Ubud, Bali - Highs and woes...

So, Ubud.  In central Bali, about an hour and a half from the airport, you'll find Ubud; much touted as Bali's, if not Indonesia's, spiritual and artistic hub.

Let's deal very quickly with the latter, don't believe the hype.  Admittedly there is a fair bit of decent jewellery knocking about, but anything better than anything else I've ever seen? No, not really.  There are galleries everywhere, 1 in 100 painting is ok, everything else is shit.  The end.

As for the spiritual, well, I suppose there is plenty of that wholesale around Bali, especially the rurual and remote areas, but Ubud itself has be poisoned by the novel "Eat, love pray" and its legacy.  I'm not sure it was ever anything like that described in the book, but the Balinese have duly raped the town for all the money the association can bring.

The main streets are now littered with brand stores, tacky salons, overpriced restaurants selling western meals (or, at best, westernised versions of Indonesian meals) and hundreds of shops selling the same tat you get flogged in all the tourist locations in Bali.

That said it has its merits, the buildings in this part of Indonesia all look like temples.  Its quite odd at first, but it gives an amazingly different look and feel to a place, especially when this naturally extends to the accommodation.

We'd booked a "bungalow" off of the main streets and it was ace.  Loads of room, quirky and quiet, the old man who ran the bungalows even served us breakfast on our own little terrace.

When you search the side streets you soon find plenty of real authentic cuisine in the local warungs and we duly feasted very well and often for a mere pittance.

After a couple of relaxing days we were planning our next moves (a few walks outside of town and hitting the markets seemed all Ubud really had on offer) in such a warung when I decided to befriend the Warung's dog... It decided to turn on Bex for no reason whatsoever and, before you knew it, the little shit bit her on the hand!!

I'll not go into the full tale of woe (I'm sure Bex will on her own blog whatbexdidnext.wordpress.com), but basically Ubud is pretty bad for rabies thus we had to stay for an extra 3 days while she had a couple of injections at the local medical centre.  The end result is we got to look around Ubud quite and relax quite a bit more, not such a bad thing really, and we lined up a quick summit as cycle ride at the end too... Much more my kind of thing!!