The honeymoon! Bali, Gili Islands and Lombok

It feels a little ironic that I only visited Indonesia once I'd moved to Sweden - ie. after spending 25'ish years next door, in Australia, where I grew up. Regardless, we decided to spend our honeymoon here. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, to be honest.. Bali and Lombok as a holiday experience seemed to divide a lot of my friends in their opinions, but we locked it in, and I can honestly say that we could not have picked a better place to honeymoon.

It was a wonderful experience! Plenty to do, see, eat, experience, buy and all those things you've probably heard before. Yes, there are TONS of Australians (going to Kuta was like being teleported to Australia). Yup, things are very very cheap. Yerp the locals are amazingly friendly. And yes, the weather and beaches are fantastic.

What I didn't expect at all though, was for the holiday to be perspective-challenging in the way that it was. Bali & Lombok are basically third world provinces of Indonesia, however developing, so you see all the good stuff in parallel with the bad. I'm not going to preach, but it gave us a lot of time and sensory ammo to reset, question, and just take some time to think - a commodity that you only seem to get when you have multiple weeks of holiday spent in board shorts and thongs (read: flip flops, for all you non-Aussies). We both really needed it, and it made us ask a ton of questions about priorities, career, life in general, the absurd amount of time we spend on our phones, on facebook, turtles and all sorts of other topics.

Anyway, to shorten this rant, what I'm saying is: Book long holidays, turn your stupid phone off (and I mean TURN IT OFF-OFF), explore, ask questions, and you'll be so much better for it.

Also, re-inspired by our incredibly talented wedding photographer, Lucky, I got back into photography after a long, painful hiatus. I read a lot about it, learned a lot, and loved every second. I've also since learned that for the past 2 years (as long as I've had a DSLR), "I've been doing it all wrong" - literally. So please excuse any particularly noisy shots in this batch... half of these were under-exposed, or just plain bad. Disclaimer: This doesn't mean I'm going to get better at photography from this point, but here's to trying! :)