A blessed summer (2025)

Mahnaz’s reflections

We’re back 🙂 Here are some of our adventures over the summer of ’25 (best viewed on a laptop or tablet rather than a mobile as the photos – a fraction of what I took – will display so much better). While most people in the GS community returned to their homes or adventure elsewhere, we decided to make the most of being in Bali. It is tourist high season but going to the north and surrounding islands was worth it and mostly quiet.

Karangasem (North East Bali)

We visited 3 small Islands by ferry which sit just off the coast of Bali :

Nusa Lembongan

Nusa Penida

Lombok Island

The Gili Islands (Gili Meno) off the coast of Lombok

Gili T (The Party Island – where people meet and fall in love)
Gili Meno (Where people go for their honeymoon – we went there as we wanted to experience the island in the middle)
Gilli Air (Where families go)

A tour of the North (Bali)

A tour of the South (Bali)

Back to School

Home & Community

Bali has seen devastating rainfall and flooding over the past week. How can we not see how climate collapse is real? Penny – a parent at the school wrote an article which I have shared below. An excellent reflection of what has happened on the ground and ways you can offer support :

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/washed-away-women-missing-after-balis-devastating-floods/news-story/9279b631d247c5d7de31bfb119d56a7b

Watching the far right protests in London (our home) shows how human collapse is possibly inevitable too. Seeing this feels worse while living abroad and we have been questioning our return to the UK – for Anisa’s sake more than ours. I am constantly being reminded that nothing really makes sense when it comes to people. Nothing is black and white. Nothing.

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Anisa pizza

I’m very nervous for quest. However I’m also quite excited to get started with it and hopefully i will come up with a great idea. Quest is a huge 6 month project which you must present near the end of the school year. Quest must be an idea which you turn into a real outcome. It has to be community minded and good for our planet.

In literacy class we are learning about Malala, and it’s so so sad. I can’t believe things like that are still happening.

I love Pandora (our kitten). She’s very small and cute, but extremely noisy and I’m also a bit allergic to her. Over time she has become much more comfortable with our company.

We have also borrowed a bike from my friends dad ,which i will now be riding to school every week.

Over the holidays, we have gone to a lot of Indonesian islands and my favourite parts were probably swimming and snorkelling or going to the safari park which was really fun.

Bye Bye!

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Suleiman’s Update

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been three months since we last blogged.

Well, let’s start off with a bare-faced lie, shall we?! Most weekends recently we have been talking about doing a back-to-school blog, but just not got around to it. Glad to be back in the swing of things again.

We made the decision this summer not to travel back home or do any international travel. This was mainly as I do not have lots of annual leave left and want to save that for trips to come. Therefore some of the summer was spent exploring Bali, which we had been told might be a little busier as the Indonesians would come and visit from the mainland but in actual fact it turned out to be rather less frantic than anticipated. This was aided by generally lovely weather, very consistent temperatures but not as searingly (unbearably?) hot as London got at certain points in July and August.

Anisa finished her school term in early June and returned for the new academic year in mid-August, much like the Scots do. So she’s actually been back a month already. Most families left Sibang almost as soon as term finished in June, with some of our closest friends amongst them (three sets of them were leaving for good). It felt strange being in a very quiet, sometimes deserted village during that period.

Mahnaz made the excellent decision for us to try to travel around the island as much as we could, the only stipulation being that we had to fit in around my work schedule, which meant me being able to use reliable Wi-Fi from 2-8pm. And at every place we stayed (bar one in the mountains) it was fine.

There are too many highlights from those weeks that it all kind of blurs together, but the most notable for me were:

• Nusa Lembongan – this beautiful island is a 45-minute ferry away from our main port of Sanur. You hop off the boat directly onto the beach, and then wade through the water to the main restaurants and hotels. Our hotel was a 15-minute walk to that busy beach, but there was a hidden beach with no tourists whatsoever that was very close to where we stayed. My one bad moment was a snorkelling trip. We were part of a group of about 10 on a boat exploring three different bays, but my equipment didn’t fit properly so I was always getting water in my lungs. The bays were full of other divers too, it was just too crowded – especially when a manta ray was in the vicinity – so I was invariably being kicked as much as I could swim. I ended up having a bit of a panic attack and swam back to the boat and didn’t bother with the final bay.
• Nusa Penida – a bigger island, in fact we passed Lembongan on the boat there. We were further away from the main strip and beaches, but the smaller beach near our hotel was fabulous. The best fun was touring round the island with a local driver who knew his stuff and took us to Broken Beach and Crystal Bay.
• Karangasem – Virgin Beach had sensational sands and warm, choppy waters that were glorious to swim in. My abiding memory, though, is a warung where we ate grilled fish which was accompanied by two sauces that will live long in my mind: a sublime sambal and an even better garlic butter sauce studded with whole pieces of garlic.
• Menjengan – this was a recommendation from our already-legendary 83 year-old neighbour, Audrey. It was a trek to get to the extreme north-west of the island (we are in the south) but so worth it. The kind of seas you dream of, and thanks to a diving guide who cleverly goes by the name of Harry Potter (who’s going to forget that name?) my confidence in snorkelling was restored. In fact, snorkelling deep in the waters for a couple of hours with Mahnaz and Anisa was the best snorkel experience of my life.
• Kintamani – a district only an hour and a quarter’s drive from us, but which feels like a different world. We had rooms facing the majestic Mount Batur, and the feeling of being in the mountains and the breathtaking scenery was just restorative perfection for Mahnaz (me and Anisa are definitely beach bums rather than mountain people).
• Gili Meno – there are three small Gili islands off the coast of Lombok. Gili Trawangan (known as Gili T) is the party island, so of course I lobbied to stay there but was outvoted by the po-faced Mahnaz and Anisa (joke). Gili Air is kind of in the middle, but we went to Gili Meno, a 20-minute boat ride from Lombok. It is a very small island, where cars and scooters are prohibited. People cycle or walk or use horse-drawn carriages called cidomos. Tourists visit it for its quiet serenity, and you can walk around the entire island in less than two hours. It featured my favourite beach of all the ones we have experienced while in Bali, but the biggest thrill was finding out that Series 4 of the BBC TV series Race Across The World finished here. We rewatched the episode and gasped in glee as we saw the two final pairs (no spoilers) getting the boat to the beach right in front of the hotel we were staying in at that moment, and then running round the back of our hotel and down the backstreets that we would walk of an evening.
• Lombok – This was perhaps the overall highlight, an incredible island that we simply adored and would happily retire to. Spectacular scenery, lovely people, and Tenjanguan Beach featured the best beach/sea combination I have ever experienced. Sadly, permission was recently given to an Australian hotel group to build a resort on the beach. All the local warungs (restaurants and cafes) that had sprung up over the years on the beach have been razed to the ground, and in a year or two it will simply be another international resort. The other highlight was a trip that Mahnaz arranged with a local family who took us to their house, and then for an early-morning walk through the mountain scenery to a clearing where we watched them make palm sugar and helped them to make a cassava curry. The language of football is universal, and the guide turned out to be a huge Liverpool fan. I had bought two knock-off Liverpool shirts with me, so gave him the home jersey which elicited the same reaction as if he was walking up the steps to his beloved Anfield.

We quickly settled back into Sibang life once Anisa restarted school. On induction day, Anisa and a group of friends led parents around the school, and me and Mahnaz did the same with a separate group as if we were veterans rather than just having been here for seven months.

I have started my Bahasa classes again, but I decided to go back down to the beginners’ class, as I felt I missed out by joining the beginners’ class in January when they had already had 4 months classes under their belts.

We have a semi-regular film night with Audrey who is a massive film buff. She showed us a superb Indian film called The Lunchbox, which explores what happens when the tiffin box that an unappreciated wife lovingly prepares for her husband’s lunch every day is accidentally delivered to the wrong worker. Very highly recommended.

As Audrey is a fan of the director Wes Anderson, we in turn recommended the first two Paddington movies to her, as the director Paul King is clearly hugely influenced by Anderson. I’d forgotten how good the first movie was, and the second film is, of course, virtually cinematic perfection. And yes, Audrey did cry at the end of Paddington 2 (I have sobbed on each of my twenty previous viewings!)

I have really got into going to my gym again. I now go 5-6 times a week, usually at lunchtime when it is the hottest part of the day and no-one (except mad dogs and Englishmen) are prepared to be in that sweatbox. I have had a couple of PT sessions with the owner of the gym, a man the same age as me (55) but who I walked straight past when I first went to meet him as he genuinely looked twenty years younger. We’ve had an arm day and a chest day, but the machine that has been a revelation for me here is their abdominal crunch machine. I have used similar ones in the UK but for some reason this one is really helping me find the muscle(s?) situated somewhere deep below the layers of flab. Where has this machine been all my life?!!

I went to a circuit training class at another (more upmarket) gym on Friday, which involved lunges and squats and working muscles that haven’t been worked since NTL was my internet service provider. I finished the session with my first-ever dunk in an ice-bath. I am a total wimp when it comes to cold water, so predictably I was able to stand it (literally) for about 15 seconds and then had to come back out. My legs felt like they were burning, it was that uncomfortable sensation when something exceptionally cold actually feels really hot. The consensus is that it is the best way to repair muscle tears and fatigue, but it’s not for me. My current exercise obsession meant I then decided to go to my local gym for a quick session, and predictably yesterday I paid the price and was barely able to move, breathe or see out. 

I am also running a quiz night for school parents and teachers in three weeks’ time. Given that many of my standard quiz questions are predicated on a knowledge of British culture, and “modern” music for me means Britpop, I have had fun reworking them to suit the international (and younger) audience who will be present. I will post some sample questions in the next blog.

Finally, a great week has been topped off by the release of a new album by my favourite band, The Divine Comedy. I’m gutted I won’t be seeing them tour for the first time in over two decades, but I wanted to share this particular track.

At a time when the world seems to be falling apart, the sentiments of this song, Invisible Thread, about the connections to our children, and in turn our parents and our loved ones seem more apposite than ever.

And yes, it is Ardal O’Hanlon from Father Ted playing the dad in the video!

Leave us a comment, or a question if you would like to 🙂

Date : 21st September 2025