August 9- New York, USA

We made it home safely, arriving at JFK late Monday night. We had a looooong flight home, but luckily everything was uneventful. We are planning on putting all of our pictures online for everyone to see, and we will update the blog and post some pictures that accompany the posts. We will let you know when you should check some of the archived posts for updates.

Anyways, after our last post, we spent a few more heavenly days in Candidasa reading on our day bed in the sun, eating on the day bed in the shade, and taking a dip in the pool every now and then. On Saturday, August 5, we had Putu pick us up in Candidasa on the east coast of Bali, and bring us to Seminyak, on the southwest coast. It was the beginning the long trek home. After a scenic ride through rice paddies, along the coast, and past Hindu cremation ceremonies. It was a lovely trip, and once in Seminyak, Putu helped negotiate for a good rate on a hotel room for us. We settled on a hotel that was back in the budget category- nothing like what we had gotten used to in Candidasa. This time there were clean sheets, and a cleanish, well, it had a bathroom.

Saturday afternoon we got lunch in a cafe along the beach and then headed out to explore the town of Seminyak. We had heard that it was a really nice and a popular place for tourists to visit. We found it just to be popular, but Ubud had set our standards high with the exceptional shopping and selection of cultural activities. The shopping in Seminyak was mediocre, which was quasi-OK with us, because we had absolutely no room left in our suitcases, and we had already bought two new ones. This too, was a town geared completely to tourists that had been hard hit by the drop-off in tourism after the terrorist attacks in the night clubs. We were the only customers in most of the stores that we visited, and the restaurants were equally as empty. We tried to look on the positive side of things, and we really soaked up the tranquility and relative calm before we were to return home.

After a weary day of shopping, our tootsies needed some loving. It was time for Ari's first pedicure and our last spa treatment in affordable Asia. The spa we chose boasted an all-male staff, the telltale sign of a high end spa in Bali. For 90 minutes we were massaged, filed, buffed like you wouldn't believe, snipped, and massaged again. Feeling completely relaxed (as if we had a lot of stress to release after a long week sitting oceanside in Candidasa) we went to dinner at a little warung near the spa. In Bali, the word warung describes a restaurant that is nice and clean, serves only local food, and is always cheap. We have had a lot of luck with these little eateries, and Jillian has sampled the gado-gado in many warungs across Bali. Warung Martha in Seminyak definitely made the cut for the list of great places for gado-gado. After dinner, we took a cab back to the beach by our hotel and sat in the sand under the stars. Even the light pollution from Seminyak was enough to drown out a few of them. It is no wonder that we did not see any stars while living in Brooklyn.

Sunday morning, we hired a car for the day, and headed to Pura Tanah Lot, a Balinese Hindu temple situated on the rocks just off the coast. It is a huge tourist destination, but only properly dressed Balinese Hindus are allowed to actually go onto the island and into the temple. Once we got there, we were totally fine with the restriction- to get to the temple, you had to wade through waist deep crashing wave for about 20 meters between the mainland and the small manmade island. Then you had to scrable straight up the side of a sheer cliff built from antique Chinese coins. The island was sort of natural, but a lot of the lime had eroded and people had built pillars out of Chinese coins to reinforce it. We snapped a few pictures from the shore and then it was back in the cab to head to the capital of Bali, Denpasar.

Denpasar is a city halfway between Ubud and Seminyak, located inland a few kilometers from both the east and west of the island (the island gets really narrow just above the southern Bukit peninsula. When the world gets to be a few degrees warmer, Bukit will become its own island). Denpasar is a city that is only frequented by locals, and does not have the tourist infrastructure of the rest of the island. Lonely Planet had told us about a few good markets for textiles and we wanted to load up with batik sarongs before we left Bali. The markets themselves did not seem to have anything worth schlepping home (the whole place smelled like dries fish, so we didn't look very hard), but the street across from the market was an absolute diamond mine for batiks! We found a bunch (the harder part was finding room in our suitcases for them) hailed a cab, and headed back to Seminyak for a late lunch.

We will tell you about our last night in Bali, the long long long plane ride home, and our FAVORITE things about Asia next time. We will also put some pictures up too.

Lots of love in the USA,
Jillian