The next day we had planned to spend the day in Canggu. We’ve heard mixed reviews about this place so we went with an open mind. We got a taxi (that should have taken about 30 mins but the traffic is so awful here that it took over an hour) and got dropped to the beach near Old Mans... a restaurant that turns into a lively bar at night as we assumed this would be where we’d spend the majority of our day. It was boiling hot so obviously we wanted to cool off in the sea, only to find there was all broken glass floating about near the shore. So the off-duty nurses in us decided that we didn’t want to deal with any injuries and left our sun beds to head to The Lawn Beach Club just up the road. It was a lovely beach club, however, the pool smelt really funky with lots of floaty bits. Nevertheless, we hung around all day lounging in the sun and having the odd dip in the stinky pool when we couldn’t take the heat any longer. By the evening we decided to go and check out Old Mans. We walked in and walked straight back out. It was jam packed with drunk people and was more like some sort of festival that played rubbish music than a cool bar. We decided we were not in the right mood to party and called a taxi to take us back to Seminyak. Canggu was definitely not for us! We did have a lovely meal when we got back though in a restaurant just up the road from our hotel. I tried a local dish called beef rendang and Gaby enjoyed a rack of ribs!

The next morning we had signed up to a painting class in our hotel. You can view our talents in the profile picture for this blog, and if you’d like to start calling us Picasso & Michael Angelo then we’d be ok with that. It was actually a lot of fun, and they didn’t turn out too bad for someone who hasn’t painted since high school (and that’s many, many moons ago for me!) After that we headed down the road to the beach where we spent most of the afternoon playing in the waves like little kids. It’s actually a lovely beach and it’s a shame it took us this long to realise how much fun we could have here. We stayed here till the evening to watch the sunset and had food & drinks while listening to a live band. After it started winding down there, we went for a couple more drinks in a bar near us that always has live music; mostly rock.

The next day was pretty much the same, minus the painting class. We spent the day on the beach but were in bed by 9:30pm... we weren’t feeling very rock and roll by the end of this day. All this holidaying is hard work and starting to catch up with us now!

We’d arranged to spend the next day with our favourite tour guide, Harry (still don’t know his real name... why learn now?!) We had originally intended on going to stay in Uluwatu for a couple of nights which is down south in the Bukit Peninsula, but now we’d discovered how fun the Seminyak beach was we changed our mind and decided to just visit for the day. So Harry, and his 10 year old son Yohges (sweetest thing ever) arrived bright and early at our hotel and took us to our first stop which was Garuda Wisnu Kencana - the largest statue in the world! The previous day had actually been the inauguration by the President after it had taken 25 years to build. Yoghes hadn’t seen the statue, and it was Sunday which was the only day he’s not in school and wanted to tag along so Harry actually left him with us to come around the national park where the statue is... we obviously seem very trustworthy!! He was very shy, but very good at staying with us and he did speak English so we squeezed some tiny bits of conversation out of him. We then stopped at Pantai Pandawa beach in Nusa Dua for an hour where we all (minus Harry) had a swim in the beautiful clear water. And as we were in the area it seemed rude not to go back to Pak Dobiel for their famous Babi Guling (this was the place we visited with our Canadian friend Kevin the other week and it’s honestly the best meal we’ve had in Bali so we were ecstatic to have the opportunity to go there again). It was just as delicious as our first one!

After lunch we visited Padang Padang beach which was nice, although quite small, busy, it was low tide and there were lots of wild monkeys. It was then time for Uluwatu temple which we got to spend an hour exploring before the main event of Kecak Dancing (traditional Balinese dancing) during sunset. Uluwatu temple is on the top of a cliff and the amphitheatre where the dancing is performed faces the sea where the sun sets so it was really pretty. Harry explained that we needed to get tickets early as it’s really popular so he went to purchase them for us while we wandered around the temple looking at the views with Yoghes. There were lots of monkeys there which scared Yoghes a bit... he couldn’t get enough of the views though so was continuously stood peering over the wall looking at the views and at one point a monkey climbed the wall on the other side to meet him face to face which gave him a fright. It was pretty funny. Another time a monkey started climbing along the wall towards him so I quickly grabbed him down and after that he stayed very close to us. He was so sweet, he’d walk 3 feet then stop to look at the view... 3 more feet then another stop. The Kecak dancing was very interesting. It actually followed a mythological story and was very comical too! There was a man dressed as a white monkey who kept coming into the crowds and posing for selfies in the middle of his performance. By the time the dancing finished and we found Harry in the car park through the crowds of people, and drove the 1-2 hours home we were absolutely shattered from our day of fun, so had a bite to eat in our hotel and yet another early night!

A few more Seminyak updates to follow shortly... we extended our stay here yet again to take us to the end of our stay in Bali, as it’s our favourite place and can still do day trips to do/see everything we wanted to. Speak to you all soon xxxx