Travel: off the grid in Bali10 June 2009, 00:29:28 - (281 hits) Sometimes, getting away is as much a mindset as physical removal. The Villas, Bali, provides a highly effective illusion that you have left the world behind - but unlike remote retreats and private islands if you need to step back into the real world, it takes just seconds to do so. It's an ideal balance for the executive who might be called back at any moment - but wants to pretend he has dropped off the grid.
From the moment you step off your plane at Denpasar airport, you don't have to do a thing other than do nothing when you book a package at one of Bali's most established villa complexes.
Imagine this: you are speeded through immigration procedures whilst others stand for perhaps 45 minutes in queues. Your luggage is picked up for you and you are whisked through (but do not bypass) Customs. Within minutes, you are walking out of the airport, being garlanded with flowers and guided into a car that takes just 15 minutes to deliver you to the complex where you are shown not to a room but to a private house that is yours for the duration of your stay.
And it's not just any house: each villa has its own garden and pool.
The next morning, you don't have to get up and go to breakfast: breakfast comes to you with a kitchen team that comes to your villa, at a time you specify, bringing you breakfast from a large selection of options. And this being Indonesia, which is not anal about serving pork in its hotels, you can have proper bacon and pork sausage if you wish.
Other meals are brought to you as ordered or you can go to the restaurant built within the spa complex. And if you want any one of half-a-dozen barbecue menus, it's no problem: a barbecue is brought to your villa and a chef prepares and cooks for you on your own terrace, by your own pool.
It seems as if every house built on Bali these days is described as a villa but when The villas was opened around 10 years ago, it was amongst the first of its kind. An American artist bought a plot of land and built a villa for himself. Friends liked it so much, they asked him to build similar properties for them. So he built, in what was an isolated part of villas, a series of villas of various sizes and that became, eventually, the complex. Now there are many villa developments in the district but the one called The Villas remains unusual because of the size of its plots, ranging up to 600 square metres. For busy executives living in cell-like city-centre apartments that amount of space is inconceivable.
Are there things that aren't so good? Well, the TVs are old CRT models that can't handle the widescreen signal from some channels, the WiFi's unreliable (but a wired connection is surprisingly quick, given that this is Indonesia), the roofs over the common parts are a kind of thatch that, inevitably, leak leaving puddles on polished floors that become slippery and housekeeping staff don't speak much English so that there are occasional wrinkles in getting things done and in some villas the fans have been removed from within the canopied beds - in this case because guests played with the mosquito nets and got them tied up in the fans. And if you are going to Bali for the beach, then The Villas isn't within walking distance of one.
But those things pale into insignificance when the relaxation kicks in. Across the road, a small but superb supermarket sells the kind of foods that many of European extraction living in the region struggle to find. It's ridiculously expensive but simply having access to good quality ham off the bone and cheeses will be a luxury to many living in, say, Kuala Lumpur, as will the range of vegetables and fruit.
Down the road or within a few minutes drive in the hotel shuttle a selection of restaurants ranges from the insanely cheap to the insanely expensive (particularly on the beach) and there are clothing and other shops galore.
You can book The Villas on a variety of spa packages. We chose the Detox followed by the Rest and Restore, making up an 11 day break. The Detox package removes all food from the diet and you live on pills and drinks for several days, plus washing out your insides twice a day. Some people lose a lot of weight, we didn't although there is a lot of weight to lose. However, there was certainly a feeling of well-being and that "heavy" feeling inside had gone.
The Rest and Restore package includes massage every day, and on two days an island tour (not the usual hotel tour where the guide takes you to places that will sell you poor quality stuff at inflated prices and give him a commission but a tour that takes you into the parts of Bali that you would not ordinarily see such as rice terraces, a volcano and a traditional family house) and an activity day - mountain biking, white water-rafting or horse-riding on the beach. We swapped the activities for more massage.The package included two meals in the Spa's genuinely excellent restaurant (at prices a fraction of a nearby restaurant where the food wasn't so good) and a barbecue in the Villa.
The phones (landline and GSM / 3G) worked, the internet worked, our VPN and VoIP worked. For 11 days, the illusion of being off the grid was complete with effective communications being available at our option (the operator blocks all inbound calls on request meaning that you are in total control of your availability). News from chiefofficers.net
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