Taking aim …

I was surprised when we did our daily bookkeeping to learn that we only traveled 48 km today. Feels like more. Never the less, it was a good day. Not mind blowing, but enjoyable and entertaining.

It started alright with a good breakfast – which says something. Breakfast is often included in the room prices, but at 175k per night for two, the money has to be saved somewhere. So breakfast, in westernized establishments is usually either a pancake or two slices of whiter than white toast, plus tea or coffee. Since many locals prefer nasi goreng or rice cake, the pancakes are usually of dubious quality. Not this time though! The pancakes were excellent, we got fresh fruit to go with them. For a bit of colour, as our host said 🙂 – what a great start of the day.

… and she fits!

After I managed to get my bike out again without either disassembling it or parts of the ramp, we hit the road. Said road got steadily less crowded as we headed east again, until it was a supremely pleasant winding mountain road to and from Sibetan. To enjoy the view and have a break, we stopped at a warung at the end of town. Once again out of Touristland™, everyone was charming and friendly. We had some juice and played with the kids. Later, we regretted not having taken some take away food with us. It looked delicious and it would sure have beaten our lunch later on, in both price and taste.

On we went, down from the hills once more, towards the coast. The plan was to follow the coastal road from Karangasem to Amed – a recommendation from Santosh. Before we would start that road though, we stumbled over a beautiful building at the roadside and stopped to check it out. Turned out that it was the rebuilt Ujung Water Palace. Before exploring, we made the mistake to have some food there in what looked like a fancier warung with a nice view. The food was overpriced and mediocre and we forgot to order Nina’s nasi goreng vegetarian, so she got chicken bits mixed in. To her credit, she took it like a champ, given that it alone costed what we usually pay all together.

Nina’s comment: Nasi goreng IS vegetarian. Adding bits of chicken makes it nasi goreng ayam or “spesial”. Thus I did not “forget” to tell them I’m vegetarian…they made the dish wrong, probably because westerners expect chicken in a nasi goreng!

the main building

The palace is the centerpiece to a park based around large artificial ponds. Build in the early 20^th century, we liked it a lot. To be precise, it was re-built in 2000 after being destroyed in 1975 after both a volcano eruption and earthquakes. Regardless, it was marvelous. We were especially delighted with how much cool respite the plateaus and pagoda offered in the searing afternoon heat.

After that, we were ready for the last 25 km of coastal road glory. The far east is very different from the rest of Bali. Traditionally poor, this arid steep and rocky shore offers little but fishing as a means of sustaining the population. That is until tourism started creeping south, starting from Amed. This is still a recent development and at least at the moment it seems the region will keep its charm a little bit longer before finally turning into a Kuta for people who “would not go to Kuta”. We briefly considered an online deal for a “resort” $10 over our budget, to pamper ourselves a little but in the end the place itself was not worth the extra money for us.

great road, great views, few tourists

We ended up booking the cheapest night in a while, another online deal for $15, including breakfast. When we turned up to this nice but tiny 3 bungalow place, it was completely deserted. To be fair, we only booked in 15 minutes ago. I called the number I found at the reception desk and a couple of minutes later the lady of the house was there to get our room sorted. Once again we were blown away with how nice the rooms are; what we get for what little we can spend. 150k to 200k seems to be the minimum for a double no matter where, but now we get so much higher quality for the same price. I sometimes wish there would be cheaper places of the same minimum quality. Well, we should enjoy it while it lasts, the quality is probably soon going down again while the price stays the same …

To have at least a brief taste of that resort luxury, we went across the street to the 4* dive resort for dinner. Nina was supremely satisfied with a good salad and home-made garlic bread, and I got to observe some of our “social class”-mates doing laps in the pool …