Island Tour

The next day we were up at 7:15AM so that we could do our island tour with Are. He was really great and was able to tell us a lot of stuff about the island. We started with Nusa Dua and were going to go over to Turtle Island but we decided it was too expensive to do the excursion and moved on. The beach at Nusa Dua though looked really nice.

Are drove us up through Sanur to Goa Gajah (The Elephant Cave) which was very neat and beautiful. We had to wear sarongs to cover our legs and women who are menstruating are not allowed to enter the temple. There was a man waiting at the bottom of the stairs who said he would be our guide and I thought he was priest/monk of the temple but it turned out he was just someone there to make money as a guide. I decided to wash my face with the temple's water, which was a neat experience.

Next we went to Tampak Siring (The Holy Water Temple). This place was very beautiful. There was a long pool that you could bathe yourself in for good luck and because we were there on a holiday all of the temples were filled with offerings. There was another pool where the "Holy Water" came up from an underground spring, that was neat to see. Unfortunately both of the temples had booths where people were trying to sell you something and you had to walk through them to get out.

We also went to see the oldest house on Bali, which to me looked like the one on "Eat, Pray, Love". We met the family that lives there and saw the different rooms, the family temple, and how they lived their day-to-day lives. It was an interesting experience and made me appreciate our house back home. 

On our way to Ubud, Are took us to a spice farm that he liked to go to. Here we got to see how they make Luwak coffee and try some, as well as other teas and coffees made there. While we were enjoying our samples it started to pour down rain and by the time we were ready to leave the path to the car had been flooded. It was a very wet walk back. 

When we got to Ubud we stopped to have lunch and Are drove us around the shopping area and took us to the Ubud Market. A little tip: shop the inside stalls at large markets like these, the vendors on the outside edges charge more because not all tourists are willing to go inside. We bough sarongs for Rp. 40,000 from an inside stall and the outer stalls wanted Rp. 120,000.

Mel was starting to come down with a migraine so we decided to skip the last two stops on the tour and just head back to Padang Padang. It was at this point that I discovered I had left my bank card in a machine yesterday so I now had to rely on my VISA for everything. I was a little worried about that at first because I hadn't changed my PIN to 4 digits, but luckily it worked fine.