There was no discussion of money at breakfast! And for that matter, none basically for the rest of the trip. Whew!
After breakfast, we hired a driver to take us the 3-4 hour drive to our hotel in North Bali, in the jungle-y mountain-y area about 10 minutes drive from the beach town of Lovina. We also had him make a few stops along the way.
The first was to the Uluwatu temple. Like most Balinese temples, the temple itself is closed to tourists (you can peek in through the gates) but you can walk around the grounds. The Uluwatu temple is known for a few things - the spectacular scenery surrounding it - it is perched high on a cliff above the ocean, the naughty monkeys who live around there and an evening performance at sundown (which we didn't see because we were there in the morning - but we saw in on TV when Bourdain went to Bali a few years ago).
Looking through the gates:
The monkeys are not afraid of humans at all, and can be quite aggressive. They will take the sunglasses off your face, play with them for a minute before breaking them and then throw them away:
no zoom required....
We also saw one sneak up behind a woman sitting quietly under a pavilion and start going through her backpack until we shouted at her, warning her. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of that!
Here, it's hard to see, but these monkeys were trying to steal the flip flops off these women's feet:
In the brush surrounding the paths, you could see lots of broken, discarded flip flops....
After the temple visit, we proceeded to start driving north. I repeated asked our driver to take us to a local "warung" for lunch, but instead, he wound up taking us to a restaurant for tourists. In his defense, the place had an amazing view of Central Bali's famous terraced rice fields.
Clockwise from left: Mie goreng, cap cay (pronounced chap chay - a vegetable and seitan dish), prawn crackers, satay lilit (the one with minced fish on the big stick), pork satay, peanut sauce. The restaurant is set up like a buffet with all the Indonesian hits. The food was completely mediocre, but the view was fantastic.
