We made it through the mountainous central part of the island, driving through Singaraja (Bali's 2nd largest city) in the north, on our way to our hotel outside of the small town of Lovina. Our driver had stopped a few times to ask people for directions, but no one could help him as our hotel is in the middle of nowhere. I think their tag line is "hard to find, hard to leave". Finally, i wound up giving him directions using Google Maps on my phone. Driving through Singaraja and Lovina were educational. When I first booked the trip, I knew that the resort in the north was in the middle of nowhere (but it just looked so beautiful), but I was led to believe that we could get a taxi to take us to the town of Lovina (about 10 minutes away) or the city of Singaraja (about a half hour away) for some local experiences. Getting there, however, proved otherwise. In the north, taxis are more or less non-existent due to the small amount of tourism and the fact that everyone at least drives a motorbike, if not a car. Both the town and city are really spread out and not meant for walking - there aren't really any sidewalks to walk on either. And as we drove through, all of the local restaurants (usually specializing in one dish) were basically empty - the streets were always crowded, but it never seemed like there was anyone in any of the local restaurants - which, when without recommendations, makes it really hard to tell who has the best stuff.
So, we resigned ourselves to eating in the hotel for just about every meal for the next 3 days...
With that being said, the hotel food was excellent. I think they brought the chef in from somewhere in Europe, and they used a portion of the hotel grounds to grow herbs and vegetables, and purchased most of their meats from local farms in the area. While there were a lot of western dishes on the menu (risotto as one example), they did have quite a few indonesian/balinese things to choose from. One of my few complaints was that dinner started at 7PM (they encouraged people to have cocktails during the sunset time around 6-6:30), and when you're still jetlagged, 7PM feels like 3 in the morning. But persevere we must! ha!
cocktails watching the sunset and their fire pit (my clothes smelled like smoke for days)
quail egg and shredded banana flower amuse
tomato sambal and homemade hummus (quite grainy) with the bread
Coconut soup with local snails. There were like 6 TINY snails in this whole thing - very hard to find. But the ones we did find were quite tasty.
This was described as a "salad of locally grown greens with cashews and pesto". It was mostly pesto with a little bit of cooked spinach and cashews. I don' tknow if I've ever eaten that much pesto in one sitting.... it was served with:
Some type of fricco, supposedly infused with garlic and kaffir lime, but any scent of either would have been entirely imaginary.
The hotel's "babi guling". We saw stalls for babi guling (roast suckling pig) all over the place - I can't tell you how many times I asked the driver to stop, but each time, the place was empty and the driver said, not now.... We never wound up with the real version (story for a later time), and we were underwhelmed by the hotel version - it was a little tough and dry. It was served with rice and acar (prounounced achar) which are like sweet/salty pickled veggies. They were great:
Wontons of what they called langoustine - but I think it was spiny lobster tail, in a coconut broth. Very tasty.
While the resort itself was not that expensive - it was maybe half the price of the airport hotel - the food there was relatively very expensive. I think our restaurant bill wound up higher than the room bill - and that's without us drinking any alcohol!!!
