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Chuckro is doing his own big write-up, but here’s my list, partially so I don’t forget:
Day 1
- Got picked up by our guide and driver. In general, highly recommend both. The driver is absolutely necessary (the roads are impossible and terrifying and confusing), the guide is also a really good idea. I used Backyard Asia as a travel agent, and they did an amazing job in lining up all the logistics, including for nearly every meal. (This got a little tiring near the end, when we were a little tired and probably would have been happier with something simpler than I’d planned. But it meant pretty much every meal, both the elaborate and the simple, were spectacular. A mix of fine dining and holes in the wall, none of which got us sick. Also, while it got a little exhausting having someone always checking if we were having a good time, it was incredibly helpful having someone friendly to navigate things and handle logistics and explain stuff. Completely stress-free. No worrying about tickets or reservations or whether the fact we were running half an hour late because of a traffic jam would cause a problem. And we got so much more out of it with a native explaining context and culture. A lot of this would have been baffling without Cika.)
- Drove up to Ubud, about two hours north. It’s one of the capitals of one of the little old kingdoms, complete with still-existing royal family, that’s now become an artist colony and tourist mecca. They have a million adorable shops and restaurants and also a monkey forest full of monkeys. We skipped the monkey forest, but apparently the monkeys come out of the monkey forest and raid the local restaurants for fruit and like to swim in the hotel pools.
- Kehen temple: great introduction to Balinese temples. A little less crowded than some of the others, but still spectacular. The temple bells are in a treehouse high in an enormous banyan tree.
- Penglipuran village – extremely traditional village that decided they’re ok with letting visitors wander in and out of their courtyards. Sort of a living history museum thing except they aren’t costumed actors, they’re normal people going about their daily lives while tourists walk around. (Including other Indonesian tourists, not just Westerners.)
- Lunch was at this gorgeous little roadside restaurant in the rice fields, in a pavilion surrounded by koi ponds. Fabulous crispy duck.
- Hotel (Puri Sunia) was also gorgeous, with I think one of the prettiest pools I’ve ever seen. We were greeted with warm washcloths and chilled fruit tea and flowers for our hair. We took a nap.
- Cocktails at a restaurant overlooking the Sayan Valley (supposed to be at sunset, but it was cloudy. Still really pretty)
- Then we went to a dance performance at Sarasawati Palace. Picture this. There’s this huge, gorgeous, ornate building with a courtyard in front. It’s dark, and it’s all dramatically lit. But in front is all a giant lotus pond full of blooming flowers. To get to the courtyard, you have to walk down a narrow pathway through the lotus blossoms, lit by candles. Incredibly beautiful and romantic. And then we watched a traditional dance performance with full gamelon orchestra.
- Dinner was at another pagoda set in rice fields that are tucked away right in the middle of the city. Balinese architecture is full of hidden courtyards and narrow passages that unexpectedly open into grand temples and fields tucked into the middle of a block. You never know from the street what might be hidden behind the first layer of shops. It’s often glorious.
- We were supposed to go to a third place for dessert. We begged for mercy.
Day 2
- Started with a little trek along Campuhan Ridge, through the rice fields. Gorgeous views.
Then the ARMA museum – mix of historic artwork and contemporary. Very nice. Also got to try jackfruit at the farmer’s market outside. I’ve never had fresh jackfruit, only dried, which is kinda gross. Fresh is delicious.
- Lunch was at Warung Ibu Oka, a little hole-in-the-wall that serves basically babi guling (roast suckling pig) and nothing else. It’s the most amazingly tender and flavorful pork, with the best cracklings of my life. Also mango juice from the gods.
- After a quick look at the exterior courtyard of the still-in-use royal palace, we got an hour of shopping which I really wish had been two. There are a ton of really pretty crafts and fun stuff to look at.
Then we got the dessert we’d missed the night before.
- Then massages. Oh my goodness. Again with the unexpected tucked away stuff – we walked down this little street and turned into the spa, which had a big set of fishponds to wait by. After a few minutes, we descended a long staircase into a narrow valley, all filled with a series of waterfalls and Zen-style ponds, and back up to our own private little building for our massages. After we were finished, there was an open air private courtyard with a shower attached to our building so we could wash off the oils.
- Dinner was at Bridges, which is in fact tucked under a beautiful bridge, kind of hanging off a canyon wall. (The entire Ubud area is a massive network of gorges, with riverlets that are carefully siphoned off into an incredibly elaborate and carefully managed set of irrigation channels watering the rice fields. You cross a LOT of bridges, both large and tiny.) Lovely fine dining.
Day 3
- We got up early and drove to Marga Village for a visit with a farmer and his (40-person compound) family. We learned how to make the little palm boxes and construct an offering, and how to make the pretty palm decorations we’d seen them putting up in our hotel earlier that morning. (All party decorations are flowers and elaborately folded palm leaves. They’re gorgeous and cheap, why use plastic crap?) We got made some kind of symbolic talisman necklace I still don’t fully get the significance of. We got traditional medicine applied to our faces. We learned the traditional way to open a coconut, and how to make coconut oil.
- We got a cooking lesson, which I very much hope to put to use, because seriously, the food is delicious. Incredibly complex flavor base. (One of the base pastes involved like 15 ingredients. Although you make a ton of it and it keeps in the fridge for a month.)
- Then we got to “help” the farmer. They needed to plow the field, which is done with a pair of cattle hip deep in water, hitched to a narrow wooden plow. We took turns sitting on the plow and “driving” it around the field (mostly letting the cows do what they’re used to and trying not to fall off. I’m reminded of beginner tourist riding horses, who know exactly where the trail is supposed to be and follow it no matter what the dumbass on their back does, while trying to sneak mouthfuls of grass because the tourist can’t stop them.) Then we waded into mud up to our knees to plant rice. The mud is very silty – it actually feels amazingly good on your skin. People pay spas large amounts of money for mud baths. Anyway, it was super fun.
- After eating the lunch we’d helped make, we drove up to Lake Bratan, where Ulun Danu, one of the most photographed temples, is located. Mixed feelings on this one. The temple is gorgeous, perched out on its own little island. So you can get really really amazing photos…which don’t show the swarm of tourists on the shore. They’ve made a little park for visitors, complete with statues for kinds including a creepy Sponge Bob, so the surrounding area looks like an Instagram trap/mini golf course. As an experience, it feels kind of empty – you do it for the photo but it’s a long drive for a non-great experience that looks great on camera. There are a couple other famous temples we didn’t hit, and I’m glad we didn’t go out of our way. (Also, a Javanese couple begged to have me in their photos. I was wearing great pants and cool sunglasses, so I guess I looked suitably glamorous and Western. They were so thrilled. It was a little random, but I’m glad I could make them happy. It was not the only time on the trip that the Indonesian tourists from other islands wanted pictures with us. “And then we saw this cool temple, and then we saw white people! Look, we got a great photo with the white people.”)
- The hotel was having an anniversary party for itself. Guests were welcome, but it was really intended for the staff. I drifted by. It was charming – they did seem to be a happy group of coworkers and the hotel seemed to really care about them.
- Dinner was at Mozaic, a French haute cuisine restaurant focusing on local ingredients, with an impossibly romantic garden seating. It was definitely in the top 10 nicest restaurants I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a lot of really nice restaurants. Pretentious as fuck, but in a good way? We did the tasting menu. They started off by bringing a wooden boat of fruits and vegetables and spices as we worked our way through courses, they’d point out the ingredients in their raw form. (Snakeskin fruit – delicious, looks like a large fig covered in literal snakeskin.) Also, each drink on the menu was entitled an entire sentence, where the full cocktail menu was a summary of the Ramayana. Each cocktail came with a tiny scroll telling that part of the story. My second drink involved a blow torch to caramelize the banana brittle that went with my drink.
Day 4
- Pura Tirta Empul. Unbelievably gorgeous water temple. A sacred spring bubbles up in an inner courtyard, and is channeled through fountains into a series of koi-filled pools, all surrounded by more of the stunning stone carvings. You slip into the cool water and proceed from fountain to fountain, each of which is supposed to wash away a particular malaise (bad dreams, bad karma from a previous life, etc.) Afterwards, we fed the fish in the massive adjoining fish pond. I’ve never seen so many massive carp in one place.
- Pura Gunung Kawi. Stone temple carved straight into the walls of a river gorge. Includes a bunch of ancient hermitages. Incredibly beautiful. Unfortunately, also involves a lot of steps.
- So there’s a particular Instagram trend of the Bali swing, a swing over the jungle. It was so popular that there are now a TON of them. I’d had mixed feelings – it’s so very much a “do it for the ‘gram” thing that it felt really shallow and weird. But I was still vaguely intrigued if we happened to be near one…except when I actually saw it, it involved a safety harness and a winch and a hidden net and no thank you.
Another delicious local lunch at a restaurant overlooking the ridge we’d walked a few days before.
- Coffee plantation – more of a tourist trap than I’d realized. I’d been to a coffee plantation in Costa Rica where it was an actual working plantation with rows and rows of coffee vines and the full processing facility on site. This was more like a little garden with one plant each of several significant plants and a couple show stations to show what is traditionally done. Oh, and a couple of civet cages for the cat-poop coffee. Then there was a tasting of teas and coffees…which involved ten different teas and coffees PLUS the luwak (cat poop) coffee. Plain Balinese coffee (which is burnt and unfiltered so it’s super silty and I’m NOT a fan), plain hot chocolate, chocolate coffee, coconut coffee, vanilla coffee, ginseng coffee, ginger coffee, ginger tea, lemon tea, turmeric tea. And the luwak coffee. Which is vile, by the way.
- That night’s dinner was a Locavore. Ok, so if Mozaic was pretentious in a good way, this was pretentious in a bad way. In “Always Be My Maybe” there’s a scene in a snotty restaurant in which Keanu Reeves eats venison while listening to a recording of the deer while alive. This…wasn’t quite there, but it approached it. I am delighted to have had the Experience, but I can’t say I actually LIKED a single one of the things on the tasting menu. They were all so overthought and intensely flavored as to not actually be delicious. But the couple sitting next to us was from Brooklyn and was equally delighted/gobsmacked by the ridiculousness and we just had the Best Time. I may do a post at some point just on this dinner. It was the worst thing we ate on the trip, but we had a lot of fun doing it. I don’t actually recommend the place.
Day 5
- We got to sleep in (and I got a lovely long swim) before leaving Ubud and heading to Sanur.
Stopped at another hole-in-the-wall, this time specializing in Panang food (from Sumatra). Never would have picked the place in a million years. Delicious.
- The new hotel, a beach resort, was a different kind of stunning. (Segara Village, if you want to find it.) Giant beach front. Three different pools, each stunning. (An infinity lap pool, that spilled over so that the pool chairs were in ankle deep water. A jungle-landscaped pool, surrounded by lush greenery. A Jacuzzi pool surrounding a swim-up bar.) Multiple gardens and pagodas for lounging and a tennis court and three restaurants and a spa and more koi ponds. A little playground for the kids with a chicken coop. Lots of beautiful resident ducks. Our own balcony with a daybed.
- We went out to Uluwatu, an amazing temple perched on the edge of a massive sea cliff, spilling over with bougainvillea and inhabited by monkeys. Gorgeous sunset.
- Cika fought his way through the teeming scrum of guides and tourists and emerged triumphant with our tickets to the Kecak dance. There’s no way we would have accomplished this on our own.
- The Kecak dance is a retelling of the Ramayana (they’re really really big on this) with a men’s chorus who continually chant while creating the scenery. It’s delightful. Especially Haruman the Monkey King, whose hamming works in any language.
- Dinner was a seafood barbeque on the beach in Jimbaran. A random roving Sumatran mariachi band played all the greatest hits of the US, the UK, Latin America, Japan, and South Korea.
Day 6
- Spent most of the day at the resort.
- Took a sunrise yoga class that was amazing. I usually do yoga at work. Have to say, doing it at daybreak under palm trees surrounded by gardens, with the ocean rolling in the distance is a lot nicer. Although it was definitely weird looking up from triangle pose into the eyes of a chicken. Also, I cleverly put my flipflops on an ant hill, which I will admit doesn’t usually happen at the office.
- One of the most magnificent hotel breakfasts ever.
- We lounged at all the places. Chuck got a massage.
- Honestly, at this point I think we were done, but we were still signed up for a final food tour in Seminyak, so out we went. Cocktails at a fancy rooftop bar on the beach. (We got there too early, so had more time to kill than anticipated. We actually fled after a bit in favor of a walk – the sunset was blindingly hot.) Appetizers at one place, dinner at a third, dessert at a final fancy hotel with an amazing backyard I could barely see because I’d worn my sunglasses and accidentally left my glasses back at the hotel. To get between these, we got shuttled around on motorbikes I was definitely glad not to be driving. It was kind of hair raising.
Then back home, jiggity, jig.
Day 1
- Got picked up by our guide and driver. In general, highly recommend both. The driver is absolutely necessary (the roads are impossible and terrifying and confusing), the guide is also a really good idea. I used Backyard Asia as a travel agent, and they did an amazing job in lining up all the logistics, including for nearly every meal. (This got a little tiring near the end, when we were a little tired and probably would have been happier with something simpler than I’d planned. But it meant pretty much every meal, both the elaborate and the simple, were spectacular. A mix of fine dining and holes in the wall, none of which got us sick. Also, while it got a little exhausting having someone always checking if we were having a good time, it was incredibly helpful having someone friendly to navigate things and handle logistics and explain stuff. Completely stress-free. No worrying about tickets or reservations or whether the fact we were running half an hour late because of a traffic jam would cause a problem. And we got so much more out of it with a native explaining context and culture. A lot of this would have been baffling without Cika.)
- Drove up to Ubud, about two hours north. It’s one of the capitals of one of the little old kingdoms, complete with still-existing royal family, that’s now become an artist colony and tourist mecca. They have a million adorable shops and restaurants and also a monkey forest full of monkeys. We skipped the monkey forest, but apparently the monkeys come out of the monkey forest and raid the local restaurants for fruit and like to swim in the hotel pools.
- Kehen temple: great introduction to Balinese temples. A little less crowded than some of the others, but still spectacular. The temple bells are in a treehouse high in an enormous banyan tree.
- Penglipuran village – extremely traditional village that decided they’re ok with letting visitors wander in and out of their courtyards. Sort of a living history museum thing except they aren’t costumed actors, they’re normal people going about their daily lives while tourists walk around. (Including other Indonesian tourists, not just Westerners.)
- Lunch was at this gorgeous little roadside restaurant in the rice fields, in a pavilion surrounded by koi ponds. Fabulous crispy duck.
- Hotel (Puri Sunia) was also gorgeous, with I think one of the prettiest pools I’ve ever seen. We were greeted with warm washcloths and chilled fruit tea and flowers for our hair. We took a nap.
- Cocktails at a restaurant overlooking the Sayan Valley (supposed to be at sunset, but it was cloudy. Still really pretty)
- Then we went to a dance performance at Sarasawati Palace. Picture this. There’s this huge, gorgeous, ornate building with a courtyard in front. It’s dark, and it’s all dramatically lit. But in front is all a giant lotus pond full of blooming flowers. To get to the courtyard, you have to walk down a narrow pathway through the lotus blossoms, lit by candles. Incredibly beautiful and romantic. And then we watched a traditional dance performance with full gamelon orchestra.
- Dinner was at another pagoda set in rice fields that are tucked away right in the middle of the city. Balinese architecture is full of hidden courtyards and narrow passages that unexpectedly open into grand temples and fields tucked into the middle of a block. You never know from the street what might be hidden behind the first layer of shops. It’s often glorious.
- We were supposed to go to a third place for dessert. We begged for mercy.
Day 2
- Started with a little trek along Campuhan Ridge, through the rice fields. Gorgeous views.
Then the ARMA museum – mix of historic artwork and contemporary. Very nice. Also got to try jackfruit at the farmer’s market outside. I’ve never had fresh jackfruit, only dried, which is kinda gross. Fresh is delicious.
- Lunch was at Warung Ibu Oka, a little hole-in-the-wall that serves basically babi guling (roast suckling pig) and nothing else. It’s the most amazingly tender and flavorful pork, with the best cracklings of my life. Also mango juice from the gods.
- After a quick look at the exterior courtyard of the still-in-use royal palace, we got an hour of shopping which I really wish had been two. There are a ton of really pretty crafts and fun stuff to look at.
Then we got the dessert we’d missed the night before.
- Then massages. Oh my goodness. Again with the unexpected tucked away stuff – we walked down this little street and turned into the spa, which had a big set of fishponds to wait by. After a few minutes, we descended a long staircase into a narrow valley, all filled with a series of waterfalls and Zen-style ponds, and back up to our own private little building for our massages. After we were finished, there was an open air private courtyard with a shower attached to our building so we could wash off the oils.
- Dinner was at Bridges, which is in fact tucked under a beautiful bridge, kind of hanging off a canyon wall. (The entire Ubud area is a massive network of gorges, with riverlets that are carefully siphoned off into an incredibly elaborate and carefully managed set of irrigation channels watering the rice fields. You cross a LOT of bridges, both large and tiny.) Lovely fine dining.
Day 3
- We got up early and drove to Marga Village for a visit with a farmer and his (40-person compound) family. We learned how to make the little palm boxes and construct an offering, and how to make the pretty palm decorations we’d seen them putting up in our hotel earlier that morning. (All party decorations are flowers and elaborately folded palm leaves. They’re gorgeous and cheap, why use plastic crap?) We got made some kind of symbolic talisman necklace I still don’t fully get the significance of. We got traditional medicine applied to our faces. We learned the traditional way to open a coconut, and how to make coconut oil.
- We got a cooking lesson, which I very much hope to put to use, because seriously, the food is delicious. Incredibly complex flavor base. (One of the base pastes involved like 15 ingredients. Although you make a ton of it and it keeps in the fridge for a month.)
- Then we got to “help” the farmer. They needed to plow the field, which is done with a pair of cattle hip deep in water, hitched to a narrow wooden plow. We took turns sitting on the plow and “driving” it around the field (mostly letting the cows do what they’re used to and trying not to fall off. I’m reminded of beginner tourist riding horses, who know exactly where the trail is supposed to be and follow it no matter what the dumbass on their back does, while trying to sneak mouthfuls of grass because the tourist can’t stop them.) Then we waded into mud up to our knees to plant rice. The mud is very silty – it actually feels amazingly good on your skin. People pay spas large amounts of money for mud baths. Anyway, it was super fun.
- After eating the lunch we’d helped make, we drove up to Lake Bratan, where Ulun Danu, one of the most photographed temples, is located. Mixed feelings on this one. The temple is gorgeous, perched out on its own little island. So you can get really really amazing photos…which don’t show the swarm of tourists on the shore. They’ve made a little park for visitors, complete with statues for kinds including a creepy Sponge Bob, so the surrounding area looks like an Instagram trap/mini golf course. As an experience, it feels kind of empty – you do it for the photo but it’s a long drive for a non-great experience that looks great on camera. There are a couple other famous temples we didn’t hit, and I’m glad we didn’t go out of our way. (Also, a Javanese couple begged to have me in their photos. I was wearing great pants and cool sunglasses, so I guess I looked suitably glamorous and Western. They were so thrilled. It was a little random, but I’m glad I could make them happy. It was not the only time on the trip that the Indonesian tourists from other islands wanted pictures with us. “And then we saw this cool temple, and then we saw white people! Look, we got a great photo with the white people.”)
- The hotel was having an anniversary party for itself. Guests were welcome, but it was really intended for the staff. I drifted by. It was charming – they did seem to be a happy group of coworkers and the hotel seemed to really care about them.
- Dinner was at Mozaic, a French haute cuisine restaurant focusing on local ingredients, with an impossibly romantic garden seating. It was definitely in the top 10 nicest restaurants I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a lot of really nice restaurants. Pretentious as fuck, but in a good way? We did the tasting menu. They started off by bringing a wooden boat of fruits and vegetables and spices as we worked our way through courses, they’d point out the ingredients in their raw form. (Snakeskin fruit – delicious, looks like a large fig covered in literal snakeskin.) Also, each drink on the menu was entitled an entire sentence, where the full cocktail menu was a summary of the Ramayana. Each cocktail came with a tiny scroll telling that part of the story. My second drink involved a blow torch to caramelize the banana brittle that went with my drink.
Day 4
- Pura Tirta Empul. Unbelievably gorgeous water temple. A sacred spring bubbles up in an inner courtyard, and is channeled through fountains into a series of koi-filled pools, all surrounded by more of the stunning stone carvings. You slip into the cool water and proceed from fountain to fountain, each of which is supposed to wash away a particular malaise (bad dreams, bad karma from a previous life, etc.) Afterwards, we fed the fish in the massive adjoining fish pond. I’ve never seen so many massive carp in one place.
- Pura Gunung Kawi. Stone temple carved straight into the walls of a river gorge. Includes a bunch of ancient hermitages. Incredibly beautiful. Unfortunately, also involves a lot of steps.
- So there’s a particular Instagram trend of the Bali swing, a swing over the jungle. It was so popular that there are now a TON of them. I’d had mixed feelings – it’s so very much a “do it for the ‘gram” thing that it felt really shallow and weird. But I was still vaguely intrigued if we happened to be near one…except when I actually saw it, it involved a safety harness and a winch and a hidden net and no thank you.
Another delicious local lunch at a restaurant overlooking the ridge we’d walked a few days before.
- Coffee plantation – more of a tourist trap than I’d realized. I’d been to a coffee plantation in Costa Rica where it was an actual working plantation with rows and rows of coffee vines and the full processing facility on site. This was more like a little garden with one plant each of several significant plants and a couple show stations to show what is traditionally done. Oh, and a couple of civet cages for the cat-poop coffee. Then there was a tasting of teas and coffees…which involved ten different teas and coffees PLUS the luwak (cat poop) coffee. Plain Balinese coffee (which is burnt and unfiltered so it’s super silty and I’m NOT a fan), plain hot chocolate, chocolate coffee, coconut coffee, vanilla coffee, ginseng coffee, ginger coffee, ginger tea, lemon tea, turmeric tea. And the luwak coffee. Which is vile, by the way.
- That night’s dinner was a Locavore. Ok, so if Mozaic was pretentious in a good way, this was pretentious in a bad way. In “Always Be My Maybe” there’s a scene in a snotty restaurant in which Keanu Reeves eats venison while listening to a recording of the deer while alive. This…wasn’t quite there, but it approached it. I am delighted to have had the Experience, but I can’t say I actually LIKED a single one of the things on the tasting menu. They were all so overthought and intensely flavored as to not actually be delicious. But the couple sitting next to us was from Brooklyn and was equally delighted/gobsmacked by the ridiculousness and we just had the Best Time. I may do a post at some point just on this dinner. It was the worst thing we ate on the trip, but we had a lot of fun doing it. I don’t actually recommend the place.
Day 5
- We got to sleep in (and I got a lovely long swim) before leaving Ubud and heading to Sanur.
Stopped at another hole-in-the-wall, this time specializing in Panang food (from Sumatra). Never would have picked the place in a million years. Delicious.
- The new hotel, a beach resort, was a different kind of stunning. (Segara Village, if you want to find it.) Giant beach front. Three different pools, each stunning. (An infinity lap pool, that spilled over so that the pool chairs were in ankle deep water. A jungle-landscaped pool, surrounded by lush greenery. A Jacuzzi pool surrounding a swim-up bar.) Multiple gardens and pagodas for lounging and a tennis court and three restaurants and a spa and more koi ponds. A little playground for the kids with a chicken coop. Lots of beautiful resident ducks. Our own balcony with a daybed.
- We went out to Uluwatu, an amazing temple perched on the edge of a massive sea cliff, spilling over with bougainvillea and inhabited by monkeys. Gorgeous sunset.
- Cika fought his way through the teeming scrum of guides and tourists and emerged triumphant with our tickets to the Kecak dance. There’s no way we would have accomplished this on our own.
- The Kecak dance is a retelling of the Ramayana (they’re really really big on this) with a men’s chorus who continually chant while creating the scenery. It’s delightful. Especially Haruman the Monkey King, whose hamming works in any language.
- Dinner was a seafood barbeque on the beach in Jimbaran. A random roving Sumatran mariachi band played all the greatest hits of the US, the UK, Latin America, Japan, and South Korea.
Day 6
- Spent most of the day at the resort.
- Took a sunrise yoga class that was amazing. I usually do yoga at work. Have to say, doing it at daybreak under palm trees surrounded by gardens, with the ocean rolling in the distance is a lot nicer. Although it was definitely weird looking up from triangle pose into the eyes of a chicken. Also, I cleverly put my flipflops on an ant hill, which I will admit doesn’t usually happen at the office.
- One of the most magnificent hotel breakfasts ever.
- We lounged at all the places. Chuck got a massage.
- Honestly, at this point I think we were done, but we were still signed up for a final food tour in Seminyak, so out we went. Cocktails at a fancy rooftop bar on the beach. (We got there too early, so had more time to kill than anticipated. We actually fled after a bit in favor of a walk – the sunset was blindingly hot.) Appetizers at one place, dinner at a third, dessert at a final fancy hotel with an amazing backyard I could barely see because I’d worn my sunglasses and accidentally left my glasses back at the hotel. To get between these, we got shuttled around on motorbikes I was definitely glad not to be driving. It was kind of hair raising.
Then back home, jiggity, jig.
