Ubud

Bedside flower arrangement

Flowers, monkeys, broken pavements, hot days and cool nights.  And so many shops....

Ubud isn't a "village", it's definitely a town.  Or maybe more accurately a series of villages that have spread out, joined up and become a town.

At Ubud palace

I'd done a lot of reading (maybe too much) before arriving and I'd scared myself with horror stories of rabies-carrrying monkeys and incessant touts.  But it wasn't like that.  Sure there were offers of 'transportation' and 'massage' regularly.  A polite 'no' was all that was needed.

 Our hotel, Alam Indah, was gorgeous. It was situated on the other side of the Monkey Forest from Ubud making it very quiet as the road was a dead end.

Breakfast

We stayed in the Gardenia Suite overlooking the swimming pool.  We met some other Australian families and the boys loved Mali, their Bali friend.

We had dates down at the swimming pool in the afternoons and the boys swam while the adults had afternoon tea.

The Gardenia Suite

We walked through the Monkey Forest the first morning. 

Like I mentioned I was nervous about being scratched or bitten but we were very careful and were fine.  The monkeys were very amusing except for a scraggly looking, twitching one that followed us around for a bit.  I was sure that one had rabies.

Nasi Campur in Ubud

A long, hot walk through Ubud followed.  It was bigger than we expected so we quickly exhausted the boys energy and patience.

I'm tired AND bored.

 That evening we went across the road to Laka Leke Restaurant where we had a lovely dinner while watching Balinese dancing.  The last dance included audience participation so up went Ralph. I also have video of this but I don't think the world is ready for it yet.
 

All Balinese dancing needed was some 'Jazz Hands' to improve it.

The next morning we'd booked to canoeing on Lake Batur with C-Bali.com. Lake Batur is a holy lake in the crater of an active volcano (!).  We canoed around the lake for two hours visiting a temple on its banks.  It was a great morning out and was great to do something slightly adventurous with the kids.
 

Alex squished between the C-Bali folks.

On our last morning in Ubud we went shopping and picked up a couple of paintings at an enormous art gallery.

I then bought a little handwoven basket that was repurposed by the boys.  I'm not quite sure what they are supposed to be, but we thought it was amusing.

So that was the first few days of our holiday.  Our time at Villa Raja will have to be a seperate post!

T
xxx