Day 14 - Ubud

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Woke up late and decided to eat our eggs and corn flakes. By then it was 11am so we decided to just hang around until it was time to visit our friends, Rosie and Gary who moved to Ballu a few years ago.



We ordered a Grab car at noon and it artived fairly quickly but then I noticed he was going in the opposite direction to where we wanted to go, so I got him to stop and it took a while to sort out the correct destination. Rosie told us to go to Warung Ting Ting and I found it on Google Maps. For some reason the Grab app was taking the driver to a different Warung Ting Ting, so there must be two in the Ubud area. So it ended up taking an hour instead of 20 minutes.



Finally got there around 1pm and Rosie came down to meet us. It was a pleasant 500m walk along a skinny bike track surrounded by rice paddy fields. It was a cloudy day so we couldn't see Mt Agung which is usually visible from there, bur thankfully no rain today.



Rosie and Gary gave us a tour of their beautiful Balinese house before having a yummy lunch prepared by their full-time housekeeper/chef. After lunch we went on a walk further up the track and looked over the rice fields and some other homes built by foreigners. The government has now brought in zoning to prevent all the fields from being sold off for resorts and foreigner's homes. This would eventually cause a shortage of food for the Balinese.



We then went back for coffee and chatted until about 5.15pm. Rosie suggested that we walk back into town as there is a walking track and stairs back to the main road, so we decided to do that.



It was a nice walk, about 20 minutes and just got a bit hairy when we reached the main road as the footpaths (if there are any) are only wide enough for one person so sometimes you have to walk a bit on the side of the road.



As we got closer to the centre of town we came across a temple called Pura Dalem Ubud, also known as the Death Temple. They were doing the Kecak Ramayana and Fire Dance at 7.30pm. The dance represents the episode of the Ramayana, The Death of Kumbakarna. It was 6.30pm so we decided to stay for the show. Again, just $10 each and we enjoyed ourselves as they acted out the story and concluded with the spectacular Fire Dance.



We then decided to have dinner at Cafe Lotus and realised when we walked in that it was cafe attached to the Saraswati Temple. It was lovely having dinner by the lotus pond with the temple in the background.

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