Made it to Bali

This story begins the same way most things in my life seem to begin. Not with a colour-coded spreadsheet or a neatly folded plan, but with a sudden, full-bodied yes that arrives before logic has even put its shoes on.

When Clare announced her Advanced YTT would be held in Bali, something in me surged forward before I had time to remember any of the practical details of being a grown woman with a job, bills, dogs, school reports, and a nervous system already running on fumes.

Yes.

Before I knew the cost. Before I knew where we were staying. Before I had asked for leave during term time, which teachers do not exactly do lightly.

Yes.

Some things don’t consult the thinking mind. They move through the body first. A tug in the chest. A quickening in the belly. A strange little opening, as though some hidden door has swung loose inside you.

That is what these trainings have always felt like to me. Not a decision exactly. More like recognition.

They take me to thresholds. To places where the self I’ve been wearing begins to loosen around the edges. Where the competent teacher, the mother, the organiser, the woman who is meant to have everything under control, starts to peel away. Not dramatically. Not all at once. More like old paint lifting in the heat.

Little deaths and rebirths disguised as travel plans.

The best part was finding out Kat was coming too. We completed our first 200-hour YTT together a few years ago, and she remains exactly the kind of person you want beside you when crossing countries.

Steady. Organised. Calm in the way some people naturally are. The kind of woman who prints documents beforehand, remembers chargers, knows where her passport is, and arrives at airports with enough snacks to survive a minor apocalypse.

Beside her, I become increasingly aware that I move through life like an overstimulated woodland creature guided mostly by intuition, panic, and whatever I last saw on the kitchen bench.

Kat had organised flights, accommodation, airport transfers, places to eat, massage bookings, and sensible arrival times so we could “ease ourselves gently into Bali.”

Meanwhile, I began packing the night before.

Or more accurately, somewhere between midnight and dawn, while surrounded by damp washing, school emails, barking dogs, half-open drawers, and the sudden urgent need to reorganise cupboards that absolutely did not need reorganising.

The house looked as though a small weather system had moved through it. Clothes hung over chairs. Half-filled washing baskets slumped against walls. A cold cup of coffee sat beside a pile of journals and the books I imagined I might read in Bali, despite having packed approximately seven thousand yoga pants and no evidence of a calm personality.

The oil heater hummed in the corner, drying clothes I probably would not wear but suddenly felt emotionally attached to taking, just in case.

Outside, the world was still dark. That blue-black hour before morning when everything feels slightly unreal. Inside, every light in the house blazed. I moved barefoot from room to room, muttering like a woman in a spell.

Passport. Charger. Antihistamines. Yoga clothes. EpiPen. Did I pack underwear? Why am I holding a candle?

At some point, after three hours’ sleep, I remembered I still had not bought my eVisa or completed my arrival card.

So there I was, cross-legged on the floor at some ungodly hour, my face lit ghost-white by my phone, trying to upload documents while also mentally delegating all the things I had run out of time to do.

The dogs followed me from room to room with the quiet concern of creatures who knew I had lost control of the pack.

Then, suddenly, it was time to leave.

The drive to Canberra passed in fragments. Fog hanging low over the road after the patchy rain. Trucks and roadwork machinery lined up endlessly along the highway. Traffic redirected again and again through narrow fluorescent corridors of cones. The smell of takeaway coffee, damp clothes and exhaustion filling the car.

Kat greeted me with a huge smile and tired excited eyes that said, “We’re doing this.”

By the time we reached the airport I felt suspended somewhere between adrenaline and delirium.

At check-in my baggage receipt didn’t print. I stared at the empty receipt slot for a moment before shrugging. Another paper thing digitalised, I assumed.

The flight to Melbourne disappeared quickly, swallowed by conversation and movement and that strange pre-travel excitement that bends time strangely around itself.

Then the long flight to Bali. A neat pile of plastic-wrapped airline comforts waited on each seat. Blanket. Tiny pillow. Headphones sealed in crinkling plastic. Water bottle. The soft chemical smell of recycled airplane air already settling into everything.

I watched movies I barely absorbed while somewhere over Australia my body quietly lost all understanding of time. The cabin lights dimmed gradually around us as strangers folded themselves into impossible sleeping positions. A baby cried in the seat behind me on and off for hours, the sound sharp with exhaustion and confusion.

By the time we descended into Denpasar my skin felt sticky, my eyes burned, and my thoughts had slowed to a heavy crawl.

Then the airport.

Immediately everything felt louder than necessary. Voices overlapping in different languages. Suitcases rattling over tiles. Children whining. Bright fluorescent lights bouncing harshly against polished floors. Heat pressing against bodies trapped in slow-moving lines.

And queues. Endless queues.

Forty minutes waiting for my eVisa only to be told one number on the document wasn’t clear enough.

“You need new visa.”

I stared at the man blankly for a second trying to process the sentence through exhaustion.

“I already bought one.”

He shrugged gently in that way bureaucratic systems do when they know you’re too tired to resist. So I paid for another visa and joined the line again.

By then another flight had landed. Another wave of weary travellers pressed in behind barriers while overhead fans pushed warm humid air around uselessly. A sign estimated another fifty minutes from this point. My legs ached. My eyes felt gritty. My thoughts moved slowly through my head like heavy water.

Somewhere beyond immigration was Kat. Probably already through. Probably wondering where I was.

By the time I finally emerged she looked exactly how I felt. Hair flattened from travel. Skin shiny from humidity. That particular expression people wear when they’ve crossed too many time zones too quickly.

“I thought you’d been detained,” she laughed weakly.

Then came baggage claim. Or more accurately, the slow dawning realisation that my suitcase was not there.

At first I wasn’t worried. Carousels are chaos. Bags appear late all the time. People grab the wrong ones. Things get delayed.

I watched the conveyor belt rotate endlessly beneath harsh airport lighting. Grey suitcase. Black suitcase. Backpack. Another grey suitcase that looked like mine for half a second before becoming somebody else’s entire life.

One by one people collected their belongings and disappeared.

Still no bag.

Kat had already checked twice.

“I really don’t think it’s here,” she said gently. “Other people from our flight are missing luggage too.”

But sleep deprivation creates a strange kind of irrational hopefulness.

I kept staring at the carousel convinced that if I stared long enough my suitcase would eventually emerge from somewhere hidden inside the machinery like a magic trick resolving itself.

Surely it was coming. Surely.

It wasn’t. That was the moment the exhaustion cracked open into something else. Not panic exactly. Just the overwhelming absurdity of arriving in another country at midnight with no belongings, no clean clothes, no toothbrush, no idea where your and luggage was no baggage receipt to help locate it.

The lost baggage queue stretched endlessly across the airport floor. People leaned against walls looking hollowed out with exhaustion while airport staff repeated the same tired reassurances over and over.

Melbourne.

Still in Melbourne.

It missed the transfer.

Should arrive tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Eventually the airline handed me a tiny compensation payment and assured me the bag would be delivered to the hotel the following day.

I laughed. Not because it was funny. Mostly because exhaustion had reached the point where every inconvenience began feeling surreal.

Of course my luggage was still in Melbourne.

Outside the airport the humidity wrapped around us instantly. Not warmth exactly. Thickness. The air felt alive against my skin after the cold dry artificial air of airports and planes.

And suddenly Bali was everywhere all at once. Motorbikes streaming through traffic like schools of fish. Petrol fumes mixing with incense smoke. Damp earth. Cigarettes. Statues appearing suddenly from darkness. Music drifting faintly through warm night air. Everything felt overstimulating and beautiful simultaneously.

And somehow, impossibly, our driver had waited. A tiny man with bloodshot eyes and the gentlest smile stood holding a sign with both our names written carefully across it.

After hours of fluorescent lights, queues, missing luggage and exhaustion, I sighed in relief, he was there. We were in Bali on our way to the hotel.