The plan was to explore each of the Gili Islands, but in the end we stayed on Gili T for a week before heading back to Bali and Ubud. The journey was long (12 hours) but pretty uneventful except a small diversion off the road to avoid a monkey and oncoming traffic, although describing any journey on the roads of Indonesia as uneventful is stretching the truth somewhat. The ferry journey was also a bit of a shock to the system as we thought we knew what was in store having completed the journey once, this time however it took an extra 2 hours and seating was no longer indoors on soft comfortable reclining seats, but outdoors on hard wooden benches.
Ubud is the cultural capital of Bali, with its museums, temples, arts and crafts from its Buddhist and Hindu heritage. What it also has is a monkey forest of which Jo has decided to provide you with a picture of all 600 inhabitants, ok not quite, but when you see the photos you'll get the impression that she did! Thankfully the forest of macaques was only 200m from our homestay( where we stayed in Room 101, and Orwell couldn't have described it better in 1984, oh, what torture it is having fresh hot running water for the first time in two weeks!)
So we managed to make it up in time for the morning feeding session, but this didn't stop one of the cheeky kleptomaniacs stealing one poor tourists breakfast after she put it down to pay for the pleasure of visiting the forest.
That doesn't mean that we're not cultural enough to see the historically significant aspects of the area, although i must admit we're pretty 'templed' out at the moment, having visited Goa Gajah or the Elephant Caves which were rediscovered in the 1920's, Gunung Kawi a group of stone memorials believed to be carved into the cliffs around the eleventh century amongst so many other temples and places of worship and ritual.
Despite all this stunning architecture from the old world it has been something far more easily viewed that has captured are attention, that being the rice paddy fields, they dominate the landscape of the region and some of the work that goes into creating the irrigation system is amazing both in architecture and spectacle, but you can have too much of a good thing and we are wondering how many we will see on our travels.
During our travels around the region we also visited a coffee and spices plantation, with a coffee roasting demo.
During the trip I've started to drink hot drinks for the first time, breakfast comes with tea which i have gradually gotten around to drinking, it's amazing what putting something in a beer glass can do to the flavour of a drink.
Coffee was always going to be a stretch and i was planning on trying coffee when we got to Columbia and i think I'll revert back to that plan, despite our imminent arrival in Java. We also went up Mount Kintamani to view the area from a high vantage point, but the only view we got was the inside of a nimbus cloud, however due to the poor view we did get a half price lunch after we decided to walk out of the buffet restaurant our driver had taken us to for lunch with a view. Not wanting us to leave they offered us 2 for the price of 1 as long as we didn't let any of the other patrons know, we weren't even trying to barter but it seemed rude not to stay after they had been so accommodating.
Lovina
We have now moved on to the black sand beaches of Lovina, where we have managed to negotiate a homestay price on a hotel room that has a nice swimming pool for us to laze around, although the room does come with it's drawbacks. The doors are not made for tall(ish) people and i managed to cut my head open on the entrance decoration. Thankfully nothing serious, but a permanent memento of our travels to go with the others i have acquired over the years.
From here we plan to head to Java and Gunung Bromo as we make our way west to Jakarta.
Ryan & Jo
