Making Moves- Indonesia to Singapore

Orchard Road, Singapore

It’s 4 AM in Singapore and I’m lying in a ridiculously comfortable bed in the Grand Hyatt Hotel listening to Justin Biebs (I like his new music, okay?). Shaili’s dad had points and so we have this amazing room to ourselves for the next five days. The last few days have been pretty cool. We went to Lombok Island where we stayed in a homestay that was immersed in a local neighborhood in Senggigi. We drove about 2.5 hours to a local area close to Tetebatu with two new friends from Sweden and Australia. A local guide took us to a beautiful secret waterfall and then brought us to his home where we ate lunch and had some bananas that he had literally just cut off from a tree. Oh yeah, we also met 2 of his 10 wives and a few of his kids. He was only 33 and had been married 10 times! What a stunna! On top of all of that, I watched the sunset with the ocean almost every day while being out on the islands. Talk about making a girl happy.

Anyways, we left Lombok and went back to Ubud for a night. The homestay we stayed at used to be a Balinese Hindu temple. Although I got sick, threw up, and felt nauseas for most of the day, it was a pretty nice last day. We decided to not get a room for our last night in Bali and spend the night in the airport since our flight was early in the morning.

One of my friends recently relocated to Bali from India for work. He’s been in Bali for the past week and I’ve been elsewhere on the island, so we really didn’t have a chance to meet up any other day. We decided to make it work and finally meet up at midnight which was pretty cool. I spent my last 6 hours before my flight having an incredible conversation with an amazing entrepreneur who I know, without a doubt will do something big one day. I like talking about these big hairy dreams that we know will take a lot of time to get to. It’s nice being in it together.

Our flight got in around noon and I was so tired. I knocked out on the plane and had no idea what hit me. When we got to Singapore airport, we took the metro and naturally, Shaili and I got to talking. We got so into our conversation that we didn’t realize that the train took us back to Changi airport about 4 times. We had gone about 12 stops back and forth without realizing we weren’t even going anywhere. Finally, we figured it out and got to the Hyatt which turned out to be heaven. I fell asleep at 3 PM and woke up 12 hours later and here I am…awake.

This is the last leg of my backpacking trip. I’ll be in India for the next couple of months, so it feels like a new chapter is starting. India will definitely be different. I’ll be going back to working on Aahana, getting started on my next move, and actually be implementing a lot of the things I’ve had a lot of time to think about. I’m really excited to get started. I’ve been itching to get back to work. Aahana, the book, the rest of my career have been moving forward little by little. I’m ready for things to take off.

With Love,

Rina