Sanur 2010  © PJ Croft 2010, 2016

Well, there you go. Notice the above two images – the top one lacks colour and looks dark. That’s not how I saw it in my browser.

The second one is brighter and has more colour, as intended. That’s because the top one is Abobe RGB colour gamut as shot in the camera, and the lower one is sRGB which is needed for web display. The web can’t display all the colours of Adobe RGB so it ‘crops’ the colours, resulting in the loss, as you see. But if I convert to sRGB before posting, I get the colour I want. But it means an extra step in the processing, which is already time consuming. Boogah.

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I mentioned that I feel as if I want to go and live in Bali, and to do it by leasing. But I’ve been doing some thinking.

A lease of a two bed villa with pool starts at A$10,000 a year. A$12,000 – $15,000 is more realistic. Plus plus – housekeeper at $200 per month = $2,400 pa. Gardener pool man, the same, probably a security man similar. Maybe other fees? It all adds up to nearly $20,000 pa or $1,666 per month, $400 per week, $57 per night. Plus probably $1,000 for a lawyer to look over the contract.

You can have a hotel room for $25 a night upwards, and $50 a night is quite a good standard, three star, in Sanur.

That’s it. No more to pay. No contracts, no lease to worry over, no maintenance costs, no taxes, no housekeeper, no security man, that’s it. Pool included, no cleaning or pool man. Nice gardens, fully maintained. And right on the beach.

I’m sure that you could haggle over the price per night if you’re booking 30 nights at a time.

Drawbacks: living in one room for a month at a time could be like being in a prison after a while. Screaming kids around the pool? No escape. Bad aircon? Hard to get it fixed.

OK, don’t like it? Move to another hotel. Except if you’ve pre-paid for 30 nights. OK, negotiate to pay weekly. And for me, I like to collect ‘stuff’. It’s hard to keep ‘stuff’ in a hotel room. Bring it home? But I want it up there. So I’d need to find a way to store ‘stuff’ up there. Pretty easy, I’d say.

You need to leave the country every 30 days anyway, at least initially, so you come back here for a break, see the doctor, get your next lot of medications. Then head back up again for the next month.

I think the way to decide this is to book a $25 a night hotel for 4 weeks and see how it goes. I know from the Xmas trip that it can go wrong, that I found I didn’t like where I was a few times, but if I go with a different attitude, go with a take it easy, don’t expect luxury, and look at the reviews, it could be OK. The location is all important and I’ve found one that’s only 100m from Sanur Beach for A$22 a night, and that’s for one night. Being so close to the beach walk, there are plenty of restaurants around.

Hmmm.

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One thing I’ve noticed about all the hundreds of hotel entries on Booking.com and other web sites is (a) the poor quality of their photos, and (b) the stilted, poor quality English of their listings.

I wonder if there would be a small income to be made by offering a professional standard of photos and a re-writing of their body text? Some of the photos are dire. They certainly put me off. Gloomy, dark shots, small sections of the rooms, repeated shots of the pillows or the toilet. One hotel showed a room with red and orange curtains, so that the room looked like a scene from hell. Another seemed to have brightly coloured wall tiles, or else coloured glass in the windows, so that all the tiles were bright red and green and purple and blue. Sickening.

The best was a bathroom that was pure white tiles, gleaming and glistening, such that it just looked clean. So easy to do.

Many needed some gardening done, too. They looked like a bedraggled jungle. Why show this?

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Jeez, I’ve got the hots to buy that Merc in Sydney. If I’m not going to lease in Bali, then I can go to Sydney if I want to.

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And a new laptop.