Daytripper

So I've been trying to get my bearings in my location of Ubud. Every morning I go walking for a bit, venturing out a little further each day. My favourite place to hang out and eat so far isn't a Balinese restaurant at all but a Turkish one! I can't help it, I'm a sucker for Turkish food, absolutely love it. And when I saw that they were doing good coffee and reasonably priced fresh food, I couldn't resist. And it was here that I got talking to a girl from Moscow, called Irina, who's living here for seven months. A rabbit hopped out and stood by our feet! Irina and I couldn't believe that we were seeing a fluffy bunny just hanging out in the restaurant garden...out here on a tropical island...didn't even know they had rabbits in Bali. He wasn't afraid at all and let us stroke him for a little while...


On Sunday, I went to the Monkey Forest Sanctuary. The macaques are hilarious, there are absolute hundreds of them. They are used to having visitors so of course, they aren't shy.


One woman had her hat stolen (although a stupid idea to wear one in the first place) and another man couldn't get one off of his arm. People yelled for a monkey expert/park ranger/guard and one came along with a slingshot. The macaque bolted. There was even one lady in tears, I don't know what had had happened to her, but she seemed to be traumatised from it.


Luckily, I didn't have such an experience as I walked through the forest. Although one did come up to me, his arms outstretched. He was a big'un too, and there was no way I was having him jump on me! The whole time I was there, I was highly amused and kept thinking about how much my sister would have loved it. I could picture her looking at them all and beaming, gushing and squealing. So Cindy, these are for you:


If I was going to see the best of Bali, then I couldn't do it on foot. Now I'm not one for day tours, I usually can't stand them, but Nengah, the driver will take the guests out for the whole day for about twenty quid. So for a one off, I thought it best to take him up on the offer and see the things I wouldn't have been able to get out and see.

We started the day by heading to this majestic rice paddie:


We then entered two temples:


Then we stopped at a coffee and cocoa plantation and sampled some of their delicious vanilla coffee. After a bit of a rest here where the air is cooler, we headed northeast to see the volcano in Kintimani:


We stopped for some lunch at a Warung, a traditional Balinese eatery and then finished off the day by a waterfall: