Beach, night spots or rice fields

Here’s a continuing post from the last entry on flying to Bali.:)

Ling was musing out loud yesterday evening while on our way home why is it that Asians are happy with 3D2N stays when the Europeans come to Asia and think nothing of spending a fortnight here.

The way I look at it, it’s everything to do with travel proximity and the experience differential. I don’t think Asians would want to do 3D 2N night stays if they were flying to say London but I can’t imagine a Parisian wanting to do a fortnight stay in London either.

In any case, as soon as we got the flight dates that SQ had remaining, we next determined where to stay in Bali itself. Bali is several times larger than Singapore and there’re specific areas of stay depending on one’s persuasion. There’s the wild and noisy Kuta, the beach front Sanur, the expensive Nusa Dua etc.

Kuta was right out at the onset as neither of us are big on night life or like what Wikitravel calls, the “drunken bikini scene”. Nusa Dua was next on the top of the list as the hotels and resorts there are more luxurious and area more peaceful less crowded, but the preferred choice of resort was fully booked. Sanur was next but I experienced the same problem with preferred accommodation availability.

That was about the time when I toggled into sour-grapes mode and all but said to myself “screw the tourisy beaches let’s go for something else”. After all, can the Bali beaches be any better than Rawa’s? I decided on the island’s cultural centre in Ubud. Most of the accommodation available in Ubud aren’t hotels or resorts, but privately-owned and run small villas spread over a huge price range.

And boy, it was so not easy getting accommodation there, given that many of these villas are perhaps a dozen units big whoops ‘small’. My first choice Tegal Sari was fully booked. As I traversed down the recommended list of Ubud stays from TripAdvisor and queries repeatedly showed that each stay was fully booked, I started getting worried. So, at the point when I *did* find an available place at Tepi Sawah Villas (pictures here from the villa’s web site), I was especially relieved. The ranking wasn’t, thankfully, that far down the list too at #8 of 86 recommended Ubud stays.

The price for a 5 night stay there worked out to SGD577 for the Padang Tegal Villa. Not too bad; certainly cheaper than the Ayara Hilltops suite we stayed at and similarly sized at 81 square metres, if less opulent from the photos. Ling though is at least thrilled of the upcoming stay as it overlooks rice fields, a request she had while I was browsing through Ubud stays.

So that’s that. Next blog entry about scouting for our driver in Bali.:)