Goodbye Ubud

By yesterday afternoon Rob and I were both feeling fantastic after our week in Bali especially after our second lunch in a week at the wonderful Indus restaurant. We even had a Janet De Neefe sighting. She was doing lunch with some very important people - no doubt more planning for the seventh Ubud Writer's Festival coming up in October. The Indus was crowded, the food was fantastic, the staff were all really on their toes with Janet around. We really enjoyed the buzz!

With all the ceremonies going on there has been a really festive air about all the streets of the village. In their very glamorous ceremonial dress, careful makeup and up swept hair the women look fabulous especially sitting decorously sideways as pillion passengers scooting off to the temples. Their partners all look really handsome too in man sarongs and batik headscarves.

Unfortunately Rob has not been well enough to leave our hotel room today to enjoy our last full day in Ubud together. I put it down to the snacks we ate last night from a market stall. I ate exactly the same thing and had no ill effects...but that is Rob and his dicky stomach for you. It's the reason why 35 years ago when we travelled around Europe for 8 months as young backpackers Rob lost about 7 kilos and I gained 7 kilos. He got sick in Leningrad eating some dicey Borscht and never really recovered until we got back to England, no matter how much schnapps he drank or how much Immodium he took.

He spent a quiet day sleeping and recovering while I visited many shops that Rob finds boring, swam in the pool, had another massage and enjoyed a beautiful lunch at Wayan's Cafe, just opposite our hotel. (on my own!) It was rather beautiful sitting facing Wayan's gorgeous garden as I enjoyed my solitary lunch (while thinking of Rob).

Rob was feeling much better tonight and was able to join me on the balcony for our last evening in Ubud. A glass of Bintang (no snacks for Rob) and the sound of the frogs and geckoes in the rice paddies, and the gamelan orchestras in the distance as the light fades over this special part of the world.

Eat Pray Love

I'd avoided reading Eat Pray Love when it first became a best seller (amongst women of a certain age). Not another book about a woman finding herself (in Bali no less!!!) I thought. However since arriving in Ubud I've bought myself a copy from Periplus and am even starting to look forward to the film, opening next month they say.

Last August when we were here I took this shot of the extraordinary road collapse opposite the renowned Ubud markets - in the centre of the village, at its busiest point. Apparently it stayed like this for months; no one seemed to know what to do, what caused it, how to fix it. It created mayhem in the village and was very bad for tourism.

Come November last year the Hollywood film makers arrived, ready to shoot scenes of Eat Pray Love in a number of Ubud locations, including the markets (yes, with JULIA ROBERTS!). Apparently they organised the repair of the roadway, fixing it in a flash.

So today it looks like this........ Hooray for Hollywood, though we all hope it was not a temporary fix!

Scenes were filmed (with JULIA ROBERTS) in the markets. Apparently a lot of the stallholders were paid as extras. I heard they were paid 100,000 rupiah (about $12AUS) for their work as extras, which most stallholders would struggle to make in a normal day.

I predict Eat Pray Love will be big for Bali and may well convince many woman of a certain age to come here in search of toothless mystics so they can be just like JULIA ROBERTS.

An early morning visit to the Ubud markets, when the fresh food and cooking stalls are in full operation is a bit confronting as well as fascinating. It was wonderful to restore equilibrium afterwards with an iced Hibiscus tea at the beautiful Lotus Cafe.

And lunch afterwards at an old favourite: Ayu's Kitchen on Monkey Forest Road. Our jack fruit curry, larwa and rice and nasi goreng were just as delicious and just as cheap as in previous visits.

Rob and I both did a cooking class at the Bumi Bali Restaurant yesterday afternoon. Rob is preparing a nasi goreng here under the watchful eye of chef Nyomen. Easy, he says! I want to see him cook it at home now! We also cooked babi kecap, tum, bergedal and my favourite bubur injin (black rice pudding) - all fairly basic Balinese/Indonesian dishes (hmm).

Our Bali is full of loving and eating. I will read the book and find out more about the praying!

Walking Ubud

Ubud is a walker's village. We started early yesterday morning hoping to beat the humidity that builds as the day progresses. That is the time of the day when the locals are at their most industrious too. We saw this cement carver hard at work in one of the lane ways near Jalan Raya Ubud.

We were on our way to our favourite walk amongst the rice paddies on the ridge overlooking the Campuhan River to the West and Ubud village to the East.

Although there is a clearly defined path at the start, pretty soon it gives way to rough tracks formed by the rice workers making their way on the grassy ridges bordering the flooded rice paddies. After a night of heavy rain the tracks were very wet and muddy this morning. But the views were spectacular, as usual.

We walked for almost three hours - at least 3-4kilometres through the rice paddies, until we reached the next little village North of Ubud and then even longer back into Ubud following a roadway that took us back into the village from the North, where we've never explored before.

The little village, Mayan Ubud I think it was called, was a hive of activity. John had told us that it is a very auspicious time in Bali for conducting ceremonies at the moment. All the men and women of the village were dressed in ceremonial clothes. The women were happily (and noisily) working together in the village bangar (community hall) and the men were building a structure out of bamboo scaffolding and woven matting on a grassy clearing in the centre of the village. It was all very purposeful. The women enjoyed having their photo taken but I really wished I could talk to them about what they were doing.

This was our best Ubud walking adventure yet but we felt we deserved our long lunch (seafood platter at Bimbu Bali) afterwards.

Ubud indulgence

Driving up to Ubud on Saturday afternoon John suggested we stop at this Babi Guling (bar-b-que pork) "restaurant" in Batubalan (the stone carver's village) for a late lunch.

Although this was not the famous Babi Guling of Ubud (recently made even more famous by Rick Stein and Anthony Bourdan visits), for a grand total of 63,000 rupiah (a bit under $8AUS) the three of us enjoyed a sensational meal of the most tender spit roasted pork, crunchy crackling, a sate lillit, sausage and rice and lawar (bean salad). We also had iced teas and peanut snacks included in the bill!

It felt so good to be back in Ubud. We are even booked into the same room at the Sri Bungalows as last time. This time there is very little duck herding and rice harvesting to watch from our balcony. Instead there is the construction of a new villa to entertain us. As usual the women seem to do all the labouring work, hauling bricks, barrowing cement etc while the men do the more "skilled" work. No one uses any electrical tools or heavy equipment so there is very little noise to spoil the serenity!

The Sri Bungalows garden continues to delight me. The hellaconias are bursting forth everywhere, hanging in pendulous garlands of intense red and orange. The gardener always takes care to colour coordinate the statuary.

And the little shops along Monkey Forest Road show the same attention to detail. Ubud is very buzzy and the main roads and shops are crowded with tourists at the moment. We think there are many more upmarket shops than there used to be. I have already had a little splurge at Animale on Jalan Raya Ubud.

The monkeys still rule the southern corner of Monkey Forest Road and there are lots more buses full of tourists to see them. You don't have to go into the forest to see monkeys though as many of them prefer to terrorise the shop owners and tourists out on the road itself.

On our first full day in Ubud we couldn't resist a visit to The Indus, our favourite restaurant, about a kilometre outside the village centre. We found that the food continues to be wonderful and their black rice pudding and handmade fresh coconut ice cream would have to be the best I have eaten in Bali (or anywhere else).

To end of our first full day back in Ubud we signed up at "Bodyworks" on Jalan Hanoman for the one hour hot oil therapeutic massage combining Swedish massage techniques and acupressure. Although parts of the treatment can cause momentary agony, the overall effect is just wonderful. We always enjoy being pampered with a serve of fresh ginger tea and tropical fruit in the beautiful garden of the Bodyworks compound after the hard work of the massage. There is always some amazing new pet every year we go there. This time a captive bat was in residence. My first chance to really look at a bat up close and personal

We wandered back to the hotel as dusk settled over Ubud and a heavy shower of rain started, heralding an evening of steady rain, and later, thunderstorms. A perfect day back in Ubud.

Nusa Dua, Bali?

We've never stayed in Nusa Dua before, the gated resort area on the Eastern Coast of the Bukit Peninsula south of Tanjung Benoa. Conceived in the eighties at the height of the Suharto era it was designed to give tourists a pre-packaged, sanitised, safe, (artificial) experience of Bali away from the chaos of Kuta, the glitz of Jimbaran Bay and the unpredictability of Sanur and Ubud.

For three days around the wedding, Nusa Dua proved to be a very convenient place for us to stay. Our garden villa at the Inna Putri Hotel was very roomy, decorated in traditional Bali style, and extremely well located directly opposite the clean white sandy beach (patrolled by lifeguards and free of the usual annoying hawkers).

We loved the outdoor Bali style shower and were very happy to have our own resident frog for the duration of our stay.

However, the hotel was just too big for our taste (typical of the bigger than Ben Hur eighties era in Suharto's Indonesia), and full of Chinese and Eastern European tourists. The Chinese tour groups seem to us to be the new Americans with their loud shorts, loud voices and cultural crassness (sorry to be so stereotyping-but that is what the Balinese think too!).

The beach is so nice, the drinks are so plentiful, the pool is so good and the Balinese cultural displays are all provided in such neat packages at the hotel; there really is no need to go anywhere else in Bali!

Luckily we had wedding business to attend to and a responsibility to take David and Vanessa with us to Bumbu Bali on Jalan Peratama in Tanjung Benoa when they had a few spare hours. Rick Stein recommended this restaurant as the best in Bali for traditional style food (especially the seafood) and we have decided since our visit that we would absolutely agree with him.

I feel sorry for all those tourists who miss out on experiencing the magic, the beauty, the mess and the mayhem of Bali by staying within the gates of Nusa Dua.

Bali Magic Wedding

We've been lucky enough to be invited to Vicki and Justin's wedding in Bali (it was yesterday). So on Thursday, the day before the wedding, we set out from our hotel in Nusa Dua to find our friend David (Vicky's Dad). Going by the sandy entrance track winding in amongst the scrubby jungle, complete with rangy looking cows grazing on cleared patches, we thought he must be staying in some rough, beach side shack. However when we opened the timber gates to Nirvana Biru this is what we found........

In all our previous visits to Bali we've never been to the West Coast of the Bukit Peninsula. The magnificent surfing beaches of Bingin, Padang Padang, the Impossibles, have obviously attracted the owners of these beautiful and opulent villas, set in seclusion on the clifftops overlooking the ocean.

Near to David's Nirvana Biru we found the Villa Permutih, where Vicki and Justin were staying in preparation for the wedding there, the next day. Another magnificent villa!

We stayed until sunset and could easily understand why this was the place they had chosen for the celebration of their marriage.

We enjoyed a relaxed pre-wedding catch up with the gorgeous Vicki, her Justin, and some of the other younger wedding guests.

The Villa Permutih has a beautiful swimming pool which overlooks Padang Padang Beach.

Yesterday, the wedding day, we arrived a bit before the 4.00pm scheduled start. It gave us enough time to thoroughly appreciate the beautiful detailing in the set up before most of the guests arrived.

There was a perfect fresh white rose tucked into the green bow on every seat. Roses don't even grow on Bali!!

And fresh white rose petals forming the "aisle".

David's partner Vanessa and I were both feeling nervous for David at this stage because he was feeling his F-O-the-B responsibilities very keenly.

But a few drinks in the garden helped settle the nerves.

Vicki looked absolutely stunning.

We enjoyed the ceremony very much, with its inclusion of literary reflections on the nature of love, some Hindu elements, including a ceremonial blessing, and traditional Balinese musical pieces (as well as the usual vows).

Justin is over 2 metres tall, a funny, smart adventurous man of Australian Scottish descent who is into adventure travel (He publishes Get Lost, an adventure travel magazine). Vicki is a tiny powerhouse of a woman, highly skilled in Corporate Law, and of Vietnamese descent. They seem to adore each other!

It was a magical wedding, very stylish and heartfelt, staged in this most beautiful and exotic setting with plenty of Balinese detailing to make it extra special. It also helped that with all the guests contributing a bottle of duty free champagne to the celebrations (you can't get champagne in Bali) it meant all of us at our table were drinking Moet all night.

Cold hands warm heart

I had a lovely social week, finding plenty of warmth in this cold, cold city-which is much more frosty than in previous years because there is "more moisture in the atmosphere" (yay!).

We celebrated the (temporary) return of Gregg and Leigh from Lombok at Mecca Bah last Thursday night. We marvelled at their bravery coming out on such a cold night after their lengthy stay in the tropics. They seemed so happy, especially after their week in Coogee catching up with life in the big city and seeing Jordan and Sam again.


A lunch date on Friday with some work colleagues introduced me to a hidden gem in Canberra. It is hard to believe that after all these years of living here I didn't know about the restaurant at the Pialligo Wine Estate (just around the corner from Rodney's). Even on a drizzly, freezing winter day it was quite beautifully rural and picturesque, with good food and some interesting wines to taste. We will go back!


Saturday we celebrated Claire's birthday with another lively gathering, Jeremy's best wines, some warming soups with Flute bread and Mum's moist and delicious gluten free orange cake for dessert (with a glass of our favourite Majella). Happy birthday Claire!

For the first time Ella has a toy that the boys are very interested in. It has been interesting for us too to see how the Toy Story marketing juggernaut has affected Ella. It has brought back a lot of memories of the Star Wars/Transformer juggernauts of her Daddy's childhood. Oh well, it didn't seem to have bad long term effect on him!