Day 3: Seminyak to Ubud

Time for us to leave the salubrious surrounds of Seminyak and head for somewhere a little quieter and more reserved. Prior to this point, we'd pre-booked our accomodation - our Darwin hotel, our campervan and the hotel in Seminyak had all been booked before we left Sydney. But today was the first day we had no plans! After a bit of Shandos research in the morning, we settled on a place in Ubud and texted our driver Putu who we'd grown quite friendly with.

Ubud is about an hour north of the beach areas around Denpasar/Kuta/Seminyak, and obviously much more rural. It's still well on the tourist trail (the Pray chapters of Eat Pray Love were set here), but it's definitely quieter and more laid back than Seminyak. We'd opted for a hotel about 10 minutes out of town with a nice pool and surrounded by rice paddies - somewhere quiet that Shandos could catch up on writing and I could start having a crack at editing together a solid video of our Darwin road trip.

We met Putu at the hotel at 11, and he drove us first to a coffee plantation in the hills near Ubud where they produce Luwak coffee (also known to Westerns as Civet coffee). Essentially they grow the coffee beans and this large cat/sloth type creature picks and eats the beans. Because their diet is mostly fruit and they don't chew the beans, they poo out the coffee beans intact (and still with a skin on), but the sugary fruit in their stomach has fermented the beans. After washing, peeling and grinding, the beans are made into coffee which is surprisingly sweet. We had a nice look around the plantation and farm, then had a tasting platter of the 8 different coffees and 6 different teas they produced. Coconut cream coffee was my favourite, but they also had a mangosteen tea which we liked enough to buy a packet of. Most rooms have kettles so we should be able to enjoy it over the next few weeks.

We arrived at our hotel around 1:30, had a late lunch in the hotel restaurant of Indonesian food, then relaxed and swam in the pool for a couple of hours. Headed into Ubud proper at 5pm and wandered around the market stalls and little shops. Not as expensive as down in Ubud, but still clearly aimed at the Western dollar. Decided to skip on the monkey temple here as we did it last time and weren't hugely impressed (the monkeys are surprisingly aggressive!!).

Dinner and a couple of happy hour cocktails at a local restaurant before catching the 7:30pm shuttle bus back to the hotel - one of the issues with staying slightly out of town means you're on their schedule not yours, or you're paying for a taxi I guess. Early to bed because that's what you do in rural surrounds!Read more