Journal

What I'd tell a friend.

Notes on the islands, written the way I'd answer the question over coffee — long enough to be useful, opinionated enough to be worth reading.

14 pieces · Lombok & Bali

Featured · Consulting

What goes wrong in a villa, and it is almost never the villa

No front desk, one caretaker, and a gate the map cannot find. Four things that decide whether a villa stay feels looked after or left alone.

27 October 2026 · 6 min read

Consulting · 6 min

In a hotel, the shift change is where it breaks

Nothing goes wrong at three in the afternoon. It just stops being anybody's. Consistency, handover and feedback in a hotel that is already working hard.

Consulting · 5 min

A restaurant gets one hour, and most of it is decided in the first five minutes

Menus people can't read, orders that arrive apart, and the dish nobody wants to take back. What I look at in a restaurant, in the order it happens.

Consulting · 5 min

A beach club is a seating problem with a sunset attached

Four hundred people, one sunset, and a host stand that decides the whole afternoon. Arrival, coordination and the hours nobody is watching.

Guide · 6 min

Lombok, from someone who grew up there

Everything written about it is written by people who stayed four nights. Here is the version from the other side.

Guide · 4 min

What to do with a day like today

Bali has about five kinds of day, and each one is good for something. Reading which one you've been given is most of the skill.

Guide · 4 min

The island before seven

About a quarter of the places that publish hours are open by seven. If you're up early, that quarter is the whole island.

Consulting · 6 min

Two weeks on the floor in Canggu

A high-end property with beautiful reviews and a problem nobody inside the building could see any more.

Guide · 5 min

Where the chefs eat

Search results are a report on where Bali ate last year. The interesting places haven't been reviewed enough to show up.

Guide · 4 min

The warung list

The best value on the island is a room with eleven reviews, a 4.9, and a bill under Rp 125,000. Almost nothing will show it to you.

Guide · 4 min

You can't choose coffee in Canggu by stars

Twenty-six of the forty cafés here clear 4.7. When everything on a street is excellent, the rating has stopped being a recommendation.

Guide · 3 min

What's still open after midnight

About five per cent of places here serve past midnight, and thirty of them are in the same two neighbourhoods. Late-night Bali isn't a secret. It's just very small.

Trip · 5 min

Batur before it was light

A day everybody does, rebuilt for two people who did not want to do it the way everybody does.

Guide · 7 min

Bali and Lombok: how to split a week between them

They are ninety minutes apart and they are not the same holiday. Here is how I decide which days go where.