South East Asia - Indonesia (Bali)

Bali

For every single thing that Lombok wasn't, Bali was.  I absolutely loved my time on the island of Bali.  We ended up with 2 full days, and I easily could have filled up a week with the beauty of this amazing island. 

We decided for our first day to book a private car and driver to take us around to a few highlights and a super delicious dinner at an uber fancy tasting menu restaurant.  Using Frommer's travel guides I selected Amertha Dana as our car/driver company.  This may have been the best decision of this trip!  We were fortunate enough to have what I would label as the best driver ever.  And I'm pretty hard to please so you know he was amazing. 

Our tour of Bali began with a stop at a fabric shop specializing in hand made batik. We got to watch the artists create the prints, then we shopped a little :-) I got a beautiful silk scarf, a skirt, and we picked up 2 prints for the house.

We had a stop at a silversmith where we learned about the process of fashioning chunks of silver into very exquisite jewelry ( and of course I left with a bracelet!)

The next stop was a very large and ornate temple which was just gorgeous. One really remarkable thing about Bali was the abundance of religion. Hindu families have family temples, and go to the community temple together. We were lucky enough to be in the temple at the start of a celebration and saw people coming in with their offerings.

Just driving through the towns and villages here was a sight, one stand out thing I noticed was there was a lot of art happening all around you. There were wood carvers, painters, jewelry makers, batik painters, and everywhere you turned there were gorgeous things to bring home. It was very hard for us to not have the 6 foot tall stone carved Budda shipped to our house.

Bali also puts you in pretty close proximity to nature. And by nature, I mean monkeys.

I suppose you can avoid these guys if you want, but we're brave and went to monkey forest. Literally a forest full of monkeys. And not just any monkeys, but big hungry aggressive monkeys. So what did we do there? Well, what any tourist would have of course! We bought a bag of bananas and created a monkey stampede. One particularly large monkey actually climbed up the husband, and no, I wasn't fast enough to take a picture before our driver saved him from the monkey.

Next up was a stop at a family run coffee plantation, these are abundant in Bali, and the all serve the famous kopi luwak coffee. We each had a sampling of coffees and teas which were delicious. We actually got the chance to visit 2 of these family coffee plantations, because a stop was included on our day 2 tour as well (more of that later).

After our coffee stop we continued on to our ridiculously amazing dinner at the tasting restaurant Mozaic. Everything here was beyond delicious, the service was impeccable, and the ambiance, well, let's just say we were eating dinner in an incredible outdoor garden.  We enjoyed a 9 course tasting menu with a premium wine pairing.  I have never experienced anything so good.  Seriously.   We have already decided on a return trip to Bali and a stop here will definitely be in the plan!!

Day 2

Our second day was so.much.fun.  We planned an excursion with some of our cruise critic friends which included a short stop at another coffee plantation, a drive to the top of a mountain where the views were breathtaking....

Told ya. 

We jumped back in the van and headed down the mountain about 20 minutes and hopped on bikes (!) to take a few miles of scenery via bike riding.  Our guide was amazing, he owns the company and was very attentive to all of us, as was his crew.  This is among my don't-miss-tours in Bali - Halo Bike Tours, and another one I will be doing again when we return.  

Along the way we learned about how rice paddies are planted, grown, attended to, and cultivated, and got some beautiful pictures along the way

After our bike tour we went back to the owners home for some interesting insight on life inside a Balianese life.  His wife also made us the MOST AMAZING buffet of Indonesian food.  It was to.die.for.  And the whole family was so nice and welcoming it really made the day extremely special.  

We visited so much in our 2 days, but really both of us could have been so happy touring this beautiful island for at least a week.  There are so many things to see and do, the shopping, hiking volcanoes, bike tours, Tannah Lot, the Northern Vistas (beautiful northern country), waterfalls, the elephant park..... I could go on and on, just trust me, it's amazing and you should go.  And things here are pretty inexpensive, we passed real estate lots on the beach, each was just under 2 acres and priced at the rough equivalent of $2,000 USD.  I promise if I had my checkbook with me when we passed that sign you never would have seen me again.