After surviving tigers, wild monkeys, and the elephant ride of death, we decided to do something a little more low key for Christmas. As this was our first time overseas and away from family, I felt a lot of pressure to make it special. I was terrified the kids weren’t going to feel like we really had a Christmas without our traditional holiday routines. The Man and I had also decided that we were tired of the obscene materialism surrounding Christmas and we were going to spend our time and money doing things with our kids instead of buying things for our kids. I’m not going to lie and say that last part was easy. Every time I passed by a toy store and saw all the kids inside formulating their wish lists I felt like I was depriving my kids of an essential part of childhood. Santa did come to our home in Singapore but he was far more reserved than in previous years.
Luckily, Christmas was on a Friday so I put together a short trip over the three day weekend. We wanted to go somewhere that was close enough that we didn’t spend too much of our holiday in transit but far enough away to really feel like a vacation. We weren’t really interested in anything too busy either as we had been living in a high rise apartment for over six months and were in need of some s p a c e.
So I put down the bon bons and started researching our options. I quickly settled on the small island resort of Telunas (www.telunasbeach.com). Telunas was less than two hours from our house in Singapore (one 45 minute ferry ride to Batam and a one hour speedboat ride to the island) and looked like something off of a postcard with it‘s rustic thatched-roof chalets. I was smitten by the idea of falling asleep Christmas night while listening to the gentle waves through the floorboards. A few emails and two boat rides later and we arrived at our island paradise.
I loved that we were on an isolated island about an hour away from the nearest city (by boat, no less) so there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. No internet, no cell phones, no clothes to fold, no trips to the grocery store. We played on the beach, swam in the ocean, read on our private balcony, and made smores by the bonfire at night. The brief afternoon rain gave us all a good excuse for a nap. A bell rang three times a day and we made our way to the dining room The food, by the way, was fabulous. I’m not a fan of many Indonesian dishes but every dish I tried at Telunas was exceptional. Frankly, not having to think about what was for dinner or if I had everything I needed to make it was a vacation in and of itself.
The chalets were everything I had hoped for: simple but more than adequate and immaculately kept. For me, there isn’t anything more peaceful than the sound of water and we all slept like death listening to the ocean.
We skyped with our families in the US on Christmas morning before we headed to Indonesia and that seemed to be enough for the kids. We didn’t bring any of the toys Santa had delivered and the kids never asked for them. All my worrying had been a waste. It wasn’t our traditional holiday but it was a very Merry Christmas indeed.
