Day 11: Ubud (Last Full Day)

Today would be the last full day we have in Bali, tomorrow we start the packing and head back to Brisbane to resume what will now be boring lives.

Before we went to bed last night we ordered our breakfast and arranged to have it brought to our room this morning.  Wow! What an amazing spread they put on here at the Alam Jiwa and what a great view we had to enjoy our breakfast.

Breakfast served at your room – the staff lay out the table and have breakfast ready at the exact time ordered! What an amazing view to enjoy your morning meal. Great way to start the day.

We opted for the Indonesian Breakfast options this morning, so the Nasi Goreng – it was lovely, really tasty.  Almost too much food for 2 people to eat – I didn’t want to leave anything behind though out of respect to the lovely staff who prepared this all for us.

The breakfast – Nasi Goreng, Fruit Salad, Mixed Bread, Fresh Juice, Coffee, and Tea. You really would only need 2 meals a day here!

Back home in Brisbane a work colleague of my wife told us she sponsors a dog at one of the animal refuges here in Ubud.  And she gave us a number of items to bring over to donate to the centre.  So our task today was to find the place and give them our donations.

The Bali Dog Adoption and Rehabilitation Centre (B.A.R.C) is located at Br. Abiansemal, Lodtunduh, Ubud – they also have the Good Karma clinic on Jl Raya Pengosekan.  We decided to get the driver from Alam Jiwa to drop us to the BARC Refuge;  what we didn’t realise before getting there was that they have visiting hours of 11am to 2pm & 4:30pm to 6pm each day – something we realised at 9:44am as we stood out the front!  Thankfully there was a staff member working their this morning who opened up and we could leave our donations for them.

Bali Dog Refuge – http://www.balidogrefuge.com if you want to check them out and help their cause.

They care for a number of dogs (and other animals) at the refuge and their goal is to try to adopt out the dogs or at least rehabilitate them back to health.  It is quite heart wrenching when you see the faces of these poor animals, many of whom have been abused or severely injured/neglected by their owners.  They were all friendly (although the noise from all the barking was a little bit off-putting!), and even the little 3 legged puppy in the office hopped over to say G’Day and thank us himself for our donations.

Bali Dog Adoption and Rehabilitation Centre

I was happy to see the work they are doing to help rescue many of the sick and injured dogs off the streets of Bali – and am led to hope that the small bit of assistance we provided makes their jobs a little bit easier.

After we left the BARC Refuge we decided that being such a glorious day today that we would walk into Ubud centre.  My wife announced before we set off this morning that today was a shopping day – so I would have to accept that and endure endless jewellery shops! The walk from the Refuge to Ubud was deceptively longer than I had first thought, in fact looking at it now on the net it was about 3km.  Which I can assure you by the end of it I was stuffed!

So by the time we made Jl Raya Ubud I can safely say my ability to tolerate shopping had worn pretty thin and I needed to stop at a Husband Day Care Centre to relax (and so that my wife wouldn’t kill me from my complaining);  Oops Restaurant was close by so we stopped there for some drinks and Satay Chicken to help me recharge.  My wife seemed to have superhuman strength today, after a 3km walk and shopping she was still keen to shop more – so she left me at the nextdoor Oops Spa Foot Massage for a 1 hour reflexology massage while she headed off to do more shopping in the Ubud Market.

I don’t know why more shopping centres don’t realise that us men are not built for all day shopping – if there were more bars and foot massage centres I would probably spend more time at shopping centres! oh and if they were only $6AUD per hour it would make it much more enticing!

So after an hour I found my wife again – who amazingly still wasn’t worn out from shopping! Again I don’t know where this woman gets her energy from.  So this time I took to Lobong Cafe for some more Daddy Day Care – this time holding the bar up for a little while and watching the AFL Prelim Finals (to which I didn’t really care since the Brisbane Lions were not even a fixture!).

Another hour passed – and a few bintangs – before loving wife met up with me.  She was commenting on how friendly all the shop staff have been today, all of the young girls wanted to practice their english skills with her, asking her 100’s of questions.

Finally all this shopping had taken its toll on her (a little bit) so we headed off for Massages – I chose Magic Fingers massage for a full body massage, while my wife chose Royal Massage for a Manicure and Pedicure.  Magic Fingers – despite a dodgy sounding name was actually pretty good, and I would put it up there as one of the best I have ever had in Bali thus far, very clean and professional – and also quite cheap at about 60-90k per hour.

As the Formula 1 GP was due to start at 8pm tonight we decided to have an early dinner before heading to Lobong Cafe to watch the race – our dinner choice tonight was Bendi Warung – a small little place on the 2nd floor overlooking Monkey Forest Road.  It is a very basic place but the food was quite good and the prices extremely reasonable – eg. 15k for a Nasi Goreng!

Can be a little tough to find this Warung Bendi – it is just across the road from the Komaneka hotel.

Bendi Restaurant – it isn’t flashy – but has a great view over the Monkey Forest Road and serves simple honest meals. That is Kenko’s Reflexology on the other side of the road.

After our meal we headed up to the Lobong Cafe to watch the F1 – and again how great is it to watch the racing at a normal time of night – 8pm start is wonderful! This week was the Italian Grand Prix which is one of the shortest duration events of the calendar so we were all done and ready to head back to the hotel by about 9:30pm.  We did enjoy some tasty Burgers at the Cafe – the service was a little slow and the manager realised we had been waiting for quite a while so brought us some complimentary cocktails as an apology for the wait.  That was a lovely gesture.

So that was it – our last real day of our holiday – I can’t believe we have to leave tomorrow – I will admit one thing though, it feels like we have been in Bali for a long time.  These have been an amazing 11 Days thus far.  Tune in to tomorrows blog post – which I am sure will contain a number of paragraphs of me complaining about having to return home.