In January, my partner, one of her friends and I decided to spend two weeks in Bali.

We planned this trip months in advance and were really excited by it. Not everything turned out how we expected though.

1st of all, we nearly missed out flight from Brisbin to Bali. I'm normally like to get to the gate well before you need to, just to be safe. This time though I was convinced by the others that we had plenty of time to shop. This was not the case though.

Our names were called out, and we had to run to the gate, as we got on the plan everyone was staring at us :(

Once we finally got to Bali, we had another issue. My partner was almost not allowed into the country. Her passport was valid for 5 months and they needed hers to be valid for 6 months even though we were only there for 2 weeks.

After around 2 hours in a small back room, surrounded by scary Balinese Boarder control, we were finally allowed in. Not to my surprise, the driver I had organised to pick us up decided it was a waste of his time to wait around for us. As we were not allowed to use our phones in this scary back room, I was not able to contact him.

We ended up getting a driver to take us on the long drive to our hotel where we were already an hour or so late, and had a long drive ahead of us. This place to our relief was one of the nicest places I have ever stayed, and I would recommend that Honeymoon Guesthouse in Ubud to anyone.

One thing that we also did not account for was that we were travelling to Bali at the height of the monsoon season. During one of the many downpours in the afternoon in Ubud, the power for our whole street went out. This was caused by some of the power lines catching fire down the road. The Bali way of fixing this was letting the fire die out, and soldering the lines together again. Makes me think how often this happens.

Ubud was amazing, and I really think it displays the real heart and soul of Bali, more so than the Clubs and bars and craziness of Seminyak. After Ubud, we decided to move to the coast. This is where our next disaster starts. We had booked a place right on the beach, where we could open the doors and nearly be in the sea.

We had got a driver to take us on this 2 hour trip from Ubud to the coast. Once we got in the right area for this place, we could see that the driver really wanted to get back to Ubud. We got to the end of the road that the hotel was meant to be on, and it was a dead end. I decided that I should go ahead and see how far the walk was and to make sure that everything was all good.

As I walked I kept asking people where "Miss sunshine" was. No one seemed to know... This was not a good sign.

After running around the beach for some time I finally found someone who knew where it was. When I got there, the owner had no idea about our booking and told us that she was fully booked. This was very frustrating as we had already paid for our accommodation there via booking.com ...

I had to go and tell the others that we had to find a new place to stay, as I was walking up the hill, I could see a storm was coming. Not just any storm, but a BIG storm. When I got to the top, I found the others standing on the side of the road with their bags, and the driver nowhere to be seen...

In the rain, I started running from place to place to see if they had a room for us, and for some reason, the prices of places seem to be 10X what they were when we were looking earlier.

We managed to find a place that was not too expensive and looked OK form the outside. The rooms, on the other hand, were not so nice. You name it, rats, cockroaches, bugs, mold, this place had it.