Advertisement
Published: April 30th 2011
Edit Blog Post
CIMG1811
Cocktail O'Clock! Arriving back in Singapores Changi Airport, we literally had a couple of hours to spare before flying out to another island, this time in Indonesia. Bali was our destination, so we quickly grabbed a taxi back to Uncle Matts place where we took out our dirty clothes from our Langkawi trip and repacked with some fresh ones although Cerri had a different idea of just packing even more clothes! Three hours later and we’d boarded the plane, which I have to say was one of the best planes I’ve ever been on. Qatar Airlines had touch screen tv’s with over a hundred films to choose from, it’s a shame the flight wasn’t longer! The reasoning behind a trip to Bali, was that Uncle Matt & Jo have a holiday home out there called “The Prajna”, located just outside a trendy part of the island called Seminyak. We were met at the airport by their driver who picked us up and dropped us off at their holiday home. By this time it was early evening, so with a quick change of clothes we headed out into Seminyak to have a few drinks. Walking into the bars Jo took us too, we could
CIMG1782
Tanah Lot Temple have been walking into a bar in Miami, New York or somewhere else hip and happening. The first bar was called “Potatohead”, it had its own private driveway down to it, was situated on the beach with an infinity pool and a live DJ playing some laid back tunes. If we had of come the week previous, we would have seen Mark Ronson Dj-ing. The Second bar was called “Woohoo” and had a bit more of a chilled out atmosphere, as we relaxed on the funky bean bags sipping cocktails into the night under the stars.
The next morning we decided to get some Indonesian culture in the form of visiting one of Bali’s famous temples. Situated on the south west coast of Bali is Pura Tanah Lot, known as one of the sea temples as it sits on top on a rock formation only ten metres off the coast. You can actually walk to the temples during low tide but obviously we turned up at high tide! We posed for photo’s on the rocks and had a stroll round the gardens before deciding to return to the air conditioning of the car, as the temperature was pretty scorching
CIMG1794
Body Boarding Pro's! that day. For Lunch we headed over to Double Six, a surfing beach not to far away, after filling our bellies with some yummy Nasi Goreng we retired to the beach for a couple of hours. Uncle Matt had brought along the body boards and as the surf was looking pretty good I took it upon myself to try and teach Cerri how to body board. It took us quite some time to get out to where the waves were breaking as we kept getting battered by the ones making their way to shore, the waves we’re huge and poor Cerri kept having flash backs of Bondi! Eventually we managed to catch some good waves, Cerri even rode one wave for 60 metres back to the beach like a true pro but on one occasion she did get taken out by a wave and surfaced with half her bikini missing! With the excitement at the beach over and bikini’s back in place we made our way back to Seminyak for dinner and called it a night.
We continued our temple and culture theme the following day by taking a trip north to the town of Ubud. We stopped en-route
P1000867
Mum and Baby monkey to see some of the rice terraces that cover the island. Once we’d arrived in Ubud we had a cheeky bit of brunch at a really quirky little cafe then headed for the sacred Monkey Forest. This cool and dense swathe of jungle is home to a band of grey haired and greedy long tailed Balinese macaques. As we strolled around the forest looking at the three holy temples that it houses, the monkeys were ever present in force, at times we even saw them harass innocent tourists who’d foolishly brought some banana’s in with them by jumping on them and reaching in their bags! After monkeying around we made our way just outside Ubud to Goa Gajah or Elephant Cave as it translates into. This is another sacred place in Bali and we all had to don a sarong to be able to enter the surrounding area. The origins of the cave are uncertain as there have never been any elephants in Bali! The cave is carved into a rock face and we entered it through the cavernous mouth of a demon. Inside the T-shaped cave we saw fragment remains of the Hindu god Shiva, plus a statue of
CIMG1887
Sunset at The Rocks Shiva’s son Ganesh, the elephant headed god... so at least there was something elephant orientated at the place! The place was quite large and after strolling around, discovering every part plus taking many photos we then went back into Ubud itself to have a wander round the markets for a bit, picking up some top notch fake sunnies in the process. As it was late afternoon by now, we headed to a bar Uncle Matt had been recommended called “The Rocks”, it was situated as the name suggests on the rocks above the beach within a very fancy hotel resort. As we have seen so many times on this trip, we witnessed another spectacular sunset over the ocean whilst sipping on a cocktail and eating some nibbles. Making our way back to Seminyak for dinner, we went to a traditional Balinese restaurant where our table was in a bamboo hut, in the middle of a lake. You could put your feet in the water whilst you sipped on Bintang Beers and ate some traditional dishes which were extremely spicy!
The next day was the final day in our short trip to Bali, we had breakfast in a funky beach
P1000943
Dreamlands Beach bar before the girls decided they hadn’t had their fix of shopping for the day, so we headed into Kuta to pick up some last minute bargains. These included some more Ray Bans and Cerri picked up some dodgy copies of one of her favourite shows “The Hills”. From the shops we made our way to another beach called Dreamlands, well it was a dream land back in the day but as we’ve found along our trip the nicest places always end up becoming very touristy and over developed. The beach itself was still nice and whilst there we witnessed the local lifeguards rescuing not a person but a large sea turtle. As we made our way back from Dreamlands we stopped off at the infamous Kerokaban Prison where Schapelle Corby the Australian is being held on drug smuggling charges for the next 20 years. Not wanting to get to close to the prison we opted to take photo’s from the safety of the car! We both wanted to visit the prison as we’d read a book given to us by a fellow caravan club member called “Hotel Kerokaben”, we’d recommend it as an interesting read...although it might put you
CIMG1944
Family Photo off coming to Bali! Once back at Uncle Matt and Jo’s holiday home we spent the rest of the day relaxing at by the pool back at the Prajna before packing the bags once again and heading to the airport to catch a flight back to Singapore.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.061s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0382s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb