The Big 50

We went to Hong Kong (where we had dinner with Ann's brother and sister in-law with Shanghai food as the HKG celebration of here birthday) then onto Bali to celebrate Ann's big 50.




Friends came from Perth (Rosita and Folker), KL (Michelle and Thomas), Jakarta (Grace), Nina from Moscow and Paula and Rob from NZ and Ann's sister from Hong Kong. We stayed in Villas in Semanyak which turned out to be great value - $250 for 3 bedroom villas each with private outdoor bathrooms and large pool - compared with $500/nite for a crap room in Moscow. 10 days of food, wine, laughs and side trips to places like Ubud (for crispy duck at the "Dirty Duck" and buying some great art) and Nusa Dua to see the tourist hotels like Grand Hyatt and Sheraton. Massages in the villa every day for everyone were great at $7/hr. Swimmming in Kuta beach about 200m away. Several trips to great (and cheap) restuarants. We even had great in-Villa catering from a local Warang at about $3/head. We had a brunch to start the day then Ann's party was in the Villa with a 5 piece band we arranged through an old Jakarta friend (who (un)fortunately was pregnant and couldnt join us). A feature was Ann singing 3-4 songs. She thought she was star. We had a sucking pig (a BIG sucking pig) as the main dish along with local Indonesian food. All in all a great time was had by all. Ann met up with Kt Karta whom she bought a painting off in 1998 and found out its worth 16 times more! so we had the photo with him. We then travalled 33 hours back - Business Class in SQ with Ann having 7 seats from HKG-SFO!