The island of Bali, Indonesia has many charms to attract us to visit, and maybe even stay; more and more western expats are making their homes here. One part of the beauty is the handmade carvings that are abundant on the island.
Window on our room at Ubud Bungalows
Our traveling “nieces” Cindy and Toulla took us to Wayan’s woodworking shop on the waterfront in Padangbai, where the senior artist showed us some of his beautiful handiwork. All of this work is done solely by hand, with a mallet and a set of handmade blades, sandpaper, and saws.
Balinese Om carvingPainted wood carving at Wayan’s shop, PadangbaiCarved coconuts at Wayan’s shop, PadangbaiCattle head, carved by hand
Later, near Ubud we toured a woodworking center. There they explained the 4 major types of wood that are used. Cheaper, lightweight wood articles are soft and often will split into pieces as the years go by. It’s best to buy from reputable artists.
Wood carvers at workWood carving in progress
We went to Five Art near Ubud for a day of art lessons. Matt worked on his Om carving for 6 hours, and we gained an appreciation for the hard work that goes into these pieces.
Matt works on his carving at Five Art, Ubud
While he created his carving I learned to do batik on cloth. In the end we both were exhausted, and delighted with our creations.
One year ago I calculated the estimated costs for airfare to travel from Chicago to Southeast Asia, transit a number of countries, and return via the Pacific. There are some package prices out there running around $3,000 pp, and I was hoping to beat that.
We make our travel plans based on what we call “Google roulette”, using www.google.com/flights/ (and cross-check against www.skyscanner.com) to look for one-way tickets to general areas we might want to see, in flexible time frames, and settling on a destination and time that work best for us. Our original plan based on the roulette method was shockingly inexpensive. We were worried that we must be missing something. This information could not be correct, could it?
Airfare Plan 2016-04
We started off with a real deal on our first long-leg flight from Chicago to Bangkok at $397 each. The original soft plan called for 10 foreign destinations, which later morphed into 13 sites. Cities were added and deleted as our desires and the roulette wheel changed.
Note: In December we took a 20-day multi-city tour of Vietnam with Intrepid Travel, which included the cost of some bus and train travel and none of that is not shown in our results below. Also, I have added in the cost of one bus trip to DaLat, since it substituted for an air flight.
Then, we decided to increase our costs by actually circling the globe. The original plan called for retracing our route across the Pacific ocean, but we found that we could add in a trip to Europe for an extra cost of $100 each. Besides getting to see Holland and Iceland in the spring, we would cut down our return jetlag into manageable chunks.
So, how did we do on our airfare costs? Surprisingly well.
Airfare Actual 11/2016-05/2017
I have frequent flier plans with stockpiled points, and annual-fee credit cards for the major US airlines, but as you can see from the above list, I never once used them. The smaller airlines had better prices every single time. This was a big disappointment, and I may be cutting up some of those credit cards soon. The only useful card was the Chase Sapphire Card. We put all our travel expenses on it, and we get 2 points per dollar for travel and dining. You can then call up Chase as your travel agent, allowing you to use your credits to buy airline tickets from most airlines. We racked up $472 in credits, which we applied to the air tickets from Amsterdam to Iceland to Chicago. So, our total airfare cost of $1,861 turned into an actual cost per person of $1,625.
Surprise costs: We thought we would avoid baggage fees by packing just a moderate-sized backpack (20-30 liters) and a 20-inch rolling carry-on case. I traveled for years on the US airlines and these two bags were always considered carry-ons; I hoisted that case into the overheads and put that backpack under my seat. Not so in Asia. A carry-on officially has a maximum weight of 7 kilos, and I am grateful that the airlines here never weighed my backpack because it probably was 8 kilos. The 20-inch cases weighed in at 15 kilos each, fully packed, and were forbidden in every single passenger cabin. The good news is that the cases traveled for free on major legs across the ocean; and on the shorter flights, a pre-payment of around $10 each usually gave us a checked bag allowance of 20 kilos, a preselected seat, and a hot meal. (That additional cost is included in the prices I’ve listed above.) The cases have been checked into the belly of every plane.
What are people doing with those back-breaker backpacks, at 45 to 70 liters of capacity? I’ve watched them in the check-in lines, and sometimes the owners have to weigh them, pay a punitive fee at the counter and check them in. Sometimes (rarely) the airlines turned a blind eye, and the owner walked onto the plane with the bag. This may be a good option for young people with strong backs, and many travel bloggers extol the virtues of single-pack traveling. To each his own; I won’t be joining them. Besides, where would I put the Vietnamese fabrics and the Balinese wood carvings I bought?
I don’t know if these low airfare prices are an anomaly caused by the low oil prices we’ve had lately. I am just grateful that we were able to take advantage of them. If you’re planning a trip to Asia, I wouldn’t wait too long. I can’t guarantee that your prices will resemble ours.
