Woke up early in the morning – got ready and went down to have breakfast with Sat. The earliest birds, Lasker and Elise were already there when we entered the hotel’s open restaurant. Ordered their Indonesian breakfast and both of us hogged the hotel free wifi and did facebooking, check emails, twitters while waiting for the food to come. Jess and Steven came later, followed by the rest.
Food came (no photos again cz I didn’t bring any camera with me) and I ate them up pretty fast as I was hungry. Then we went back to our room to pack our stuffs and gathered at the hotel’s open lobby. I went around and took final few shoots before one of us suggested on group photo.
We gathered again at about 7-ish (can’t really remember the time) at the lobby.
The guys were conspiring on jumping into the pool at night with beer by the poolside; which made me all green eyes as I wanted to join too! Hmph! But I let my pool temptation slide by doing the I-hear-no-evil-meditation-thingy. Haha.
When all of us arrived, we got back into the van and off we went to the dinner place at Panorama Bar & Restaurant. We were supposedly to have dinner at Lasmi Restaurant, but the tour agent owner changed that for us.
The van pulled to a stop in front of Panorama hotel.
I wasn’t expecting us to dine at a hotel’s restaurant on a humble backpacking trip, but we did! We walked into the restaurant with the restaurant staffs warmly welcoming us in and led us to our table.
It’s said that Ubud is famous for arts – and it’s absolutely true as I saw plenty artistic handicraft shops all the way to the city. I knew we’ve entered the city judging from the amount of tourist buses and the intensity of people there!
Oh well, I am not surprised with the amount of people there as the road is aligned with shops on the both sides! Even I would want to enter those shops just to check their goods out though I was almost penniless. Lol.
Mr. van driver turned left into a smaller road and stopped at the side of an open hall – I think the open hall is used for show performances since there’s a big stage there.
We got down from the van and crossed to small road to a high rise bricked wall with beautiful Balinese carvings.
We walked through the opened red wooden doors and wondered where we were as we saw in front of us is a beautifully decorated garden with a small stages for performance and musician.
From Hotel Surya, our van went uphill to Jalan Raya Penelokan where we were told about the absolutely breathtaking view of Mount Batur and Danau Batur. Mr van driver pulled a stop at one of the look-out point along Jalan Raya Penelokan. Before getting down, Yoga warned us about the persistent handicraft sellers there. He told us only look and bargain for the good if we wanted to buy. Else, ignored them.
So we did. We got down and walked to a very narrow lane built on a cliff, behind a handicraft shop.
And my, the view is indeed beautiful. Again, every one of us can’t believe that we just climbed that mountain few hours ago! It looked so complicated, so untouchable, so unconquerable from afar. Yet, we managed to do so!