I don’t know how we fit so much fun into so little time! Here are the highlights from the final days of my parent’s visit to Bali:

Plantation Princess in the warehouse - the strips are bound into blocks of equal quality rubber (5 grades), then shipped for further processing.

We set out one afternoon, not knowing we’d end up on a fascinating, last-minute, happenstance plantation tour. I’d gotten a local to tell us where the government management office was. We showed up late in the day, played charades with a few security men who didn’t speak English, and wandered around the office grounds. We were about to take off when a man in a Panama hat drove up on a motorbike. Not only did he speak English, but he was the plantation tourism director! To our delight, he agreed to clock back in in spite it being after-hours.

A quick summary, to orient non-regular readers:

Starting in October 2010, Pat and I spent a year in New Zealand, two months in the Philippines, and a month-and-a-half in mainland SE Asia (Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia). My parents’ mystical calendar-of-things-that-shall-be decreed that they spend Christmas 2011 with me. Schedules and finances demanded that we move Christmas to the following March. I told them to pick someplace in SE Asia. As a result, we spent a week housed at Medewi Bay Retreat exploring the island of Bali, Indonesia!

So besides survive a flash flood, what else did we do? Tons.