A day for sleeping in! Hooray!

We have a late start, and a wonderful breakfast compared to the rolls we’ve been grabbing as we head out for the long drives to dive sites.

We spend most of the morning choosing pictures for the last few days of our journal – the stories have been written, but the pictures have not been chosen. Then we head off to do something we dread – we go to the internet café to update the web and pick up our email. The internet is so slow here on Bali – everywhere they tell you they have “high speed”, and everywhere it is dial-up – sharing small bandwidth among 12 or 15 other users. It is so bad that we have been avoiding the internet since last week. But we must do it, and so we head to a café that Sophie, our dive master of the last 2 days, tells us is faster. 2 hours later, our website updated and our email downloaded, it is time to head to the beach. It is a very short walk to the beach. When we get there, we head north, walk about 1 km to La Lucciola, which everyone has told us is the best restaurant on Bali, and where we are having our “farewell to Bali” dinner tonight.

Beach Life in Seminyak 

Having done the walk, we turn around and go south, and choose chaises in front of another restaurant, Ku De Ta, on which to sit – paying the appropriate fee, of course. The water is clean – very different from our only other time at the beach, on our 1st day here, when neither of us was willing to get in the water. The waves are unbelievably high – we won’t venture in very far. The only people who do go out past knee depth are attached at their ankles to surf boards, and they gladly take the risk and head out past the breaking waves, waiting for that perfect wave.

Dinner at La Lucciola

After showers, we head into the restaurant – it is beautiful – all open to the ocean, no walls under the Balinese thatch roof – in that way that only places where the coldest temperature they get is 26 degrees can do. The menu is strongly Italian-influenced, and for the first time in our experience here, there is nothing on it to indicate that we are Indonesia or even to hint that the chef has been influenced by Indonesian cooking. We order a drink, our entrees and mains, and a bottle of wine. The first thing to arrive is the bottle of wine. The next things to arrive are our entrées. Finally, our drinks arrive – we have almost finished our entrées (Greg had a hot entrée), but have held off on wine pending the arrival of the drinks. We slowly finish our entrées and our drinks, and there is a nice amount of breathing room before our mains arrive. Timing issues aside, everything is very good. We aren’t sure what we feel at the end of the meal, though – tonight’s meal does not in any way compare to a number of the meals (Indonesian food raised to the level of art in equally beautiful settings) we’ve had for a fraction of the price we paid tonight, which was about the same as we would pay in a good restaurant in Toronto.

Goodbye Bali Drinks at Santa Fe

Joan and Errol are at Santa Fe, and we meet them for a drink. And then we head off to home, for our last sleep in Bali. We will be sorry to leave – it is, once you adjust to it, spectacularly beautiful. The best is out in the country-side. The city, as John Baker says, has been spoiled by tourism. But if you want to, you can find the heart of the island, and you will be as we feel we have been, rewarded for engaging in the search. And if nothing else, we feel that we could drive to Candi Dasa blindfolded – which is, to judge from appearances, the way all of the other drivers do it.