Rain in Ubud

We woke up to the rain bucketing down. Really bucketing. The sort of rain that starts one thinking about building an ark and collecting two of the animals you like. (Sorry brush turkeys, you’re toast.) We went out for breakfast at the café across the road named FLOCK. (When the staff put on their aprons which cross at the back, it looked more like an unbloggable word.) My coffee was puzzling when it arrived. We couldn’t work out if the waiter really didn’t like me, or really really did.

Onto less phallic things. We’d been intending to head to Amlapura in Eastern Bali, but with the rain, we thought it prudent to consider closer alternatives such as Gianyar or Klungkung. We really wanted to get to Eastern Bali, though. By 10am, the rain had died down, so we checked out and left. The young girl in the place asked where we were going, and we told her Amlapura and her eyes widened, and she said, “so far!” (It’s 40 km or so.)
As soon as we left, we encountered Ubud just after the rains. Lots of super-heavy traffic. With Ubud, you’ve sort of got to go and trust everyone to get out of your way. This was counter to every single organised neurone in Dalma’s brain, so she had a hard time of it and got stuck at a corner. Still, everything eventually got going, and we headed first to Gianyar where we picked up some petrol and then headed on to Klungkung where we had lunch at a little wayang on a black sand beach. Some kind of soup with meatballs. Delicious.

After lunch, we decided to press on to Amlapura. Dalma was still a bit frazzled about her earlier traffic incident but made the best of it like the trooper she is. We decided on a room at a hotel just out of Amlapura on the beach. We set off on WTF and Lexi.

On the way in, I missed the turn, so we ended up going past a “Biker Warung”. Well, we had to try that, we decided, and were glad we did. I’d never seen a biker bar/gym/dress shop before, and I’m not certain that I will again. But it was excellent with many weird Balinese bikes: a C90 clone, some mini bike designed to run on nitro… We ate (again) and headed to the hotel.
The Jasri Daley Surf Retreat is not an easy place to find. Beeline wanted to take us down a narrow walking track and a search of Google Maps (on which Beeline is based) revealed a road 50 metres away that took us there too. We got there and met the manager, Gorem. Our room was a bamboo-and-timber structure that delighted us. No air-con, but three archaic and slow fans. The barest of lighting. A big four-poster bed with a mosquito net. We were in heaven.

We headed down to the beach where we sat on chaise lounges and drank Bintang (which Dalma liked rather, to her surprise). Gorem told us that this place had been founded as an orphanage by an Australian man who came here in the 2000s with some incurable condition. He set the place up and met Gorem, who he employed as a driver and then manager. Eventually, he passed away and employed Gorem to run the place as a guesthouse, with profits going to an orphanage in the area. COVID hit them very hard, and they closed the place in 2021. They’ve only recently reopened.

We watched the night close in, and eventually, dinner arrived in the form of some barbecued fish (bony but spicy and excellent).

We called it dinner.

Eventually, it got too dark to see much, so we headed back to the room, happy and full of fish and Bintang. Tomorrow we’re off to the Amed coast.