Category: travel

Ayu and I met online, as we had said in our earlier post, All About Us. I wanted to meet Ayu in person so I bought a ticket to Bali, Indonesia. Overall, the trip was amazing! So many beautiful beaches, cute little shops on the side of the streets and many, many other places to visit.

So let me share about what I’ve done in Bali. Not much because my girl needed to work during the weekdays 😪. But, well, I’m going to talk about the trip with her to Ubud and GWK. The first place we visited together was the Rice Farms in Ubud. It was a fairly hot day, although I’m used to the humidity since I currently live in North Carolina in the US. Walking through the farms felt relaxing. The calming green rice plants everywhere you looked had such a peaceful atmosphere. There was also a swing that you could go on with additional cost and some instagrammable photo spots for free. We stopped for lunch at a place called Tebasari. It was the first time I got to try some of the Indonesian spicy food, and it was deliiiciiioous!

Before I went to Bali, my brother told me I “have” to go to the Monkey Forest, so we went. It was actually a lot of fun watching the monkeys! The way they wrestled with each other, climbing all over and eating their little bananas. Inside the forest there were sacred temples that were usually open for the public during big ceremonies, but not everyday so correct me if I’m wrong. They had many statues of distorted creatures surrounding them.

Ah, after we left the Monkey Forest, we went to a restaurant called Bebek Bengil, for an early dinner. Bebek Bengil means Dirty Duck in English. Although the duck wasn’t dirty, it sure was delicious! (And spicy too!)

The last place that we visited was a place called Garuda Wisnu Kencana. This place, located in Jimbaran, is on the southern side of Bali and is just 30 minutes away from Ngurah Rai Airport. The Garuda Wisnu Kencana statue is about 400 feet tall, which is almost 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. We arrived in the late afternoon around 4pm when the last show of the Kecak dance was about to start. We only took a few pictures in front of the statue because we were in a rush to get to the Lotus Pond Area to see the Kecak Dance show. The show was pretty fun because it was not only a normal Kecak Dance where all you see are guys singing “cak cak cak” with a girl dancing in the middle and ending with a fire dance. Instead, we were able to see the dance about the Garuda Mythology aswell.

If you are in search of a tropical island for vacation I would recommend going to Bali. Just be prepared to eat reeeeeaaaal spicy food and rice almost every meal!

If you would ask what our favorite part of Bali is, we would say the first would be Ubud because of the real Balinese vibes. The second is Nusa Lembongan because it is small with beautiful views. The third is Canggu because of it’s young vibes with many good places to enjoy the foods and sunset.

Let’s leave Ubud for the moment, we wanna share about Nusa Lembongan. It is located in the southeast of the Bali island, you can access it by speed boat only, about 30 minutes away. The cost? Depends on which speed boat you use. We use the mid class which is not too expensive but with the “okay” kind of feel to the speed boat. Not special, I must say, but for IDR 200,000/person round trip for Indonesian ID and IDR 350,000/person round trip for foreigners that is fine. Check and make your reservation from Glory Fastboat if you wanna try.

There are not many choices for high end hotel in Lembongan, although if you don’t have a high budget (like us 😂) there are many good bungalows and hotels that you could choose starting from IDR 300,000 – IDR 2,000,000. It varies depending on the season too. We chose a hotel not too far from the beach called Bukit Taman Cottage. We got it for IDR 675,000/night. The staff and owner were awesome! If we could suggest something to you, please choose the hotel around the northwest coast and not a hotel that has more than 10 minutes of walking to the beach. Why? Because almost all of the beach clubs and tourist attractions are located along the northwest coast and it’s not easy to access them if you can’t ride a motorbike. The best option that you have for transportation is by motor bike, which costs around IDR 75,000/day. You can get the rental once you are arrived in Nusa Lembongan, (and seriously, there is always someone offering you to rent their motorbike when you’ve just arrived). If you travel with family or kids, you can call a taxi. It is not a usual taxi in the city, No. It is a small pick up truck that has seats and a roof on it. Almost every famous restaurants and beach clubs have their own taxi pick up service that you can call, just ask your reception and they will help, sometimes it’s free and if you want to get a taxi to the place that has no free pick up, the cost for 1 taxi is IDR 100,000 one way. The last option is golf buggy and is more expensive than the other two. The cost for 4 seaters is IDR 1,000,000 for a day, although it’s different for every rental agent. Please take a note, the road is daaark at night, not much light except from the people’s houses so just be careful if you ride a motorbike or drive a buggy.

Where should you go once you are in Nusa Lembongan? There are plenty of places that you could visit. For us, 3 days are enough to explore. The first day you could enjoy the beach club and sunset. The second day you can go for snorkeling, mangrove tour and then go to yellow bridge and see some pretty beaches. The third day just spend the rest of the time to explore the part of the island that you didn’t see and go photo hunting.

We were there for 2 days and 1 night only and due to that time, the weather was too hot. Gosh, can’t believe that was 33° C. It was so humid. Ayu was dying on that day. We mostly spent our time in beach clubs and swimming. But since Ayu went there before without Jacob, we are posting some pictures of her when she was in Mangrove Tour. I promise we will go snorkeling the next time we go there again. We went to 3 places to hangout. The Deck is a cafe near the harbour (only 7 minutes of walking to get there) and basically, you can see the beautiful view of the strait from there. There is the Sandy Beach Club that you can visit too, we were there from 4pm to 8pm (hahaha 😂don’t judge us, we just wanted to chill out and enjoy the sunset). The last one is Ohana’s, also one of the beach clubs there but our favorite is still Sandy Bay if you want to talk about vibes but if it’s food we’re talking about, we would choose The Deck.

So, have you decided to go there with your friends, family or loved one? We would like to hear your experience there!

xoxo