So good to wake up and be in an actual bed rather than on a plane for a change! Lovely room, aircon, roomy, although it wasn’t quite the place I’d booked; I’d booked the Sindhu Mertha Guest House and they’d “upgraded” us to the Sindhu Mertha Suites supposedly; another staff member said that the Guest House was undergoing renovations, yet walking past it I could see guests going in and out so who knows what was actually happening. True Indonesian style 😉

Nice view from our room as we were upstairs at the back of the complex with a view over the pool, although we didn’t quite understand how breakfast worked – everyone else seemed to have a menu and breakfast delivered whereas I had to go in search of it. Standard banana pancakes, mum ordered tea with separate milk but we received hot coconut milk in a jug – unfortunately we didn’t notice until she’d already added it to her tea! That one went straight down the sink!

We headed towards to beach and sat down for a lovely lunch at a cafe next to the beach overlooking the sea. I had fresh grilled fish and mum had shrimp, with beer and fresh fruit juice to accompany. Delicious! Finished off with a pudding – mango with coconut icecream. We met a fellow Brit who told us he came to this cafe every time he was in Sanur, and that he had lunch here every day!

It was quite interesting to note how much the island had changed since my last visit in 2010 – so many more buildings and restaurants along the seafront, more upmarket venues, and also a lot of signs and businesses advertising in Chinese. Sadly also a lot more boats were arranging trips to Nusa Lembongan, and the British guy told us how it was full of hotels and other businesses now. Times have to change I suppose…

We walked along the seafront, parked ourselves on the edge of a hotel maintained section of beach, and had a lovely swim in the sea! I forgot how warm the sea is here 😊 At least that aspect of Sanur hasn’t changed!

We popped back to the hotel to get freshened up and then out for dinner, again by the seafront. The staff were telling us how they were all quite cold that evening – it was 25C so absolutely glorious for us! The restaurant wasn’t as nice as where we’d gone for lunch, and so when a huge tour group came and disrupted everyone by moving tables and chairs etc, we took it as a sign and went for a drink at the place where we’d had lunch. We also tried black rice pudding – interesting particularly when served warm, it not mum’s cup of tea at all(!), before using Grabcar to get a taxi back to the hotel.

Tomorrow, off to Ubud – I emailed the home stay to arrange for their driver to come to our hotel at midday to take us there, to save fiddling about with taxis and potentially being taken to the wrong place to try and sell us to another hotel!