Sanur, Indonesia

We're back in Sanur after a couple nights on the island of Nusa Lembongan.

We stayed at Waka Nusa Resort which was our splurge on this trip. Our room was a round thatch-roofed bungalow, creatively decorated (and a full mosquito net). The grounds were impeccable, with all the beach sports available. (We played a short game of bocce ball (which was interrupted for complimentary tea and cakes - it was almost like cricket), and some pingpong).

The resort was on Mushroom Bay, which is a nice secluded little beach. It's small enough that there's only about eight hotels (each hotel having maybe ten rooms) lined end-to-end over the whole beach, but large enough that it had a couple restaurants (to provide variety from the resort). In busy season we were told that you need to book at least a month in advance! We booked the day before. There's nice views across the water of Bali (nicer in dry season :) ) & Gunung Agung (the tallest peak in Bali), a cool ocean breeze and not so many tourists.

Yesterday I went diving with Lembongan Dive, arranged through the hotel. It was pretty cheap (only $30 / tank!). Heather joined along and went snorkelling while I dived. I dived at a couple sites, SD and Lembongan Point. Both were fast drift dives, which I'm relatively inexperienced at (previously I've only done drift dives when I did my Advanced Open Water). It was pretty cool. My previous dive was three years ago, so it took me my first dive to get my feet wet (pun intended), and on the 2nd dive I was able to look around at the coral and fishies. The water was only 24C so we wore a full wet suit and boots. Didn't see any manta rays or sunfish.

In the afternoon Heather and I walked about 15 minutes from our hotel through the island to Dream Beach. It was like a beach in a movie scene. Most of the time we had the beach to ourselves (technically we were in the restaurant overlooking the beach). It reminded Heather of PEI, except for the colour of the sand. We had lunch and a couple Bintangs, and then walked back to our hotel.

We had dinner at Winda Sari Warung, right beside our hotel. We both had grilled squid, which was really good, and shared a banana crepe with palm syrup and cocoa shavings, the best dessert we've had so far. I've been having grilled squid at every occasion on ocean-side towns, trying to find a place as good as the place in Zanzibar. So far at places here it's been really good to great.

This morning we had plans to wake up at 6am to see the fisherman come in; but at 6am those plans didn't seem like a great idea. So we slept in till 8am. Had breakfast, read a bit, caught the ferry back to Sanur, checked back into Tamukami Hotel. Most likely we'll be staying here until Friday when we fly back to Jakarta, although if we get bored we may spend a night in Kuta. Tonight we're going to eat at the fish market in Jimbaran. There's rows of places serving fresh fish with garlic, lime and chili marinade, grilled over coconut husks. I'm hungry already just thinking about it. It's about 15km from Sanur on the west side of Bali, so if it wasn't rainy season we'd also get a nice sunset. We've arranged for a driver to take us there and back for about $10 -- not sure if that's the going rate but it seemed good to us.