What is that makes travel memorable. Is it only the breath taking spectacles, the new sights that we come across, the sense of bewilderment that engulfs us during our travels. For me, part of what makes travel memorable are the human interactions that happens during its course. They make a place and its culture come alive by adding color and narrative to the journey. Without the interactions the locales would be just plain picture postcards and pretty they may be, they would also be devoid of character.
Although there are many ways in which we come across other humans and locals during our travels, one of the key ways is turning out to be renting or sharing space from them. During our travels we have stayed at umpteen hotels. The Hotel stays are nearly always nice, pretty much in line of expectations and do provide some great experiences. The hotel staff is courteous and ready to help in case any need arises. The people we interact at Hotels during your stay are employees doing their jobs and generally do not have much time or desire to engage in your inquisitiveness. As an end result, most of the Hotel stays end up being nearly same and one struggle’s hard to remember or distinguish between them after an amount of time passes.
However, with the advent of CouchSurfing and AirBnB the way people are staying during their travels is increasingly changing. While planning our trip, we wanted to give AirBnB private accommodations a try for our travels through Indonesia. AirBnB provides enterprising Individuals an opportunity to participate in the tourism industry by letting out their spaces. It is eventually enabling many different individual’s to compete with the well established hotels to offer you accommodation. This situation has interesting pros and cons. The advantages primarily being that you can get rooms and spaces with more character and the owners can definitely take it up either as a full-fledged business activity or as a mean to make some extra income on the side. There are the obvious downsides with the service levels being left to the whims of the owner, the place not turning out to be what you expect and so on and so forth. However they do offer one distinct advantage in the owner normally being more receptive to the guests and willing to engage in discussion. Not only they provide great information about place, they also provide a lot of insight into the culture and tradition. This post is the story of one such encounter with an enterprising host.
For our stay in Ubud, we booked for one week with Rheisma at one of her Villas in the middle of Paddy fields. The Villa was nice and very neatly maintained. The Villa had all the modern facilities including a private swimming pool, one of the best stocked kitchens, spacious living and dining room on the ground level. The first level had a huge bedroom with a four poster bed, sloping roof, lots of natural light through big glass windows with views directly into the paddy fields. From the onset, we were happy to make that decision.
The hosts, Rheisma and Ketut were very friendly and assured us of all help during our stay. They were knowledgeable and recommended places and restaurants to visit. We were able to hire a scooter with their help for our sorties in Bali. As things turned out one night, a driver who had a Bintang or two more than what he could handle, got too drunk and hit us hard while we were returning back to the Villa. Not knowing anybody, we called our hosts and true to their word, they rushed to help us. Upon their arrival they took control of the matter. When Rheisma figured out that we both needed medical attention, she called in her Father-in-Law who very graciously took us to the traditional Balinese healer ‘the Balian’ in his own vehicle despite the late hour. The visit to the Balian was a memorable experience in itself and in this age of instant pills, his expertise in relieving the pain without any pills was beyond excellence. The whole experience was mystical to us and we felt that we were taken care off like his own children by Rheisma’s Father-in-law. The accident though unfortunate warmed our hearts to the core by the love and caring we got from our hosts and their family.
The incident also forged a strong bond between us over the next few days which got further accentuated by every passing day. We also met their lovely children Nyla and Indira and spent some great moments with them. By the time the stay was scheduled to be over our hosts invited us to a dinner to celebrate the time spent together. This was also a first occasion for them for something like this with their guests. The dinner was a very lavish spread laid out lovingly by the hosts and all of us enjoyed the meal thoroughly. The camaraderie shared during dinner was of long lost friends meeting after a long while and the time just flew past by.
We had stayed at many a lavish hotels and we struggle hard to remember any of them. This stay however is going to stay with us for a very long time. Not only we received love and caring in a distant land, we ended up getting a fair bit of perspective into the local way of living and their ceremonies. The friendship that followed is priceless. For us, it seems the human interaction, sharing of love and care is the real value that AirBnB brings. We are a convert, and would happily trade the comforts and convenience of a hotel for human interaction that AirBnB leads to whenever the opportunity presents itself. These interactions along with others that we had was the secret sauce that made the whole trip so memorable.
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