Blogs from Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, Asia - page 55

very much a hindu area, strong in keeping their traditions & cultures. nice to see the contrast between here & java. wonderful houses - all very much look like temples - all have temples inside them for making offerings to the gods. beautiful offerings & incense all over the place - little baskets with fresh flowers everyday placed outside doors & at varous places around the rooms, streets, etc for luck & general protection from god. definitely a great feeling of relaxation & calm (despite the many touts & other tourists wandering around!!) getting a bit of a culture shock being here...really quite enjoyed being in a minority in java & missing the way of life i was getting used to. monkey forest - great little forest, yes, full of monkeys..very fun!!! spent a morning doing ... read more

It's been over a month since I got to Ubud, Bali. A town about an hour ride inland from the beaches synonymous with Bali. Up here where the air is cool, the rice terraces are a brighter shade of green than you can imagine, the hippies congregate, the gurus heal, I find my self stuck. Drawn by accommodation unrivaled during the last seventeen months on the road. The story goes a bit like this... So I board my flight in the Delhi Airport after the longest, most grueling security process I've encountered at any airport. People pushing and shoving, in typical Indian style, complete disregard for a line. So off to Kuala Lumpur for a pit stop before catching a plane to Denpessar, Bali. Small side note worth mentioning. India being a Hindu country beef vanishes ... read more

Thursday 17th: After leaving Lovina, we were happily on our way to Ubud, and we asked the driver to stop at Bedugal so we could see the temples on the lake. They were nice to see, but not nearly as impressive as the photos we had seen of them. Got to Ubud and the driver took us to a nice hotel near the centre called Argosa on Monkey Forest Road. It's a nice place, 2 double beds, with an outdoor bathroom - with hot water (a luxury for us by now), and it's set back in a nice garden - all for Rp 60,000 (about £3.40). So we walked around Ubud, went to the Post Office, posted our PADI forms, postcards etc, and walked on. Figured Ubud, even though it's Bali's second largest town, really isn't ... read more

Hi, it's Jamil. My birthday is coming up and I get to pick the hotel, the thing to do and mom will buy me one thing and will give me 20 dollars. What I want to do on my birthday is to take a glass bottom boat through the ocean to see all the fish. We have been in Ubud for eight days. One day in Ubud we rented a car and drove up to a volcano. It is an active one and the second we got to the top it started to pour, so we plopped ourselves inside a restaurant that I think would've had nice view if it was a nice day! When we left the place, there was a group of people outside trying to sell stuff in the pouring rain. I ... read more

We've now spent 8 days in Bali, as we arrived here on the 10th of April. We were picked up by an old friend of ours, who used to be married to someone in Canada and moved back to Indonesia about five years ago, Tata. He greatfully showed us a few hotels around Ubud untill we picked a nice one (well Jamil, Samir and I think it's good because it has a swimming pool, that's about all we look for). Our first full day in Indonesia was a great one, we went to a monkey forest, you wouldn't believe how many monkeys we saw! Another day, we went on this long, long walk with a view of Ubud and lots of rice fields. Thursday we rented a car and drove to a volcano which apparently ... read more