Staying in a place for a week or more is, I would say, essential when you travel for few month. It’s like taking holidays of your trip. You can rest your bones on the same bench in the same spot at the same time everyday if you want to. You start to make friends and do some plans together, the kind of plans you do at home with your homies. You discover all the good places of the city and you have time to try all the different coffee shops and register all the wifi passwords of the town in your iPad. You take your time. 

In a word, you can enjoy the routine.

I realized that taking your time, being bored or liking a little routine was not well accepted in an occidental society. How many time did you hear a friend saying that with Gigi, they were “so bored by doing the same thing every day” and that it was “the best thing EVER mate!”…

You zap channels on the tv, impatient for more images to please your eyes, more words to fill up your desire of speed. You don’t have time to digest the informations but the quantity is more important than the quality afterall… Quick, fast, more. Everything we do is trying to break the routine. For us, this is boring and a sign of immobilization, which is the antithese of a good life. 

How many time did you ever think that the routine was positive for yourself? I bet rarely. However, in a way, after living an adventurous life for few weeks, I felt like having a quiet life style for a bit would be the best for me to focus on my feelings and to fulfill this small homesickness that started to settle down in me. 

I would be wrong saying that I don’t like travelling, doing different things everyday. I left my home with a backpack in order to break the routine. But I new it would be for a short period of time in my life and when you have this intense rythm of moving all the time, you feel like a place that you can call home for few days would be salvatory.

I found what I was searching in Canggu. And maybe even more. But after one week, I started to feel guilty about staying around. I was for sure saving money and I enjoyed feeling like an expat in Canggu for a bit, but I could feel in my gut that it was time to move one. I had few time left in Indonesia and I knew that some islands around Bali deserved to be visited. 

So I left Canggu that night. I took a cab to Seminyak and I planned to take the boat, early morning at the other side of Bali. Sashi was playing in Seminyak so it was a good time to say goodbye to everybody.
 

On the way out of Canggu, my cab was stuck in the middle of the rice fields for a time that I felt like an eternity. The entire narrow main road was full of scooter and cars. It would have been so simple for the car in front of us to move forward and let us go, but nobody wanted to make a move. So we simply stayed there for half an hour. Nobody seemed angry. We were all just waiting. Canggu taught me patience and contemplation.

It was like the entire vibe of the area was trying to retain me here. It was like it would be impossible for me to leave Canggu, like a lover who is pulling you by the arm when you try to leave, like a magnet attracted to a fridge, like a cat doing the pussy in boots-big eyes to make you feed him. It was the traffic this time but I felt like Canggu wanted me to stay. I’ve heard these stories of people saying that they tried many times to leave a particular place on earth and that everytime, something made them stay. 

But I had to go. I could feel it in my heart. 

I also knew that I will be back. Soon. 

It was just a goodbye.

I promised Sashi and Marielle to come back after my tour of the Gili Islands.