Monday 5th December 2022
We decided to hire a car to explore the island, and ended up with a very beat up looking Toyota Agya
Before setting off for the day, we had breakfast at our hotel, as it was included in the room rate. I had mie goreng (Balinese noodles) and Pete had a rice dish, which we’d pre-ordered last night. Both were freshly cooked and sizeable portions. We were also offered a big plate of fruit, although we didn’t bother with this.
Our first challenge was reversing out of the hotel onto an extremely busy road. One of the hotel workers kindly helped by guiding us out. We drove to the Turtle Conservation And Education Centre, which is free to enter but donations are encouraged. One of the volunteers gave us a guided tour, and explained the work that the centre do.
About 50% of their turtles are rescued from the black market (for their eggs, meat, and shells) and about 50% have been injured. The most common ailments the centre treat include injuries due to being hit by a ship or caught in a fishing net, or parasites that infect the turtle shells. A few of the turtles also had tumours. The turtles are looked after and given medical treatment, and then released back to the wild when they are back to full health.
After the turtle centre, we drove to Sababay Winery. I had no idea Bali made wine until today, when we just happened to notice this winery on the map. We stopped by and asked if we could do a tour. The next one was in 30 minutes, so we sat out in the garden and they bought us cold water and grapes while we waited. There didn’t seem to be many visitors today, so we were then only ones on the tour. We learnt that the winery was first set up to help local grape growers in North Bali, who were selling their grapes for 500 rupee (about 2.5p!) per kg. When the winery was founded, it started buying the grapes for 15,000 rupee per kg, so the grape farmers could actually earn a living. We had a tour of the factory, and were also told about the products they produce. Due to the hot climate and the fact the grapes are table grapes (i.e., ones you actually eat) all the wines are very sweet. They started importing Australian grapes to blend with the Bali grapes for dryer wines, which they sell as the premium reserve wines.
After the tour, there’s a tasting with a sparkling (very sweet), a rose (not to my taste, but I’m not a rose fan in general) and the red reserve (which was superb). They also bought out some fried cassava with the most amazing salsa for us to enjoy with the wines.
If you leave a google review, they’ll let you taste an additional wine, although in reality they were happy for us to try as many as we liked. We bought a couple of bottles of red to takeaway and drink in our hotel over the next few days.
Just along from Sababay Winery is Keramas Beach, which is a beach of black sand. I’ve never been to a black sand beach before, but it was beautiful – the sand looks like it’s peppered with lots of silvery glitter (which unfortunately doesn’t come our well in photos!). It was also very hot to touch. There were a lot of very small crabs scuttling along the beach. They were difficult to spot when they kept still.
There’s a cool little restaurant on the beach, which has protruding tables so people can sit with their legs dangling over the beach below. We didn’t go inside, as we’d had a huge breakfast and then the fried cassava so weren’t at all hungry.
We drove further along the coast to the Goa Lawah Temple. As we soon as we got out of the car we were surrounded by women aggressively trying to sell us sarongs and bracelets. You do actually need to wear a sarong to enter the temple, even if you already have your legs covered (as I did), along with a red sash. However, these are included in the 30,000 rupee (about £1.50) entrance fee. The temple was smaller than we were expecting, so I’m not sure it’s worth a special trip. It does have a bat cave though, with millions of bats flying around. You’re not allowed to enter the cave but you can still see them very clearly, and the noise they make is extremely loud!
After the temple, it was time to head towards Ubud, which is where we’re staying tonight. We’d spotted a very highly rated gelato place, Gaya Gelato Lab, which appears to have banana ice cream on the menu – so of course it had to be a stop en route!
Unfortunately when we got there we found there’s no banana today, how disappointing! We got some ice cream anyway, I went for matcha with black sesame croquant and chocolate orange Pete had mint chocolate and coconut. It was very good ice cream, I particularly liked the unusual matcha flavour with its satisfying crunch of savoury black sesame.
We continued driving to our hotel, the Bali Moon Guest House in Ubud. We’d partly chosen it as it’s meant to have free parking, however google maps took us to the entryway to a very narrow alley. Luckily we found somewhere to park nearby, walked down the alleyway, and found the hotel. Apparently there isn’t actually any parking (so a bit annoying that they advertise it), and we were also greeted by a very territorial yappy dog. Not the best first impressions of the place, but fortunately the room was large and comfortable.
There are a lot of stray dogs in Bali (some of which are very aggressive) and I wasn’t too keen on the idea of walking down the dark alleyways late at night (yep I’m a wuss). Plus we were both feeling tired. There’s a pizza place very nearby, Umah Pizza, which had reasonably high ratings on google. So Pete went and got us a takeaway before it got too late.
Unfortunately it was far from the best pizza we had (though was perfectly fine), but the bottle of Sababay wine we drank with it was excellent.
We did a bit of planning for tomorrow, then enjoyed the rest of the wine with an episode Manifest on Netflix before going to bed.
Emma and Pete’s Asian Adventure 