Bore da, sut wyt ti? (Good morning, how are you for the English followers!) I once again have the pleasure of introducing you to another country...

So after leaving poo-get (that's how it is pronounced!) we decided to head to Indonesia, starting off in Bali. Rather than directly leaving the sands of Thailand for the notoriously known beaches of Bali, we thought we would break it up a bit and explore inland to see what else the island has to offer.

As always the journey begins at the airport, followed by withdrawing a couple of million from the cashpoint (as commonly done back home obviously) before haggling with the taxi drivers - who eventually realise you are not so naive after all, and end up agreeing to a price which is less than 50% of what they originally offered - all part of the fun! Arriving in Ubud, our guest house was located on Monkey Forest Road...no prizes for guessing why it's called that!

We started off just by wandering the streets to get a feel of the place. It was noticeable that the architecture here is a lot more friendly on the eye (than Thailand). Whereas architecture is not my forte, I do believe food is! So carrying on with my obsession for spicy food, I chose the first thing on the menu that contained the words 'spicy' and 'curry'. However I was disappointed as at best it was only comparable to say a Bhuna back home - so I came to the conclusion that spicy Indonesian food does not come close to spicy Thai food (I would later learn my lesson from this assumption further into the trip!)

Although a blog about food is what you really want, I better side track a little...we then proceeded to walk a few miles (Sara seems committed to this losing weight through sweating rather than taking a taxi!) to what i believe is a temple known as 'elephant cave' (Goa Gajah). It was quite picturesque with little pathways and a waterfall amongst the trees; and I'm sure I must have more than looked the part in the obligatory sarong that I was wearing.

The highlight of Ubud though for us was the bike trip we took. This involved visiting a coffee plantation and trying various coffees - I'm not a coffee drinker but ginseng coffee is pretty good...and apparently as our guide informed us "it make papa strong and make mama happy" - make what you want of that! We then continued by having breakfast overlooking an active volcano and it's lake (Mount Batur), before starting our 30km descent by bicycle. Along the way there were various stops which included being shown round a local Indonesian family's compound, numerous paddy fields and finally the owners retreat where we were treated to a welcomed ice cold towel and all you can eat buffet, nom.

We couldn't leave Ubud without visiting the monkeys (even though a few of them had kindly swung up to our guest house to say hello and they are all littered along the roads and roofs outside the monkey sanctuary anyway). Though they are intriguing to observe, you have to be on your guard since they are dab hand at snatching anything that they think could remotely be food...plus some of them have huge gnashers and you wouldn't want to mess with them!

Anyway that's enough from me - I'm sorry that the food blog went off on a tangent but maybe next time!

Xx