To be honest, today probably more ticks the box in the “
Lessons learned and we’ll laugh about it one day” column than the box in the “
Another day in a tropical paradise” column.
Let me begin by stating that our son-in-law is a wonderful man in every respect and we are incredibly blessed that he has married into our family.
Before and during our holiday, he put out feelers on his social media accounts for advice and recommendations on things to do and, in particular, places to eat in Bali. We followed the advice of one of his social media friends on Thursday night and had a pretty good time.
For today the strong recommendation was for breakfast at a place called Lawar Kuwir Men Koko – about a 20-minute ride by car from here. It promised to offer an authentic Balinese breakfast, was highly recommended by our son-in-law’s friend on social media, and is very well reviewed on Google.
We’d been thinking of walking there, until we woke up this morning to heavy rain.
So we caught a rideshare over and began a typical ride through the organised but surprisingly courteous chaos that is Balinese traffic. During the ride our son-in-law was monitoring the restaurant on Google and announced, “We should expect it to be very crowded.”
We arrived in pouring rain, we got out of the car, the driver sped away and we turned to see a totally deserted establishment. According to Google it was not only meant to be open, but it was currently packed to the brim.
Not so much. There was no-one there.
Oh well: in terms of meal recommendations, one out of two ain’t bad.
We walked about ten minutes in the rain before we came to this place, the Konne Cafe: Safe, clean, modern, unthreatening, Western and, more to the point, open. We all had a nice enough, but not Balinese, breakfast.
From there it was another 10-minute rideshare to the Love Anchor Bazaar.
The Love Anchor Bazaar is pretty much what you’d expect – a market bazaar geared very much to tourists. We spent about half an hour there buying stuff for ourselves and for family. My wife bought some earrings and a couple of scarves, among other things. My daughter bought a nice necklace and a sarong, and my son-in-law bought a wooden turtle. You get the drift. I resisted the temptation to add to the t-shirts that I’d bought for myself on Thursday.
Our son-in-law then confidently announced that it was a mere 25-minute walk to the restaurant which had come the most highly recommended of all: the Warung Jawa Bu Sri. By that time the rain had stopped but it was hot and, as you’d expect, very humid. As we approached the Warung we all felt quite a bit of relief to have finally gotten there, tinged with some regret that we hadn’t felt brave enough to try the scooter option.
Anyway, we finally arrived to find this:
One out of three is pretty bad. I turned to my son-in-law and told him in no uncertain terms – mostly jokingly – that he was sacked. From being the designated eatery co-ordinator, that is. Not from being my son-in-law.
We decided to retreat with our tails between our legs back to our hotel, from where we lunched at “The Flow”, another safe, Western, clean, and -- in terms of the food -- decidedly non-Balinese option. The hamburger was pretty good, though, and I indulged in a Pina Colada.
From there it was a walk back to our hotel for a much-needed swim and (for the young couple) a much-needed couples' massage.
The moral of the story? Well, "
Don't let your social media contacts dictate what you do on your holiday" works for me!
. Those boat rides are well, exhilarating. We had a similar trip. We had the choice of a fast but open, boat ride to an island, or a slower, enclosed boat to and fro. We had our kids, maybe 10 and 15 with us. It was a no brainer. Fast open boat for us. And yes we got sopping wet. We watched the slow enclosed boat come in after us. We were almost sea sick watching it bobbing along the surf and there was no escape outside for fresh air. 
