Happy New Year

Can you believe it is 2013?  I know I've said this numerous times already, but 2012 feels like it absolutely flew by!  And fittingly, so did the holidays.  I was in a mall tonight and realized that the whole holiday shopping season absolutely passed me by without me noticing at all.  I guess because I don't really shop very much in Singapore?  (Not having a Target anywhere has definitely decreased my consumer spending.)  Anyway, it is January 2013 already.  This year, I hope to run more, do more yoga, and read more.  I hope to stress less, complain less, and weigh less.  I'm looking forward to my 30th birthday, lots of travel, and hopefully finding my footing a bit more at work.  Alright, moving on...

So as I mentioned previously, I rang in the new year in Bali!!!  (Seriously, if someone had told me two years ago that I would be in Bali for the holidays, I would've thought they were crazy.)  Of course, it was beautiful, but it was totally different than Krabi!  Much more tourist oriented, and much more spread out - traffic was insane, but luckily, we walked most of the places we went.

Black sand beach.. you can't really tell from this picture, but it's much more visible in the water.  It is a bit creepy though because it makes you think the water is dirty haha.

We spent a day on an island (Nusa Penida) with this beautiful white sand beach!

We didn't eat a ton of "local" foods.  Honestly, the food in Indonesia kind of reminds me of the food in Malaysia, so it didn't really seem all that special to me.

Condiments for champions and winners :)

Two really incredible things to share with you guys.  First, we did a sunrise volcano hike one morning!  Lena and Stephanie told me about this back when I visited Singapore in the spring, and I was dying to do it ever since.  I mean, come on - hiking a volcano??  How cool is that!  What's not so cool is the 2am pick up time haha.

Anyway, we were picked up at 2am and drove about two hours to reach the volcano - I don't remember the name, but it is an active one, and I think our guide said 1999 was the last time it erupted.  We hiked straight up the side for about 90 minutes.  It was a much different hike than Percy Warner - lots of loose rocks!  It was dark, so you could only really see what was on the ground right in front of you.  But you could look up ahead and see all the flashlights of the people who were climbing ahead of you.. sometimes that was really cool, but sometimes it sucked to see how far you still had to go :)  We reached top just before sunrise.  The view faces out over the lake with the mountains in the background.  It was breathtaking.

While we snapped pictures and enjoyed the sunrise, our guide cooked us breakfast using the steam from the volcano!  Then we headed back down.  The trek down was cool because we could actually see, and since we weren't in a hurry, our guide was able to share some fun facts about the volcano with us along the way.  But going down was almost harder than hiking up because all the loose rocks made me slip everywhere!  I fell down a few times, and Stephanie vowed that she wouldn't hike anymore mountains with me until I got some hiking shoes :)

Steam pocket on the left, crater on the right

View from below.. we hiked all the way up there!

All in all - a beautiful experience.  I thought that I had put it on my Singapore Bucket List, but I guess I never did.  Either way - I had been dying to do this hike, and it did not disappoint!

Me at the top!

The other really awesome thing was our actual New Years Eve celebration.  We just went to dinner and then headed down to the beach to watch the fireworks.  The beach we stayed near (Legian) has a ton of cool beach bars in the sand, and everyone was throwing a huge party.  And you guys, the fireworks were totally INSANE.  It's such a shame that pictures wouldn't do justice to what we saw, but let me tell you - the fireworks went on for hours.  Literally, they were already going off around 6pm, and went on until past 1am! And they were going off all along the beach!  It seems like Bali doesn't have the same firework safety precautions that we would in the US, so literally out front of every other beach bar, there was just someone crouched in the sand with a giant stack of fireworks that they were shooting off.  So we rang in 2013 with a TON of fireworks, the Indian Ocean, and dancing.  It was spectacular.

Happy new year everyone!!