happy family. I played in the water with my siblings. I surfed with my parents again, this time at the fun beach break in front of our house.

We hung out at the house in our boredom. And finally, we had another huge meal at the warung.

The restaurant in itself saved us. The food was so ridiculously cheap here, we ate like kings. We’ve never been able to go out to eat anywhere, and each order our own drink, and here we each got our own drink twice a day.

Plates of food cost $1, and they were tasty.

During our stay, the 2 women who ran the warung got to know us, and my mom began asking for custom dinners. And if we ate well before, we began eating great. We had feasts for dinner and felt somewhat guilty because of how little locals routinely ate. When we ate better, we began feeling better.

After one or two more mishaps with the water and electricity, they stopped being issues.

The surf got better, too. We had 3 days of truly epic surf. I consider Raglan the most perfect wave in the world, but Medewi might have it beat.

We had a little routine going, and we did a pretty good job of enjoying our time here. We were tolerating it well… but merely tolerating it.

My mom and her “big ideas”

One morning, I woke to my mom saying, “We came to see Bali, right? Well, we might not be back here, so why don’t we use the money that we’d spend on a flight home to better enjoy our visit to Bali?”

So we took another risk, we rented a car in Bali.

Remember how I was saying the roads were insane here? Well, it was an adventure to say the least.

For 10 days, we traveled as we normally travel. We road tripped.

We visited Seminyak and got a taste of what luxury travel is like.

Next, we went to Canggu for a week, and Canggu changed everything.

We loved everything about Canggu, the hipster restaurants, the surf, and the good vibes. One of our houses wasn’t very nice in Canggu, which was a bummer considering how much we liked the town, so we explored Uluwatu for a day.

Then, we went further north, and things started going downhill again.

We saw the crowded Tegallalang Rice Terraces, hiked to one of the most beautiful waterfalls ever, and we drove along Twin Lakes—but the natural beauty we came to those places for was sadly corrupted.

I believe nature belongs to the world, it belongs to everyone.

It’s not something to be bought and sold and unappreciated and all these gorgeous natural wonders were being sold to make money—sure, the people are poor and desperate, but I think it’s wrong that everything beautiful on their island costs money to enter.

This set us off on a bad foot, so when we arrived in an Airbnb near the North coast of Bali, we just wanted to relax with WiFi and get work done. Except that the house did not have WiFi. Even worse, there was nothing to do anywhere near the house, and the grocery store was far, so we were left with a feeling of being trapped again.

We found ourselves in the exact same situation we tried to escape in Medewi, except this time, with no world-class surf break.

I hated that house with all my heart. Now, imagine my mom, all the rage built up from 2+ weeks in Bali, finally unleashed when the Airbnb manager didn’t let us shorten our stay and give us a refund.

The guy was completely rude and refused to let us do a simple thing, leave 1 day early and refund 1 night. One thing led to another, somebody came to our front door and asked for our passports, and my mom freaked out that the police were coming or something and said, “We’re leaving.”

The next morning, we were so glad to be out of there.

The only reason we came north was to see the town of Munduk, but we seriously contemplated skipping it. But in the end, we figured that we’d come this far, so we should make the 30-minute detour to see what we came to see.

The waterfalls were beautiful, but once again, it was relatively expensive to enter; however, walking through coffee plantations and the jungle was one of the highlights of our road trip.

You’re probably wondering where this is going at this point, but I promise the “lesson” this blog is all about is coming, so keep reading 😉

Good things never last.

We left Munduk and we’re back on the long, winding road to Medewi.

My expert driver mom tackled the craziest road—a steep, pothole-ridden incline. I feared turning back, but she made it, tires screeching, cresting the hill.

Finally, after another hour of driving along a mountain ridge overlooking Bali’s canopy and descending a long, windy road, we arrived back at our house, and we all said, “I never thought I’d be so glad to be back!”

There was a strange sense of comfort being back in that village. But it didn’t last long.

We enjoyed being back there for 2 days before the hardships came back. We were getting sick of the unhealthy food, which was starting to make us feel terrible. And in case you forgot, there was still no WiFi.

We repeated the same contemplations. Should we buy tickets out of here and go to Kuala Lumpur (which was a place we had to stop anyway on our flight back to LAX)? Should we tough it out for the final week?

Some of us believed staying was wiser to save money, which we desperately needed when we landed. Some thought leaving would be worth the debt.

Then the decision was made.

We leave.

It felt like we were just giving up.

I feel like we lost, not just mentally, but also really in the fact that we toughed it out this long, couldn’t we have lasted 6 more days and saved A LOT of money?

But in the end, it was not my choice to make; I always knew it wasn’t. My mom takes our opinions into account, and though she says she wants us to make the decision, she is a leader.

Her choice, which is almost always the right choice, is the only choice that matters.

And I’m so grateful for that choice.

That 1 choice turned the trip from one of my least favorite trips ever to one of the greatest and happiest weeks of my life…

ranking among the week I traveled across the Southern border of France in 2016, the week I backpacked 2 Great Walks in New Zealand, and the week I lived on the side of Icicle Creek Road in Leavenworth and explored an alpine wonderland.

We went back to the 1 place on the island where we truly felt at home–Canggu.

Canggu changed our entire view of Bali.

It was the perfect combination of locals, tourists, nature, structure, energy, and relaxation.

We spent an entire week in Canggu, living life as a trip to Bali is supposed to be.

We finally had WiFi and loved being productive and working towards achieving our dreams.
We loved getting French pastries in the morning (ironic).
We loved the everyone-has-time-for-a-random-conversation feeling.
We loved riding a motorbike (much less stressful than a car) past rice fields, down narrow roads with warungs, surf shops, and hipster restaurants lining the streets to surf a really fun (and shallow) reef.
We loved cooking our own food in our own kitchen.
We loved shooting pool and swimming in our own pool.
We loved being able to order really, really good pizza (and we have high standards) and have it delivered to our house, which we loved being at.
We loved watching the sunrise each morning over the canopy and listening to the sounds of the jungle and the roosters, and the crickets.

Bali was a marathon that we had half-heartedly run since arriving here.

But then, here we were, at the last leg of the journey,

I’m sitting, watching the sunrise on our deck, and I can’t help but think the human psyche is amazing.

Looking back, we went through Bali like a race, counting down the days until it ended, hoping each day, each step would get easier.

Then we changed pace, we did our little road trip, and it was a pleasant run. We enjoyed ourselves, but there were still negatives looming over us throughout the road trip.

That ended, and we were back in a hard time, the countdown omnipresent in the backs of our minds.

The finish line was in sight, but finally, we were out of energy to push any harder.

We gave up, we quit the race, and began jogging at a slower pace, even if it meant losing.

Then, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we were at the finish line and didn’t want it to end.

I wanted to go back to the start and do it all over again. I wanted to go back to run it at the right pace.

The majority of our trip was spent wishing we weren’t stuck here, and the other half we loved it so much we didn’t want to leave, and we can’t wait for the day we come back.

I tell myself and my family that if we had come with the intention to stay in Canggu the whole time, we wouldn’t have even come to Bali because we wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

Here we find ourselves in yet another “Purposely Getting Lost” situation. This phrase we made up refers to how, by seeking adventure, we allow ourselves room to get lost.

The general gist of it means that life is unpredictable. Not everything is going to go according to plan, and that’s a good thing. That’s what makes life interesting.

Let yourself get lost because by doing so, you will be greeted with the most memorable moments of your life.

Part of me wondered if I’d gone “soft.” If it was “wrong” that I enjoyed living such an easy life in Canggu. Of course, it’s not wrong, everyone enjoys comfort every once in a while. But it’s knowing that I’m rarely ever this comfortable and that I’m not going to be right here forever.

Because in a mere 2 days, my routines are going to completely change again as we head back to the US at ground 0—and that’s good too, because life is all about learning, and if I stayed right here in comfort, what would I gain?

If I stayed in a situation as hard as Medewi, I’d be beaten down so much that my learning mindset might’ve disappeared completely.

The truth is, nothing in this trip was truly good or bad. It all was.

Some experiences may have felt better than others, but the experiences weren’t good or bad; it’s just your perception of them. The goods and bads are all just relative. A situation isn’t bad unless you compare it to something better.

Medewi wasn’t bad. Medewi was just a poor, beautiful village with an epic wave and little infrastructure. I learned more about myself in Medewi than in all of my other travels.

Canggu had waves, plus infrastructure and options. But the reason Canggu was great was because of the hardships I faced before that. It was my perspective of Canggu, having come from one of the hardest 3 weeks of my life, that made it so good. In fact, my first experience there wasn’t nearly as amazing as the experience I had the second time.

The challenges of Medewi, and even the road trip for that matter, just made me appreciate certain comforts and privileges in Canggu.

I appreciated never having to worry about being without the essentials. I appreciated having the choice to enjoy dozens of different, delicious restaurants. I appreciated not being forced to be bored. And most of all, I appreciated having the freedom to have easy (motorbike) transportation to go surf, go to restaurants, and overall to entertain myself.

I’m learning that life requires balance because experiences are all relative.

Bali ended up teaching me that toughing it out isn’t always the answer—that balance is key because you can’t have good times without bad times, and you can’t learn and grow without some bad times.

I spent the final few days in Canggu repeating one phrase in my mind, “I love my life.”

I love being faced with a challenge and having to overcome it.

I love the lows equally as much as I love the highs. I love the hardships, and I love the easy times. I love the whirlwind of emotions that travel brings. I love new experiences. And I love doing them with the people I love– my family.