Hotel California

There is plenty of room to stay at the hotel California. A one-way flight from the nearest major airport, which is Bali, cost $300 for a flight that is only about 700 miles. For some reason the cost to fly to this impoverished nation is about double or triple what it is to other cities in the region. For that reason and the fact that there's no developed tourism infrastructure there are only a handful tourists at any time.

Here is the Hotel California. It actually looks pretty nice and it is across the street from the beach.

We run along this River a couple times a week. During the rainy season part of the retaining wall for the road collapsed. It's taken about five months to get this much work done. Fortunately at the top of the picture you can see a barrier. This is unusual. It's usually just driver beware.

I post a lot of these videos of singing in our English classes because they are so interesting. We sing them so the students get practice saying English words. We sing the same song at the beginning and at the end of each class for three consecutive classes. The students love them. Many of them will take out their phones and video the song. Cheryl enjoys leading them.

It's almost entirely a cash economy here so we use the ATM a lot. Because we are only here on a tourist visa we cannot open a bank account. Only a few of the stores will take a credit or debit card. Most of the restaurants will not. All of the ATMs and the few in-store credit card readers have been down for several days. Unfortunately this caught us at a time when we had used up our cash reserve paying some bills and so we're out of money. We keep trying ATMs all over town to see if we can find one that works. Luckily we have a good supply of food for a few weeks. The problem is transportation. We may be walking a lot.