Hotel trekking
(Walk from IBAH hotel entrance to the balcony of our room in Ubud: Bali, Indonesia)
As we were shown to our room in our Ubud hotel, my first impression was of immense beauty and tranquillity - I know, I know, I sound as if the hotel is sponsoring this post, but seriously. To have a fair impression of the walk from the thatched, wooden foyer, start in the top left corner and move from left to right along each line of images. I’ll walk you through:
1. Start here at the end of the foyer. This is looking back towards the front desk, over the pools of hungry fish. Each time we passed by, they swam into a frenzy of excitement, hoping we would offer them food.
2. Turn around and look through the carved archway, flanked by Buddha statues. You can see the pathway snaking off into the foliage.
3. A stream runs underneath the path beyond leave festooned trees. Leaving the shade of the canopy, wooden railings run along the bridge length.
4. Just to the left of the bridge end, carved wooden monkeys hang from a leafless tree stump. It creates a parting of the ways; we continue straight, but other guests can move left or right to reach their rooms.
5. Leaving the monkeys behind, two moss-coated stone lizards greet us each time we walk along the wall, past blossoming flowers. The first time we walked this, around this point, we asked the gentleman walking us how big this hotel’s compound was. He grinned shyly and admitted he didn’t even know. A simultaneously delightful and unnerving answer! He told us that it used to be a palatial garden and home for a Balinese prince, but when we read the brochure, it claimed to have been built on a garden area in the 1990s. Either way, it has the aura of ancient mystique, so I suppose for the purposes of a hotel stay, it doesn’t really matter.
6. Up the steps; the walls either side of this walkway were damp and springy with thick carpets of moss. Occasional recesses in the walls revealed statues of animals that were illuminated at night, I recall turtles, monkeys and lizards.
7. The walkway levels off and opens out to expose a tunnel archway; inside the tunnel were entrances to two more villas plus a series of fishtanks containing an assortment of little tropical fish.
8. Almost there! From the steps curving down to the left just beyond the tunnel end we had the fist glimpse of our villa. As you can see, it overlooks a forested jungle area, right up to the windows. To the right, next to the foliage is a set of wooden blinds - just behind those is the balcony.
9. Creeping behind the blinds; the balcony. It is an open affair with table and chairs, chaise longue to one side. When we arrived, there was a little overflowing bowl of miscellaneous fruit. I assumed that being South East Asian himself, that Ying would recognise all of it. Not so - I managed to spot little bananas and grapes, but there were at least three other fruits that I have never even seen before. I actually thought that the ’snakefruit’ (we looked it up) was a woven basket like decoration. It was indeed a fruit, though not particularly enjoyable! More on that another time.
Mosquito bite tally: 4. All the original ones are still itching like mad. I got the other two last night from a mosquito in the room. When I find it, I am going to smash it to a pulp. Hopefully it is so fat from eating us that we can find it and kill it easily.
– Today Rosie and Ying are dodging the rain at the seaside of the Nusa Dua peninsula, Bali –
