Bali (Day 2) - Ubud

The roosters were back again starting around 4:15 AM, but this time I was ready.  I inserted earplugs I saved from our flight over from Chicago and they worked well enough to let me fall back asleep.  Our driver is arriving at 9 AM, so we got up, packed, and ate our American breakfast of eggs, toast, fruit, sausage (Tim), and juice.

The driver showed up right on time and we were off, but first, we saw from a distance the night before, a large statue of Garuda on the horizon.  We asked the driver to take us there before leaving town.  We thought it would be an easy drive-by, but it wound up being a whole thing.  We arrived at a huge parking lot and then was whisked away on a golf cart to an entrance and then was asked to pay around $16 UDS per person to walk in and see Garuda.  Oy...this is just wasting time.  We want to get to Ubud since we have a long walk planned.  Tim and I decided to just shoot this photo of the large statue of Garuda in the background and head back to the parking lot. 

By the way...this is what Garuda looks like. The statue itself is 249 feet tall, with the base it is 400 feet tall.

We got back to the car and was finally headed north to Ubud.  The distance is only 27 miles, but due to road congestion it took us 2 hours.  We drove by lots of small, but impressive looking community temples, but whatever this is was the weirdest thing we passed.  Thanks to the traffic I was able to get photos of these weird frogs that look like they are not happy with each other.

We arrived at our lodging in Ubud around 11:30 PM.  We thought we would just have to leave our bags at the front desk, but our room was ready so we were able to put our bags into our room.  But not before our welcome drink, every worker thanking us for staying here with them, a tour of the facility, and a tour of our room.  Wow...this place is so nice.  I will include photos of this resort at the end of tomorrow's post.

I had the driver wait for us to check-in so he can drive us to the start of our walk, so we dropped our bags and headed out.  The walk started right in the middle of Ubud at the Royal Palace.  Although this palace looks old, it was built in the 1800's.  It still was pretty cool, had a definite Bali feel, and had some interesting, intricate carvings.

Next our walk takes us out of town, but was we were passing restaurants we started getting hungry so we picked one and had lunch.  I had a traditional Balinese dish called Tuna Sambal Metah and Tim had Meat Lover's Pizza.

After lunch we finally got on with our walk, and just after 1:30 PM we arrived at the start of the Campuhan Ridge Walk.  We saw many other tourist walking along this route, but I think most were doing an out and back for a 2.5 mile or so walk.  We plan on doing a loop that takes us up the ridge and then back around though the rice paddy fields for a 6.5 mile walk....let's see how it goes.

One of the first things we saw was a traditional Bali Temple tower.  This is what the temple yesterday was missing since it was being renovated.

These temple towers are definitely one of the iconic symbols of Bali.

The trail continued climbing and climbing up to the ridge, but the scenery was beautiful, so climbing didn't seem so bad.

We made it to the entrance of a village and decided to take a little break before continuing on.

We entered the village that was a bunch of cafés and villas with a small road going through it that seemed only wide enough for scooters.  After about 10 minutes we were out in the country with beautiful scenes of rice fields.

We then took a left turn and road became busier and hard to walk along since it was narrow with car and scooters constantly passing by.  We had about 1 mile of walking along this road.  Luckily there was many small temples along the route that allowed us to take a break of walking this crazy road and seeing some sites.

Finally we made it to the turn off the main road and enjoyed the walk through smaller, more quiet villages.

And then the road because pretty much a pathway for only pedestrians and the occasional scooter.

This is were the scenery changed from a more urban setting to rice paddy fields.

We saw many people harvesting the rice.  This woman was separating the rice from the husk using the river running along the road.

We loved this part of the walk.  It was so beautiful. 

We then made a turn and wound up back in a larger village with traffic-laden roads.  We still had over 1 hour left of the walk to return to the Royal Palace in the center of Ubud, but decided we had enough.  

Oh...I forgot to mention that in every village we passed though, some always offered us a taxi ride. It seems everyone here is a taxi driver.  This time we really did want a taxi, so I approached the taxi stand and negotiated a fare back to our lodging.

Another thing I need to mention is that our plan for tomorrow is to rent scooters and ride around the area looking at temples.  All day Tim has been talking about how hesitant he is about riding scooters on these crazy roads.  So, as we were taking a taxi ride back to our lodging, I asked the driver if he was free tomorrow to drive us around.  He was, and he said the cost would be 500,000 IDR => $33 USD to pick us up and 8:30 AM and drive us around for most of the day.  For that price, and for Tim's piece of mind, I had to accept, so we will see Made tomorrow morning for a tour around Ubud.

Made dropped us off at our lodging around 4:45 PM and we immediately changed into our swimsuits and hit the pool.  The pool has a swim-up bar, so we took advantage of that and had a few beers.  By around 6:15 PM we were getting pretty hungry so we headed back to the room to shower and get dressed.  Instead of heading to town, we decided to try the restaurant in the resort which turned out to be a great decision.

They had a full menu of everything from traditional Balinese food to pizza, Japanese, and Mexican.  We went for the Jackfruit nachos for a appetizer.  I had Tempura Vegetable and Tim had an Indonesian chicken dish.  For some reason I was in a hungry mood, so I ordered a couple of desserts as well.

We left very full and quite sleepy after our 7 mile walk today followed by beer and a large dinner.  Tomorrow our driver will be here at 8:30 AM, so we have to be up around 7 AM to ensure we have time for breakfast.  We went back to the room, tried blogging (failed), tried watching some YouTube (failed), and finally went to sleep.  

​Until tomorrow...