#balilife offtojava

After spending all of 5 minutes in the domestic terminal of Jakarta, we decided to take an earlier flight from Jakarta to Bali instead of waiting at the airport all day. The organization here was terrible and we almost boarded the wrong plane!

As soon as we arrived to Bali, we saw so many sculptures like these, which the island is known for:

Also, there were many many temples with bushy, straw-like tops like these scattered throughout the island:

We were lucky enough to stay at a nice villa for three days where someone came in to cook us breakfast every morning: 

And there was also a lot of beach time to be had.

I got a pretty bad cold that had me feeling like this for a few days.

Eventually I found the right medicine to take. It was all in Indonesian! 

We also went snorkeling again!

We even saw rainbow fish! There were some in the Perhentian Islands as well, but we weren’t able to get a picture like this: 

Later that day we also went parasailing! 

We were only up in the air for about a minute, but it was a pretty thrilling experience!

Then we changed villas and stayed in a more remote area where the beaches were very blue and beautiful.

We also stumbled upon this hotel while trying to look for a restaurant. Needless to say the restaurant in here was way over our budget. However, we did get some good advice from someone who worked here on where to go to eat and things to see. She definitely thought we were guests and also probably thought we were bored teenagers whose rich parents took us here. Haha nope!

The following day we went to see the Tegenungan Waterfalls: 

Our driver took us to this place for lunch where they greeted you with a flower.

And afterwards we were off to the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud. It was very surreal. It felt like we were in the middle of the Jungle Book. 

I was able to learn how to look for lice on Louie’s head from the monkeys.

And we were able to get bananas to lure monkeys on us.

My monkey didn’t want to rest on me. 

It was slightly terrifying. 

The monkeys were able to go inside a sacred temple, but we weren’t, so we could only look at them from behind the fence. 

Afterwards we went to the Batur Volcano: 

And finished the day going to a way too expensive beach restaurant for which our driver probably got a commission. lol

Also, Sangha’s room had interesting things going on...

After Sangha left, we stuck around in Kuta and accidentally came across a baby turtle release into the ocean! 

There were TONS of people and TONS of baby turtles being released into the sea.

We also learned how to be magical that evening. 

The show we went to combined a Balinese story with magic. It was very weird but fun. Louie made me go up and be a volunteer to help them with their magic tricks.

We were there for about a week longer after that, so we kept going to the beach :)

Our last night in Bali we stayed at a place with a weird toilet/shower combo:

We finished off Bali by going to the Uluwatu temple, which was on a cliff. They also had a sunset dance/play that was very good: 

I’m not sure how so many people managed to fit. The people in the center were the musical accompaniment. They hummed and sang in a really peculiar clicking manner throughout the whole play.

And the view of the sunset right to the left of it was amazing.

The fire they used as part of the play was questionable considering how many people were packed into the stadium, but it was very cool to watch. Here the monkey lord burned down his enemy’s palace. Throughout the play, the monkey went into the crowd and took selfies with them haha.

This was the main character princess person.

After that we went on a very old rickety $5 bus to the other side of the island to go on a ferry to Banyuwagi. The side of the bus was falling apart, so that was interesting.