Our Air Garuda flight to Bali last Saturday went very smoothly, as usual. This time, in cloudless conditions, we had a very clear view of the amazing outback Australia landscape for most of the way.
Although we left Australia (on different flights) at about the same time, Ros and Pete had an hour or so wait for us at Denpasar airport before we got through our queues at Immigration. Never mind all that, easily forgotten; our driver Eddy was there waiting for us and we had our holiday to get started - Ros and Pete's first visit to Bali and our ninth (but who's counting).
Our Paneeda View villa is roomy and charming and right on Sanur Beach. We love the peace and quiet of this little (though extensive) hotel after the chaotic traffic. Our favourite Warung Blanjung just a few minutes drive away, still serves some of the best Indonesian food in Southern Bali and we make it our first food stop of the trip. Ros and Pete are instant converts to their Nasi Campur and the local beer!
We wake up early on Sunday morning, still on Australia time, a most beautiful time of the day in Sanur - when the gardens and the beach are looking their best.
We settle in for breakfast in the hotel's beautiful open air pavilion and Pete can't resist going for a dip in the smooth sea water in front of our hotel.
We go for a long, sweaty walk along the paved Sanur Beach promenade, dodging lots of cyclists and the inevitable touts but enjoying the beauty and the energy of the place. It's family day at Sanur Beach on a Sunday and there were many parts of the beach that were crowded with locals, cooking, eating, swimming and fishing even though it was so early in the day.
jk
With an early start to the day we were able to fit in a long session in the pool before late check out at noon and a delicious lunch of gado gado, sate and lumpia (the local version of a spring roll) in the hotel's gorgeous beach side pavillion again.
Eddy made sure we were in plenty of time for our Wing Air flight out of Denpasar to Lombok at 3.00pm. Once again we felt like royalty arriving at Lombok Praya to a warm welcome from John and Gede and everything taken care of. It's about an hour's drive to our hotel through the busy Sunday evening traffic (including a joyous Sasak wedding procession) and the ramshackle energy of Senggigi township.
Puri Mas Boutique Resort and Spa, about 5 minutes drive out of Senggigi is a revelation! It's a beautiful hotel, probably the most luxurious we've stayed in and Ros and Pete and us are in the seaview villas! They are gorgeous. It's just on sunset as we arrive and I am blown away by the setting.
We're too enamoured by the setting to bother going back to Senggigi for dinner so we enjoy G&Ts provided by Judy and Jurgen at Ros and Pete's spacious villa and then on to the hotels' gorgeous open air pavillion overlooking the open sea and Bali's sacred Mt Agung in the distance, for dinner.
I think a few wires got crossed towards the end of dinner causing much hilarity. Rob and I got presented with a cream cake and a special cheesy serenade for our "fortieth wedding anniversary" - causing quite an uproar at our end of the dining room. We played along with it of course - what else can you do when the dinner staff were all so happy for us and our long standing relationship!!
The best way to start the day in Melbourne is with a strong coffee in one of the atmospheric inner city lane way cafes. This morning we had the added joy of being able to listen to a busker playing some ethereal pieces on his cello for the whole time we were drinking coffee and planning our day.
We met up with Rob's old friend David and his Vanessa for lunch at a little (very long and narrow) hole in the wall Thai restaurant on Victoria Road in Richmond. David ordered all his favourites for us: green papaya salad, steamed salmon green curry, whole snapper, Tom Yum, seafood fried rice...the most delicious fresh food.
We've caught up with David and Van twice this year, once in Canberra and this time in Melbourne. We're making up making for some lost time!
We walked up Victoria Road after, to catch one of the free city trams on La Trobe Street, and we both thought we would love to buy this neo-Classical style terrace as our Melbourne "pad"....but only if the current owners agree to leave that Rover Thomas painting above the fireplace.
We celebrated our last night in Melbourne tonight with another wonderful meal out with friends of Maxie and Rod's at Maha, Shane Delia's celebrated Middle East inspired restaurant, just around the corner from our hotel, in Bath Street.
We chose a four course set menu which included some amazing dishes like ketalfi oysters with sour onion hummus with pomegranate, duck and fig bastilla, beef short ribs, 2 hour roasted lamb shoulder and some desserts to die for. We all loved the Turkish delight filled doughnuts with rosewater honey, but this halva parfait with yoghurt icecream and sesame tuille was very yummy too.....
...as was this Pedro Ximenez cake, and olive oil icecream (again) with rosemary and candied fennel (and chocolate soil).
Our day started with breakfast at Madamimadam (Madam I'm Adam), in one of our favourite Melbourne lane ways off Collins Street, before heading up to the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square to see the "200 Years of Australian Fashion" exhibition.
All of us enjoyed seeing this comprehensive collection of clothing from the earliest days of the colony right up to the present, including pieces from the most recent Melbourne Fashion week.
Our favourites were the exuberant fashions of the 80s - when a really distinctive Australian aesthetic started to be evident - especially in the fabulous creations of Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson et al.
.....and the wonderful designs of Akira Isogawa whose Japanese inspired aesthetic is a dominant theme in all the current collections.
Afterwards, while we were still in the mood for fashion we took ourselves off to Cose Ipanema at the Paris end of Collins Street, on Jeremy's recommendation. A big thrill here was seeing an inspiring collection of Kate Durham's jewellery. We didn't buy anything at this high end store but rewarded ourselves all the same afterwards with a pot of Cloudy Wheat Beer from Young & Jackson (home of the iconic Chloe) on the corner of Flinders Street and Swanston Street.
We met Fiona W. and Elizabeth for an early meal at Mamacita on Collins Street tonight. Mamacita is a small but very popular contemporary inner city Mexican restaurant - beautiful fresh flavoursome food but wildly crowded and noisy - even at 5.30pm in the evening. There was already a long queue waiting for tables as we left the restaurant around 7.00pm.
With the night still young we made our way up to the 34th floor of the quietly opulent Sofitel Hotel for a drink and a chat and a chance to admire the sumptuous surroundings.
This pic below of Fiona and Maxie was taken in the Ladies loos - with one of the best views you'll find in the CBD - overlooking Fitzroy Gardens out towards the Dandenong Ranges.
We enjoyed breakfast in the stimulating communal spaces at Studio Schaller - the carefully curated collections are displayed so invitingly - it would really be a fun space to spend hours in!!
But we were on our way to Melbourne today!!
After an easy drive down the highway and an even easier run into the city we were able to drop our cases off at the Rendezvous Hotel on Flinders Street and make our way South of the CBD to the Royal Botanic Gardens in time for lunch.
We wanted to try the food at Jardin Tan - the beautiful contemporary Vietnamese cafe adjacent to the Garden's Visitor Centre. We loved their fresh and delicately flavoured Pho and fragrant salads - although we missed out on the setting under the fig tree today!
We spent the rest of the afternoon at the National Gallery of Victoria - at the amazing Ai Wei Wei - Andy Warhol exhibition. There are over 300 pieces of art work of every size shape and media in this exhibition...enough to look at, think about and learn from for at least a week...but we took in as much as we could over two hours or so!
The curators had done a wonderful (and surprising) job of drawing the parallels and intersections between the work of these two iconic artists..it was a very thought provoking exhibition!
,
Ai Wei Wei has shocked a lot of us with what he has done with priceless Han dynasty and Neolithic era pottery (which is nothing compared to what happened in the Cultural Revolution).
And this work was constructed from Lego!!
Andy Warhol has played around a lot with making art out of everyday materials and imagery (among other things) to surprise us too!
Flowers and seeds figure a lot in Ai We Wei's recent works - but used in very powerful contexts as a means of protest. He used the bunch of fresh flowers image in his bike basket every day for two years or so (for the benefit of the surveillance cameras) as a protest against the loss of his passport to the Chinese authorities.
and Andy Warhol worked with flowers too!
We stayed until the gallery closed this afternoon - still a long way short of seeing everything this amazing exhibition offers. But what an experience!
We returned to the Rendezvous - a very grand old Melbourne Hotel in the old style - but very well preserved and maintained now. We are very happy to be here!
We're in the middle of a road trip - through Yass, Gundagai, Albury and Wodonga on Saturday - with a long, late lunch at the Bridge Road Brewers at Beechworth and then an overnight stay at sleepy Rutherglen, in the middle of one of Victoria's great wine producing areas.
We missed our chance to do breakfast at The Pickled sisters Cafe at Cofield Winery yesterday morning (they were closed for a private function) so made do at the very satisfactory Doc Yarrum Cafe in Corowa instead.
We paid our respects to the region through a visit to the nearby picturesque Pfeiffer Wines on Distillery Road in Wahgunyah.
It felt too early in the day to taste their renowned Muscats and Topaques so we tried their dry crisp Riesling and a sparky Tempranillo.
We loved the setting of Pfeiffer's, with its historic old cellars and acres of old vines set on the banks of beautiful Sunday Creek, a tributary of the Murray River. Rob was excited to see his first native platypus swimming just below the old timber bridge (but we missed it) and we all saw dozens of turtles and schools of oversize carp in the mirror smooth water.
We made it to Bendigo yesterday afternoon just in time to book into our funky Art Series Hotel - The Schaller Studio - and walk (briskly) to the Bendigo Art Gallery by 3.00pm - our pre-booked timed entry into the gallery's big ticket Marilyn Munroe exhibition (in collaboration with twentieth century Fox).
The exhibition includes her iconic costumes, studio portraits, fabulous film material, personal items and letters. Fabulous, talented and beautiful Marilyn was evident in all her glory in the exhibition - but what remained an enigma was the tragic Norma Jean who created her. Marilyn's star shone brightly for barely a decade, but what a gorgeous (though fragile) creature she was!
We mused over all this at the historic old Rifle Brigade Hotel opposite the gallery on View Street as we downed some pots of locally brewed Southern Ocean Pale Ale.
We love our funky Schaller Studio hotel. There is original art work, superb design and stimulating spaces everywhere we look. It would be fun to spend a longer time here - and with some good eating and drinking places close by too.
Although we left Australia (on different flights) at about the same time, Ros and Pete had an hour or so wait for us at Denpasar airport before we got through our queues at Immigration. Never mind all that, easily forgotten; our driver Eddy was there waiting for us and we had our holiday to get started - Ros and Pete's first visit to Bali and our ninth (but who's counting).
We settle in for breakfast in the hotel's beautiful open air pavilion and Pete can't resist going for a dip in the smooth sea water in front of our hotel.
We go for a long, sweaty walk along the paved Sanur Beach promenade, dodging lots of cyclists and the inevitable touts but enjoying the beauty and the energy of the place. It's family day at Sanur Beach on a Sunday and there were many parts of the beach that were crowded with locals, cooking, eating, swimming and fishing even though it was so early in the day.
jk
With an early start to the day we were able to fit in a long session in the pool before late check out at noon and a delicious lunch of gado gado, sate and lumpia (the local version of a spring roll) in the hotel's gorgeous beach side pavillion again.
We're too enamoured by the setting to bother going back to Senggigi for dinner so we enjoy G&Ts provided by Judy and Jurgen at Ros and Pete's spacious villa and then on to the hotels' gorgeous open air pavillion overlooking the open sea and Bali's sacred Mt Agung in the distance, for dinner. 
I think a few wires got crossed towards the end of dinner causing much hilarity. Rob and I got presented with a cream cake and a special cheesy serenade for our "fortieth wedding anniversary" - causing quite an uproar at our end of the dining room. We played along with it of course - what else can you do when the dinner staff were all so happy for us and our long standing relationship!!
