A day in Ubud

An overnight stopover in Sydney, at the bland but oh so convenient Airport Rydges .........

........... a six hour flight to Denpasar, a one and a half hour drive North (thank you Made) and we're in Ubud, Bali, our home for the next 10 days!

We settle into Cendana and head out straight away into familiar territory -  our favourite Cafe Wayan a few doors down Monkey Forest Road, for their delicious Nasi Campur and Bintang beer (but none of their famous duck tonight). 

 We both sleep well and wake at around 6.00am Bali time yesterday morning (a good effort considering the 2 hour time difference). We start the day the way we want to - with some laps of the lovely Cendana pool, a great way to stretch out after the long flight yesterday.

This is the view from our south facing balcony on a cloudy morning ........

 And our view from the open air dining pavilion - as the rain fell! (We actually loved seeing the rain - something we haven't seen a lot of in Australia in recent months.)

We love the gardens at Cendana too. They are so WET and GREEN (and so carefully tended).

We went walking after breakfast as the rain cleared - getting to know buzzy Ubud again after our three year break. There's a lot of changes in the shops and cafes, and tourists everywhere. The narrow walkways are hard going in places but at least there were no big coachload groups crowding the roads this morning. We heard lots of British, American and Chinese accents in this busy part of town and the Ubud markets were as crowded and frantic as ever but maybe less chaotic and more organisedthan we've seen them in previous visits ....... 

 A beautiful tree along Jalan Dewi Sitra .........

We rewarded ourselves after all this walking with a slap up lunch at our favourite Three Monkeys Cafe  - another place in Ubud that remains unchanged (thank goodness!). 

 Prawn, snapper, calamari, avocado and pomelo salad for me .........

 Rob had seafood satays, urab salad with rice steamed in banana leaf YUM!

 We tried in vain to get into Bodyworks on Jalan Hanoman yesterday afternoon for a massage, but their first available appointment was 7.00pm today!!!! We have NEVER had to wait 24 hours for a Bodyworks massage before (we hate Tripadvisor)!!

To overcome our disappointment we treated ourselves to Ubud's finest gelato (Gelato Secrets on Monkey Forest Road) before catching a mellow sunset from our Room 303 balcony (with our first beer of the day).