Bali - Nusa Penida and Ubud

Bali wasn't really part of our planned holiday. However, neither of us enjoys long flights, so we chose to break up the journey to Thailand by stopping in Indonesia both going and coming back home, and Bali was an obvious choice to give us somewhere interesting to have a stop-over.

We had a week here, divided into a relaxed island stay on Nusa Penida and a bit of tourist stuff in Ubud. We spent the first night in Sanur, where the fast boats leave to go out to the smaller islands. Our arrival wasn't auspicious; the taxi from the airport took us to Sanur, but dropped us off at the top of a narrow alley - too small to drive in - and told us it was "down there". It wasn't. After wandering up and down little alleyways we eventually asked at a tiny shop, where one of the other customers kindly rang our accommodation for us, and arranged for them to come and get us - we were too far away to be given simple directions. So we got to our airbnb one at a time, on the back of a scooter.

Our island sojourn was on Nusa Penida, where we hoped to do some snorkelling. In reality, the water was too rough, so Geoff swam out to the coral one day, but Kaye decided not to - she satisfied herself by cooling off in the pool. We stayed in a very small "resort" - just five chalets - in Crystal Bay. The island was fairly quiet, but there were quite a lot of Russian and Chinese tourists. Sunset on the beach was amazing - packed with tourists who drove out there just to watch the sun go down over the ocean.

Back on the mainland we had a couple of days in Ubud. It was much more touristic than we had thought it would be. We were in a lovely rooftop studio, beautifully decorated, with a sitting room and a terrace with lily pond and fish - the nicest place we stayed for the entire trip. One highlight in Ubud was a trip to the monkey forest, where the main entertainment was watching the monkeys divebombing from a tree into their water hole.

Overall we weren't that excited by the bits of Bali that we saw. We prefer places where we can explore on foot; we thought Ubud would provide that, but the centre of the town is taken up with an extensive tourist market, of very limited interest to us. There are lots of cultural experiences that we could have sought out, and we may have seen the place differently had we done that, but we had limited time and just tried to get an idea of what Bali might offer.

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