Sand, Sun & Smiles : Part III

Thank you in Bahasa Indonesian is Terima Kasih. Sounds very close to "Teri ma kaisi" and also "Teri ma ki". I can't believe I'm using this language on my blog! But that's exactly what the boys thought about, as soon as they were introduced to the phrase. Boys will be boys. Anyway, we tried being nice and polite and used terima kasih wherever we could with a smile :)

I woke up the next morning and checked for water, it was back! Widi and the plumber must have worked hard early in the morning to get stuff done. I walked down to the common room to find Simran sleeping on the sofa with ten thousand mosquito coils around her. As usual, Uttesh was up. That boy, how he does it, I don't know. But I think the AC in his room wasn't working, so maybe it was too hot to sleep anyway. But whatever the reason, he was up 7:30 AM. The aim was leave the house by 10:30 AM. We were travelling to Ubud. Rather, we were driving our scootys all the way to Ubud. Now, I've travelled from Ubud to Seminyak once. And it was quite a distance and the traffic was horrible as well. So the previous night when we were discussing plans for the next day, I mentioned it to the group, but everyone wanted to drive down anyway. I love road journeys anyway, so I was happy. I wasn't driving, so I was concerned about the ones who were. When everyone seemed more than happy to undertake the journey, I happily agreed. Uttesh and I decided to wake up everyone and ask them to start getting ready. I did my yoga and made some nice garam chai for people. Akshay and Uttesh called the scooty guys and sorted out the bike situation, one of our bikes was still at Potato Head. The bike guys came to our villa and Uttesh went along with them to get that bit fixed. Everyone started getting ready. HImakshi and Agam decided to go get breakfast at Earth Cafe. The rest of the group would have killed me or buried me alive if I denied them their bacon and eggs breakfast that day. So Uttesh, Akshay and Simran went to this awesome place called : Bali Bakery, that Agam had spotter the previous day, to pack us some breakfast for us to have during out pit stop en route Ubud. Stuti and me, lazed for a while and then slept on the beach chairs. Oh, and Latika was getting ready. The folks took about 40 minutes to get breakfast, and Latika was still getting ready. But she was done soon and we all set out on our glorious rides ready for the challenge in front of us. Simran had utilised the free WiFi in Bali Bakery to the utmost and sent us screenshots of Google Maps (what a saviour !), which we all memorised while leaving the house and even then managed getting lost :

Please don't use these pictures to plan your journey, they are only meant for pictorial representation! 

Anyhow, the point is we had a vague idea about where we were going and like the above pictures show, it's technically one straight road. How lost can you get! Well, as we (and later Himakshi and Agam) prove, you can get quite lost on a straight road. Akshay got me Banana Smoothie from Bali Bakery. Like Stuti says, I was on a personal mission to find the best banana smoothie in Bali and Lombok. I ordered it wherever I went. So well, yes the smoothie from Bali bakery was pretty good, more banana lassi than smoothie, perfect to wake me up from my sun bathing/sleeping. We tried eating a bit before we started the journey and kept the rest for the way. 

Simran would have cried literally of she hadn't gotten her bacon that morning. Dangerous for me, because I was riding with her. Thank you Bali Bakery!

Himakshi and Agam would have finished having breakfast and lunch by now! But we weren't all that late. It was 11:15 AM by the time we started. Stopped on the way to fill petrol, cover ourselves with caps and stoles to prevent being sun burnt, and rode away on Bali roads ! Now Ubud was 32 KM away and according to Google Maps would take us 38 minutes in current traffic. 30 minutes and we were no where near Ubud. One aunty on the road gave us wrong directions, and uttesh called out "Teri ma ki" to her. Poor thing, must have heard it as terima kasih. But I won't blame him. We had been riding for close to an hour and nothing so far. No highway even. Fortunately we found the highway eventually and decided to stop at this place called Joy Chocolates for breakfast and rest. But mostly because we saw a free WiFi board hanging next to it, we wanted to check maps and figure out how far this was going to take us.

See how prominent the Free WiFi sign is? I think it's placed there for people like us. To entice us to spend our money on  marshmallows and coffee while we figure out using the internet where on earth we are driving to

  We never leave a photo op. The gang inside Joy chocolates.

Looked like we had 25 km more to go. We wondered on whether this is worth it, so trusted Google maps when it told us it's 1hour 15 mins away and decided to continue. Many boxes of bacon and eggs (with Sambal Chilli) and an awesome latte later, we started getting ready to leave. The girls were relishing awesome chocolate covered marshmallows from joy chocolates! We also realised that your phone's GPS tracked your current location on Maps even if your data is off. So we checked the route on maps and kept that open, and our 'dot' kept moving as we travelled. Not rocket science, I know, but at that moment, it felt like eureka! 

                                         Simran and me! Very smart of me to pose for a pic with the visor down :| 

                                        Langoor ke muh ke Angoor !  now guess who is what.

There was really a lot of traffic. Indonesia celebrates her national day on August 17th, so all the Red and White flags you see are the national flags. And of course, you also see our hero in his very holiday shirt.

Wow we should be in the movies. Just look at us. I mean just. look. at. us.

There are no pictures of Latika and Uttesh because Latu was clicking all the pics and Himakshi and Agam were riding ahead. Oh, which reminds me. This convoy type journey had technicalities to it OK. You don't undertake such a daunting task, without setting some ground rules. 

1) What is the riding queue : who is #1/2/3/4. We established some pattern and never stuck to it.

2) Distress signal : piii - pip - pip was  our distress signal. At various points we were all distressed, but the signal never worked 

We tried our best man. There's only so much we could do. So Google Maps, did turn out to be correct and we arrived at our destination in 1 hour-ish. And parked at the parking lot next to Monkey Forest. The idea was to hire bicycles and ride to the rice fields. Like everything we were doing in this vacation, this was pretty much unplanned. None of us wanted to hire a tour guide or join another group to do this. Also, the proper rice fields bicycling thing was 8 hours long and we didnt want to spend that much time. So we started walking on Jalan monkey forest and decided to rent bicycles and take it from there. We stopped at this car hire and scooters rent thing and asked about the rice fields. We were a little taken aback by the responses. Because supposedly it was really far from Ubud town and would take us 2 hours to get there by cycle. After a 2 hour bike journey, we didn't want to do this. And frankly we didn't have time as well. So then we enquired about hiring a car to go to the rice fields. And the owner and Akshay struck a deal. And both had very pleased looking faces by the end of the negotiation. We saw the owner laughing and talking in indonesian to his counterpart, who was going to drive us. And we gathered that the so-called 'deal' we had struck would not have been a deal at all. So then master Askhay makes us all fee better saying "How much ever he tries cheating us, he doesn't know that at the end we still have the upper hand, so there, we win in the end!". Oh, did I mention he had acquired a Spanish accent as soon as he breathed in the air in Ubud. Dont' ask me why that happened. Should've recorded it for eternity.

Ok, so this above picture is well, weird. After parking our scootys, we went looking for the bicycle hire places. I was walking with Uttesh and he was desperately trying to tell me something. And I was busy trying to read shop signs and watch out for vendors. And Uttesh is being unable to articulate whatever he was thinking or feeling or seeing. So then he finally says in hindi "dekh rahi ho tum" or something of that effect. So I finally wanted to know what he was so intrigued about, maybe he spotted a monkey somewhere on jalan money forest. So then asked him what he was so excited about and he pointed these out to me. And at first it didn't register in my slow brain and then it did. And I burst out laughing. These phalic-shaped bottle openers seem to be a very popular souvenir in Ubud. They were everywhere. Should research the history or significance behind these. Maybe we should tell Uttesh to. He later tried pointing it out (with the same level of ambiguity) to Simran and Stuti who had already seen these and tripped on the weirdness of it. Himakshi being himakshi also held my arm and whispered it to me at the end when we were about to leave Ubud. Basically we were all very intrigued.

Anyway so we struck a deal with the car guy and the 8 of us fit in one Avanza. Which was boiling inside. And after what looked like 40 years, but must have been more like 40 mins, of being stuck in jalan monkey forest, we finally got out of ubud town and on our way to the rice fields. We were also going to see the coffee plantation near by. Akshay continued speaking to an indonesian in Spanish and we learnt asked him about hindi movies and actors. Everyone we met in Bali and Lombok were huge india movies and music fans, and everyone knew ShahRukh Khan (!)

Ubud is beautiful. I can see myself living in Ubud. Like leaving my job and settling down types. It has a different feel to it. You can feel it in the air. It calms you down and grounds you in a nice soothing way. But that's just my reading :) So when we drove past the small balinese houses and the rice fields and all the art, I felt like I was back home! I love Ubud, it's my favorite place in Bali. If I had time, I would have dragged the gang for a yoga class. They would have tied me up and left me in the boot of the car I think. Anyway, we arrived at the coffee plantation. And I'm biased about coffee plantations, nothing beats the beauty of Coorg for me.

I have always loved coffee blossoms!

 But this turned out to be the plantation where they make Kopi Luwak. This coffee is collected from the coffee berry beans which have been digested by an asian cat :

 

Luwak

 The famous asian palm civet, a cat like animal, called Luwak in Indonesia. Very gross if you think about it. But when we went through the whoel coffee roasting and powdering process, you can see a marked difference between regular coffee and luwak coffee. Luwak is a lot more aromatic and a much darker brown that regular coffee. The aroma was beautiful. Uttesh tried a cup of luwak coffee at the airport, and it didnt taste all that different actually.

 The different kinds of drinks they made at this plantation. We could sample some 12 different varieties for free, except the luwak, because you had to pay for that one. None of us wanted to take the risk then, so we didn't order the luwak.

  The clove flower! It was so pungent, the fragrance stayed on Stuti and my hands long after we'd held the tiny little bud!

Cocoa!

A very pretty little flower I saw in the plantation.

 Folks taking pics of our sampling tray

and more from other angles

                              ......it continues.....

OK, I'll stop now.

The buoys!

 The ladies!

 

The gang sans me.

 This was the view from inside the restaurant of the rice fields. It was breathtaking. You have to be there in person to feel the feel :)

So that was our coffee plantation trip. There was a small souvenir shop from where you could buy coffee and oils and scents and soaps. Himakshi, Agam and I went there, while the rest of the gang did some more photography and other nonsense like this: 

 This pic should go in one of those newspaper columns. With two speech bubbles over both their heads, asking readers to guess what they're talking about.

We finally drove to the rice fields, which were equally awesome. And we wished we had our cycles to ride around. It would have been fantastic. It wasn't hot and the sun was not too bright, perfect weather for exploring on your cycles or even by foot. The only minus was that is was too crowded, but then the Tegalalang fields are a very popular tourist destination in Ubud and I should've anticipated it being crowded and touristy. I sat on a restaurant overlooking the fields with Himakshi and Agam, while the rest of the folks went one step down to the fields. 

Again you have to see in live, in person, to experience how beautiful it is. Pictures (especially mine!) don't do justice to it at all.

            This should go on matrimony.com. Thankfully there are no bottle openers next to him :P

Himakshi and Agam managed to do a little bit of shopping from this huge wood carving store, that had a hundred thousand buddha heads ! The rest of us ate ice cream in the car. We finally drove back to Ubud town and dropped off at Bali Buddha, which is this awesome bakery selling all healthy and organic stuff. We decided to split and shop on Jalan Hanuman until 5:30 (we had ~ 45 minutes) and then head back to Seminyak, before it gets too dark to drive. Everyone knew that no one is going to stick to the 45 mins deadline. Everyone shopped. Some (like me) shopped a lot (i mostly bought yoga clothes!), some others shopped smart (Simran and Uttesh) and sat at a cafe to drink. We eventually found each other (other than himakshi and agam) at this cafe: Atman. I ordered a banana smoothie. 

It was 6:15. Not too bad. By the time we walked back to the parking lot, just in time to see Himakshi and Agam walking from the other end, ad settled ourselves for the ride back to Seminyak and finally got going, it was 6:30. One hour after our intended start time. Not bad at all, considering we took a shopping break and there were 5 girls in the group of 8! 

The gang all ready to head back to Seminyak. Google Maps said it would take 1.5 hours. and it did!  Where are Himakshi and Agam! This is a question we were all going to ask later on our drive back also ! :D

Simran being a boy (as always)

So we set out and it did get dark. Stuti and I had maps on GPS and we were guiding the convey. All was ok, until we realised in between that himakshi and agam are missing. So Sim and me, who were leading, stopped and Axe and Stu, #2, stopped behind us while we waited for latu and uttesh, #3, to catch up. When they reached, they told us that himakshi and aga had stopped to adjust something and maybe they spotted a shop on the way or something, and Uttesh confidently says, they told us to go one without them. Which in his defense, agam did say. But poor Agam thought, Uttesh will refuse to go on without them and wait for them while they did whatever adjustment on the scooty, but instead, uttesh agreed and left them! So we merrily started to drive. Sang songs. Bollywood songs, loudly, akshay joined in with some cheap bihari type nonsense, while we continued on our melody. It was loads of fun, the closer we got and started recognising places and realised that we won't get lost again, the merrier we got and the louder we sang. We eventually reached home to find the house in darkness. The electricity was not coming on. So we called Widi, who came with an electrician. HE took time to come, I made chai for the group, and we sat in the common room and debated playing dumb charades and what not, but the sheer laziness to move from out places, prevented us from doing anything worthwhile! So we sipped our chai in darkness while we waited for Widi. Himakshi called me from an indonesian number to say that they are on their way and were lost for a bit, but are ok now. He eventually arrived and fixed the problem and we thanked him. The minutes the light came on ,himakshi and agam arrived. 

Now their side of the story, they actually were having problems with the scooty and stopped for genuine adjustments and no shopping. Uttesh deserted them. They didn't have a cell on them, so they stopped and searched for a sim card after they realised that they had lost the way. And then eventually got here using maps. Haha. So much drama. But poor Uttesh, not his fault, he really thought they were stopping to shop! :)

Anyhow, we changed into our swimsuits and floated around in the pool for a bit while deciding what to do and where to go. And eventually deciding to go to a beach place. We Googled it and found that Crystal Palace was this nice place with live music and good reviews and all that jazz. So we decided on dressing up and going there. Latika and me had some fun dressing up. Fun that poor Uttesh was indirectly subjected to. So after all that laughter and screams, by the time we go ready it was 10:30PM. It was our last night in Bali and Latu, himakshi and agam's last night with the rest of the gang. We were going two (three rather) separate ways after this, so we decided to open the bottle of sparkling rose we had bought from the duty free and raise a toast to the awesomeness ! Axe was feeling a bit under the weather and was coming down with a fever, but being the sport that he is, he got ready and was eager to go out nonetheless! 

Simran and me were trying out best to look all nice and sophisticated and elegant. Didn't work. Never does. 

There. That. Was. Our. Sincere. Attempt

We google maps-ed Crsytal Palace and drove. Latika and I were leading the way. Maps this time disappointed us, and took us through the back alleys to this beach-ish place, that didn't look too promising. We had to get off our bikes, while the the folks found parking space. Sim, Stu, me and himakshi waited at this beach place, which wasn't even crystal palace. Very obviously we were very very very over-dressed for the place. So we fiddled with our skirts and our phones. While we waited for the boys and latika. We eventually found them and they told us most places were closed for food. We literally stopped at every shack and asked them about dinner, but everyone was closed for food, still open for drinks. Each shack had a few bean bags on the beach for seating, and the tide was quite strong and high that evening, we literally saw a wave that carried away a couple of bean bags into the ocean as the restaurant staff ran to save them.

Crystal Palace, it's a really nice place, but more of a sunset feel than a late night place. If we had gotten there by 8 or 9 PM it would've been pretty nice, but we were just too late and too hungry. (this pic is copied from the web, it certainly wasn't this bright when we reached there that night)

So anyway, we spoke about what to do and Googled for late night eating places in Seminyak and found a couple. The top most being Soho's. Which is a 24/7 place :D And we wouldn't mind eating those heavenly ribs again! So we decided to go back to Jalan Raya Seminyak and see what's open. It was already 11:30pm. We eventually landed up at this Italian restaurant called Ultimo, which was shutting it's doors as we walked. The place looked really fancy, but we just wanted food. Because we hadn't eaten anything after the bacon and eggs breakfast and were starving.  The food turned out to be really really good, not too expensive, and the place was really pretty as well. With fairy lights on the trees et all.

 Couple 1

 Couple 2

 There that's us all dressed up and nice

My salmon dish at Ultimo

So that's it then. Our last night in Seminyak. We went back home and hung around at the common room. Our flight to Lombok was at 4:30. We needed to leave for the airport at 1:00PM. Latika's flight was at 7pm and Himakshi and Agam were shifting to Nusa Dua. We called it a night, because everyone was super tired. I decided to give myself a break and not do yoga and sleep. But I ended waking up early. And guess who was up with me! If you've been reading these blogs, no points for guessing anyway :P