Uluwatu

The perch over the beach where we would spend every morning. Yes, those are Mark’s legs peeking out.

After 16 nights at three resorts in the Ubud region it was time to move south, down to the Bukit peninsula on the southern end of Bali. This is very different from the jungles and forests of central Bali; it has, instead, a dry and stony landscape with massive cliffs on the western shore. So a big change from what we’ve been experiencing.

First, though, we had to get there. Now, that shouldn’t be too hard: it was only about 42 miles from our resort in Ubud to the Bulgari resort we were going to. How bad can that be? Don’t ask. You just crawl getting through Ubud and in fact it took us some two-and-a-half hours to make the trip. Yikes!

Now, to be fair, we did choose to make one stop en route. Pretty much every resort we’ve stayed at on this trip has their dishes made – typically custom made – at a place called Kevala here on the island. We’ve loved the ceramics and were going right past their main store in Denpasar so we made a quick stop (and picked up a few pieces for home; perfect souvenirs…). But we were in the store for no more than 10 or at most 15 minutes so, yeah, the traffic.

A couple frangipani trees, the infinity pool, and the Indian Ocean

Once we got to the resort though it was just as beautiful as we’d hoped. The property is apparently 20 years old, meaning that the gardens and grounds are fully mature, but it feels very modern, probably the most beautiful place we’ve stayed so far.

The resort itself is way up on a cliff and we didn’t think it had any beach access at all. When we got there, though, we discovered there was a funicular-type thing headed down. So every day after breakfast we’d head down and – because we’re early birds – get the best of the 10 chairs there. Even tbough it was on the beach you couldn’t actually go in the water – it was all rocky and dangerous. But just the roar of the surf and the isolation and natural beauty kept bringing us back again and again. Even our last day, when we were leaving at noon for our next destination, we had to spend a couple hours down there before coming up to pack.

The almost shockingly steep funicular

But once you got down there they’ve carved this little oasis into nature. Note that while there is a sandy beach you can’t swim there – the bottom is all sharp and dangerous rocks. It was still glorious anyway.

Oh, and did I mention coming back up? Notwithstanding the (shockingly steep) funicular that ran for some 500 feet, there were a total of 301 steps – some of them decidedly big and steep steps – from the beach up to the roadway leading to the lunch restaurant. For us, at least, it was worth it though it was obvious based on seating capacity that most people don’t ever go down there. And meanwhile, we could see a fair amount of construction down there, a bit away from our perch. Turns out there was a restaurant there that needed a refresh, so they were doing pretty much a gut renovation while we were there. In other words, there used to be a restaurant and there will be a restaurant in the area, but not during our visit. Sad.

As for food, we enjoyed lunch at the resort every day since nothing else was in the area. At night though, we’d usually use the Uber-equivalent here and go maybe 20 minutes to little tourist zones that had some good places. One night Lebanese that was pretty authentic, another night French, and yet another night supposedly Italian but there was stuff on the menu I’ve never seen in an Italian restaurant. All good though.

Lunch with a few of the ocean

All good and way cheaper than at the resort. The place was really gorgeous and the service was great. The prices were steep even by New York standards though, and that’s saying something. And honestly a martini there was no more than half the size of what we would typically get at our favorite restaurants at home so that was not ideal.

Now it’s on to our last stop. We’re on our way to a legitimate beach stop in Nusa Dua. Amusingly, we decided to check our blog to see what we’d written the last time we were there, back in 2017. The opening line in that blog was “Nusa Dua – an enclave of five-star resorts in southern Bali – might be the most beautiful place we’ve been that I just can’t imagine going back to.” Maybe we should have done some research before making that our last stop!