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This Homestay is a traditional Balinese building overlooking a tropical garden with Hindu statues and a delightful swimming pool. A restaurant is open all day overlooking a lane where and watch daily Balinese life. I relaxed on the lovely terrace outside my room, overlooking the rooftops, writing in my diary and reading a good book. Whilst I was staying here there was a three-day festival called ‘Gulungan’, the family decorated the statues in the garden and made Bamboo decorations lining the lane.

One month later had eight of my lymph nodes removed from my groin and they found three of the nodes had cancer cells. I found a small lump on my shin, had surgery to remove it and another skin graft followed by 25 days of radiation. I had an eight-hour surgery which involved a vein graft as surgeons were unable to remove the tumour from the vein, but they managed to remove the one from the artery. Results came back that I had a 5cm tumour in my stomach, cancer cells in my voice box, bowel and lymph nodes.

It gets dark at 6.30pm and the time I finished dinner it was dark and started to rain quite heavily, there is hardly any street lights and I couldn’t see a thing. The first European to arrive on the island were Englishman Samuel Wallis and James Cook. Captain James Cook first settled on Tahiti and then he took his ship with Samuel Wallis and went onward to Mo’orea. He first landed in ‘Ōpūnohu Bay, Cook’s Bay was later named in his honor.

November’s art swap was to create two pieces of artwork using text pages. I used a page from a 1950’s children’s book for the elephant painting and a page from ‘Flow’ Magazine, for the Mandala painting. The paper is not glossy like some magazine and ideal for artwork. My swap parnter for this month Bernadette from Oregon sent me this very cute little note book.