a piece of my mind

Travelling is always fun. We can explore new things and we can also refresh our body and mind while we’re at it. But, sometimes we don’t have time to travel. Fortunately our mind can imagine the travelling by looking at pictures or reading about the destinations. This time, I’ll take you travel to Bali by reading this article.
Bali is the perfect destination to give you a relaxed time and set aside your daily routines. Weather you travel in luxury or budget travelling. Because now we don’t have any limits for cost, I’ll take you to a luxurious travel. We can reach Bali from Bandung with limited domestic airlines, Merpati Nusantara Airlines (MNA) or Air Asia. Air Asia is a budget airline, so I guess we’ll choose MNA. MNA Bandung-Bali will depart at 6 a.m. and will have a transit at Surabaya for half an hour. The business class will provide us a nice couch, hot breakfast and selected drinks. It will take 2 hours to get to Ngurah Rai International Airport, Denpasar. So, we will arrive at 8.30 a.m. Bandung time, or 9.30 a.m. Bali time (because of the time difference).
At the airport we will be greeted by a strong scent that I called Balinese scent. It’s an incense scent that Balinese people turn on every day. The scent immerge energy of vacation. Inhale deeply, and feel your body lightened. Can you feel it? And it’s only just the first minute.
Next we can find a taxi to take us to the hotel. We can find exclusive hotels either in Nusa Dua area or Seminyak. I like Seminyak better. It feels friendlier there. Most of the hotel in Seminyak have private beach. And when there’s a private beach, the hotel’s rate must be 4 stars and above. So there will be a great room, great swimming pool, great garden, great spa, and great restaurant.
The best way to spend the first day is exploring the hotel area. Have some rest in the room until lunch time (we need the rest, after an early flight), have some lunch at the hotel or some walking-distance restaurant from the hotel and continue to go around the hotel. Don’t forget to put on your bathing suit, because we will also have a dip in the swimming pool and hit the beach afterwards. First, go to the restaurant, look at the menu. I always think that having a meal at the restaurant hotel is the last resort. So let’s go to the restaurant outside. Nasi campur Bali would be very nice. After lunch, we go back to the hotel. Go around the garden and lay down in the pool side. The tropical air will invite us to have a dip on the refreshing water. We’ll wait for the sun goes down, and when it’s time for sunset, we’ll go to the beach, sits on the sands and watch the amazing view of sunset. It’ll make our day perfect.
Searching dinner would be easy out here. Great cuisines are lining across the Legian-Seminyak area. We can choose from the locals to the international ones, because the entire restaurants usually have a special chef for them. Let’s get the Italian ones tonight. After we finish, we can find a coffee parlor to have dessert while enjoying the atmosphere.
That’s a wrap for the first day.
The second day, of course we will start it with breakfast buffet at the hotel. After, we can ask the front desk for a tour of Bali’s tourist destinations such as Tanah Lot, Bali Bird Park, Goa Gajah, Monkey Forest, and Ubud. It will fill our knowledge about Bali more. There will be a lot of scenery to photos.
Let’s found beaches on the third day! The closest ones to Seminyak are Kuta, Legian and Sanur beach. Sanur beach is on the east of the island, so it’s perfect for sunrises. On the other side is Kuta beach which is on the west side, so it is perfect for sunsets. A little bit further we can find Nusa Dua for watersports, and the latest in are Dreamland and Padang-padang beach on the most south of Bali Island. They’re also close by to Uluwatu where we can see the sunset while watching the Kecak dance.
There’s one more interesting beach at the most north of Bali. It called Lovina Beach. Here, at dawn, we can go to the middle of the sea by boat and meet the dolphins! But, because it’s a pretty long drive, about 3-4 hours, we have to go at 3 a.m.!
In the fourth day, we can go around the Kuta-Legian-Seminyak to enjoy the tourism atmosphere and go shopping! There will be a lot of cafes and restaurants and of course abundance of shops. We can find everything we need to buy gifts of travel, clothes, accessories, and arts and crafts.
Fifth day we can fill with art galleries and crafts galleries also dances and dramas. Bali is famous for its artist, whether it’s paintings or sculpturing. There are a lot of crafts also, such as silver, textile, etc. So we can find a lot of galleries and museum here. Kecak dance, which we saw in Uluwatu on the third day, is one of them. There are also Legong dance, Sanghyang Trance, and Shadow puppet for the drama.
Sixth and seventh day is about indulging yourself. There will be a spa at the hotel, but there are also unique spas at Bali. We can choose which one is the most fit for us. And of course, there’s no harm done in exploring the hotels again
Aah, we just had a 7 days vacation in minutes. But for now, at least we had a nice thought to think about, so on the next leave; you can experience it for real.

the road trip to garut-santolo end

On the next morning we waked up tired. But, I still have the excitement of holiday, and intend to make the best of the last day. I waked up pretty early, had another relaxation hot bath and ready to go around the hotel area. I thought I saw a big fishpond just outside our bungalow. It had a nice lights around it the other night. In the daylight, I can see mountains on the background. Very beautiful and breath taking. I walk around for about half an hour and went back to the bungalow. Everybody already wakes up by then. We had breakfast and decided that we will take some time at the hotel first then go buy some snacks a la Garut to bring back home and then go to Candi Cangkuang.

We were packed and ready at around 12. At the store we went crazy buying snacks! We bought dodol (it's like caramel candy), potato chips, sweet potato chips, and a lot more. We got our lunch there too, a bowl of noodles. Just so you know Garut is filled with restaurant which sells Noodles with meatballs. I think it's like their thing. Anyway, we continue our trip to Candi Cangkuang. It is on our way home and we just had to find the green signs. It's quite easy to find.

As we arrived there, we immediately buy the tickets (by the way, my dog paid for a child's ticket, haha). Because I've been there before, I know that there's nothing interesting around the lake area, so we go straight to take the raft to go to the small island in the center of the lake. Candi Cangkuang is build in this island. There's also an old village and an graveyard area there. It was a graveyard of someone famous there long ago. If I'm not mistaken, it's someone who bring Islam there. And the village - called Kampung Pulo - is his descendant. There are only 6 (or is it 7?? haha, sorry for the miss-info) house there which each have a householder. There cannot be more than 6 householder live there. When there is more, they have to move out. The trip there was fun. We can socialize with the locals easily. They're open and interesting.

After we take lots of photos in Candi Cangkuang area, we headed home to Bandung. Unfortunately, it's not an easy road back. There was a nasty accident the night before, adding the commotion of long weekend, makes the traffic real bad. we had to stop for almost an hour on the Garut-Nagrek intersection.
The trip back home took almost 3 hour.

Well, at least we had a great relaxing and adventurous time to wash out our weariness.

Vacations are aaallllways great! So, make time to have vacation, weather it's short or, even better, long ones.


Have a great vacation everyone! ^.^