A land without water fountains

One of the few luxuries that I am looking forward to upon returning home is drinkable tap water. There is none in Bali. They do not have any sort of water purification system or treatment facilities. You simply cannot drink the water straight from the tap. There are several ways to go about this: 1) boil your water, 2) buy bottled water, or 3) treat the water yourself. For the most part, we went with option #3. Rather than using iodine tablets or things like that which they often sell in camping stores, we opted for non-chemical treatment and bought ourselves a “Steripen”. The steripen uses UV light to kill all the bacteria and bad things in the water. Apparently this is how some municipalities in the USA treat their water anyway, so we figured it was good enough for our purposes. The steripen is made for travelers and treats 1 liter of water at a time and takes about 90 seconds per batch. We had a morning routine in Bali in which we would start each day by treating about 4-6 liters of water.
    
The amount of money that we paid for the steripen ended up being about the same (maybe slightly more) than what it would have cost to buy bottled water for a month. But we both feel better about refilling our own water bottles and not creating a whole bunch of extra trash by dumping several plastic water bottles a day. Also, the steripen worked great. Yes, it was a bit fussy at times, but never once did we get sick from the water. I call that a win.

The first stop in our many legged journey back to Philadelphia was the Singapore airport. For the first time in a month, there were water fountains! As far as I can tell, there is not a single water fountain anywhere in Bali (why would they have them when the water isn’t drinkable?). In many towns in Bali I think that running water itself is still very rare (hot water is even rarer) but we were in Ubud and other towns where there is some amount of tourism infrastructure and money. When we were in more rural areas, we definitely saw people bathing and washing clothes in the streams. In any case, water fountains were a welcome sight! I think I will appreciate our drinkable tap water in the USA more than I ever really thought about before. The steripen came in very handy, but now it can be put to rest until our next travel adventure.