Bali, held well, can carry a year. Few places do.
We are based on the south-west coast, but the work is island-wide — and we place each family where the fit is best.
The right region is a question about your family, not about the island — the children’s ages, how you want the days to feel, how near the surf or how deep the green. We help you choose the one that suits the family you are, and run the year from there. The standard of planning remains the same wherever a family lives, but school access, healthcare proximity, traffic and the local vendor network vary considerably — which is why the region, school and household plan must be chosen together.
Choose a region — on the map, or in the index — for a short note on how it lives, and who it may suit.
The regions families consider, in their real relative positions — Ubud inland to the north, the south-west coast at Seseh, Cemagi, Canggu and Seminyak, Sanur on the south-east coast, and Uluwatu at the tip of the Bukit peninsula.
One standard of care in every region — and a different fit for every family.
On placeEach with its own register.
The busy, well-served heart of the south-west — schools, cafés and surf within reach. Convenience over quiet.
Markedly calmer — rice fields, a black-sand coast, space to breathe, depending on the chosen school.
Design-led and grown-up, with some of the island’s strongest dining and shops. For families who want the town at the door.
Green and slower — jungle, waterfalls and a strong creative community, with Green School inland to the south-west.
Dramatic and surf-led, on the clifftops above the Indian Ocean. A trade of distance for beauty.
Gentle water, a long-established international community and a slower pace that often suits younger children.
A broad choice of international and internationally oriented schools sits across the island — from Canggu Community School, Sunrise and ProEd in the south-west to Green School inland and Bali Island School in Sanur. We research and introduce against the child, not the brochure, and time the year to the calendar that suits. Bali has private hospitals and clinics used by international families; we help families identify and arrange suitable insurance through qualified providers and establish the practical route to specialist or offshore care — Singapore is around two and a half hours by air — if qualified clinicians and the insurer recommend it.
Bali isn’t perfect. The wet season is real, and at times heavy. The traffic in some places is genuinely difficult. The bureaucracy is its own discipline. We know all of that, and we say it plainly. The Annum exists because, when those things are held by someone else, what’s left is one of the best years you could give your family.
You are not only in paradise. You are in one of the oldest human stories on earth.
Long before it was a holiday, this archipelago was a stage for the oldest chapters of human history. Homo erectus — Java Man — walked these islands for more than a million years, one of the longest records of human habitation anywhere. The Austronesians sailed south from Taiwan in the greatest maritime expansion the world has known, settling these waters and pushing on to populate half the globe, from Madagascar to Easter Island.
Then the layers a classical education half-remembers: the Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms of the first millennium, who raised Borobudur and Prambanan in Java; the Islamic sultanates; the spice trade that drew Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain east in pursuit of nutmeg and clove once worth more by weight than gold; three and a half centuries of Dutch rule; the Japanese occupation; and a hard-won independence in 1945. Every layer is still visible — in the language, the food, the temples, the architecture, the daily rhythm of the village. A family does not study this. They live in the middle of it.
And it is vast. Indonesia is more than seventeen thousand islands and some seven hundred living languages — the largest archipelago on earth, strung along the equator for the distance from London to Tehran. Bali is a single Hindu island in the world’s largest Muslim nation, and a year here puts the rest within reach: the orangutans of Borneo, the dragons of Komodo, the reefs of Raja Ampat, the temple cities of Java. A family arrives for Bali, and leaves having seen a great deal more.
Few families expect the food to be what they miss most when they leave. It usually is.
The spice trade that drew the world to these islands is still on the plate. A morning can begin at a market stacked with fruit you have never seen — mangosteen, snakeskin salak, durian for the brave — and end, if you like, at one of the best restaurants in Asia. In between sits the warung: a family kitchen with four tables and a plate of nasi campur that costs a couple of dollars and quietly ruins you for anything lesser.
Bali has its own table — babi guling — Balinese roast suckling pig — and bebek betutu cooked all day in banana leaf and spice, sambal pounded fresh at every meal, satay turned over coconut husk at the roadside. Beyond it lies the rest of the archipelago: the fierce Padang food of Sumatra, the grilled fish of the coasts, the rijsttafel the Dutch carried home. Families learn to cook it with their own household cook, eat their way along an Ubud food trail, and find that dinner, here, is one of the plain great pleasures of the year.
Where relationships and invitations allow, we introduce families to Balinese educators, makers and community initiatives who choose to share their work and perspective.
Language lessons, visits with makers and craftspeople — the silversmiths of Celuk, the weavers of Sidemen — and introductions to local educators and community initiatives can be arranged. Deeper participation develops through relationship, respect and invitation.
The intention is not simply to spend time in Bali, but to come to know the place with greater care, context and respect.