There's a reason Bali attracts over 80% of Indonesia's tourists - we spent about 10 days trying to come up with reasons to forget about the rest of the trip and just stay put.

We started in the sleepy seaside resort Sanur, appropriately nicknamed 'Snore', reluctant to leave the plush hotel we'd made our home (complete with breakfast on the balcony overlooking the pool, for a grand total of GBP4/night), and used it as a base to explore a bit more of the island. A day trip to Denpasar, Bali's capital (of roadside rubbish?) sent us running straight back to the sweet-smelling Sanur.

But the following day, after meeting up with Sivi's boyfriend Alex and his friend Richard, we hired a car and driver to take us north, through rice paddies, to temples, Mount Kintamani (one of many many volcanoes in Indonesia), and to a coffee plantation where we were lucky (?) enough to try the infamous 'kopi luwak'. Google it for more details, but essentially it's made from coffee beans that have passed, whole, through the entire digestive system of a ferret. And it's super expensive, and, since filters don't seem to have reached Indonesia, it's very gritty. But it was an interesting experience, to say the least.

The delights of Sanur exhausted (or so we thought - we did actually return there for 2 more nights a while later!), we moved to Ubud, Bali's cultural capital, for a few nights. It's a really compact town, surrounded by more rice paddies (I swear, it'll be a very long time before I choose to eat rice at home, and I'm already saying this only 4 weeks in!), with loads of great places to eat, and a monkey forest! We spent ages wandering around the forest, watching them all - especially one slightly retarded monkey which was sat banging a stone against the floor every time we walked past). Balinese dance shows were also a big thing in Ubud, but fortunately our hotel room in Sanur had had a TV, so we managed to find out in advance what we were in for, and managed to avoid what would have been quite a long and excruciating night!

And then, having heard excellent tales of the Gili islands, off the coast of Lombok, we headed to Gili Trawangan, supposedly for just a couple of nights...