Touchdown Bali, Indonesia.
First stop: Ubud.
Inspired by European artists like the German Walter Spies and the Dutch Rudolf Bonnet Ubud opened up to be a cultural and touristic destination in the 1980’s. Former a small village surrounded by rice terraces it became a quirky, vibrant and touristic small city with thousands of little shops, coffee and smoothie bars, art galleries and hundreds of Yoga and SPA places now. The traffic is horrible. Although we are not in high season it is already crowded because there is just one Main Street.
Staying at stylish Como Uma Ubud, a nice place 10min (in low season, in high season you need up to one hour due to the enormous traffic!) from Ubud centre with outstanding service and a wonderful pool, we spent our first day with strolling around downtown Ubud at Monkey Forest road and Jalan Rayan Ubud which is actually the Main Street. Inhaling astonishing nature in monkey forest – a place where we saw wild monkeys living in the woods there. We had a great healthy and vegan food at Herb Library – a lovely place we can strongly recommend for good quality and slow food. Generally Ubud offers a lot of healthy food as this trend perfectly goes together with the Yoga community… Especially, with jet lagged bones you should really go for a massage in Bali. Prices are generally low and there are plenty of SPA options for every taste. New for us avocado-ginger hair treatment. Says it all, we think. Being a bit „monky“ we need to admit that not every salon is worth to carry the title SPA but we had a funny experience when booking the full body package „Eat, pray, love“ finding out is is more a „Stink, sweat, sneeze“ one. Unforgettable.
Being so relaxed after the touchdown day we had a great trip over the centre of the island with our tour guide Adria, speaking fluent German with an Austrian slang, most impressive words he used „deppert“ and „Lulubrennen“ (when he described the usage of the herbs at the local market…). We saw beautiful rice terraces still owned by local farmers, the volcanos around Lake Batur where we had a beautiful lunch with local food and an impressive farmers garden where we tasted the famous Luwak Coffee – a specialty from Bali considered to be the most expensive coffee in the world as it is made from cat poo. Delicious! By the way back in town we found the Cafe Wayan, a very romantic place to have dinner at Valentines Day.
We already fell in love with Bali after only two days – Bali is a rich island full of beautiful nature, inspiring culture, it has more than 14,000 temples (we saw 2 🙂 ), very friendly people (mostly Hindus) and an artsy-hippie attitude which is still very unique somehow although the town became commercial after all those years of course.
