Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Tuesday the 26th of August,

which, because of the seasonality on the beautiful Indonesian island of Bali, means it's a pretty good time to be there.

But there has been a lot of complaining about what's happening in Bali. I will give you two extremes, so one of them is

the lonely planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, who revealed four destinations he's not going to.

They include Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States, mainly for what he sees as unfortunate political leaders in those countries.

But the fourth destination on his list is Bali.

He does say there are many good things about that Indonesian island.

I've just had a great travel writer's reunion trip there,

but until they sort out the ridiculous traffic, I never want to go back, unless there's

a very good reason to drag me there. And as you may well have read in The Independent by my

excellent colleague, Annabel Grossman, she has been writing about how, well, one definition

at the start of her article is,

it's like the Costa del Sol for Australians, you'll hate it,

and there's been an awful lot.

Instagramers, TikTok is basically queuing up to say,

it's a really awful location nowadays,

smothered by overtourism, I think, rather sums it up. But I haven't been there as

recently as Annabel and Annabel, thankfully it being's Travel Desk Tuesday is here. So Annabel,

tell me about what you were expecting and then what you found. So similar to Tony,

Barley really wasn't on my list at all.

In fact, it was probably on my no-go list for quite a while.

And for a very similar reason, maybe 20 years ago, it would have been top of my list.

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