Ubud

Our first few days in Bali exceeded all our expectations. Encounters with monkeys - some fun, some more aggressive - beautiful temples everywhere we looked, chaotic streets, participating in a religious events, swimming in a massive waterfall and of course Instagram queens at every corner! Bali, a very welcomed culture shock.

After a short flight from Brisbane we land at Denpasar airport, everyone on our plane was in a holiday mood, this is definitely a tourist mekka. Our arrival at the airport was very efficient and in no time and especially no hassle, we were in a taxi to our first destination: Ubud. It should be only a short hour drive but it took us a bit longer due to traffic. Some roads were totally blocked due to religious processions. It wasn't too bad to watch them from the aircon car. Ubud is a small town just north of Denpasar, surrounded by hills and rice fields. We can't see much of this from the car though, it feels like one continuous built up area the whole way. We could tell we arrived in the town center by the increasing amount of tourists in the streets and a lot of nice coffee shops. Our hotel is in the middle of this touristy street with buzzing scooters everywhere and we're a bit worried that we made a wrong decision. The hotel stretches for nearly 500m back from the road and the rooms are quite remote from the street and we found ourselves in front of a little rice field with no noise at all. Could almost be paradise.

After a quick jump in the swimming pool to try and get cooler we brave the streets in the search of a restaurant, or more precisely a good restaurant as there are restaurants everywhere. We found ourselves in a cute little restaurant that turned out to be quite high end cuisine and very delicious! Good start. Next day, we wake up early thanks to the 2 hour jetlag and we decide to visit the monkey forest. As per its name it is full of monkeys but they are fed so not agressive. It is also a place with amazing banyan trees. As we couldn't get more sweatier we decided to walk further down the road to a museum. It is an art collection of a rich Balinese and shows traditional as well as modern Balinese art. Quite interesting! Back at the hotel we go for another refreshing jump in the pool and go out to discover the local temples. The stone carving are impressive and remind us sometimes of the temples in Angkor. We buy ourselves tickets for a dance from one of the temples and it's time for an early dinner. Another really good restaurant. Just in time for the start of the dance, we settle ourselves on small plastic chairs for an hour show.

Dance has long been a part of religious ceremonies here and the show we opted for gives a taste of the traditional, performed on the temple grounds with the traditional instruments and outfits. It was interesting to see the colours and hear the music, but I'm not sure these ladies are going to be winning many followers on Tiktok anytime soon.

Next day and we decided to explore the surrounding of Ubud. We are not comfortable on motor bikes yet and seeing how they drive here we would probably have an accident almost immediately, so we hired a driver for a few hours. We were really happy with this decision because tonight there is a big event for Nyepi day (we will tell you all about it in the next post!) so some of the roads were closed with crazy diversions enforced, and as there are no signs anywhere it was helpful to have someone that know the area! We managed to make it all the way out to a remote temple. From our experience the temples are usually built by the river so there is always a lot of steps to get down to the them and then worse, back up again to the road. Quite an exercise in this heat! 🥵 There wasn't a lot of explanations on the temples but they are stunning rock carving and it was a serene environment. Our last stop of the day was a waterfall good way to finally get cooler. It also had a lot of Instagram frames to get some pictures. There weren't any Instagrammers today so we managed to get a picture of Armelle in a nest. Let us know if you want more of these 😂

Finally we got back just in time in our hotel to relax a little before the big event tonight!Read more