In Reply to: Aarrgghh - nothing's ever easy! posted by nyc_to_bali on Wednesday, 28. July 2004 at 23:51 Bali Time:
'experience'; when traveling you'd do yourself a favor by looking forward to and enjoying all the good/bad/ugly of your situations. The text below was found on a JBR from Juba Anne; go to the search function on top, type in Arena, and there are additional comments.
"...we stayed at the New Arena Hotel in Kuta in March 04 for 4 nights. Here's a portion of my JBR about the New Arena:
The room was quite large and despite the awful painting of a topless girl on the wall I decided it was new, clean and roomy enough for us, also it had a fridge, and a telephone - a first for us on this trip so far, it was handy for a wake-up call we needed one morning, plus we found out it worked OK when reception rang us half an hour later looking for pre-payment for the 4 nights – something we had not experienced in Bali before. Looking outside the window I saw a few other guests at the large rectangle swimming pool ... topless too! Oh well, Sam, the 15 year old will enjoy this place. Over the next few days we would see the sunbathing set come out at 10 am around the pool and then they would be gone by 4 pm, so our paths didn't really cross much as we were out and about a bit. I think the hotel was trying to attract young clientele, as the pool bar would crank up around 5 pm with flashing Christmas lights and boom boom type of music. Over the next few days we saw a steady stream of young backpackers coming in and out, mostly European.
The hotel is in a good handy location, being slightly closer to the beach than the Masa Inn, but it had a bit of a closed in feeling to it which you didn't feel at the Masa Inn, because the grass area around the pool extended only about 6 metres from your balcony and the pool was circumferenced most of the way around by the rooms extending three levels high. I don't think I would stay here again if I had to pay full price for the accommodation.
PS: the included breakfasts were awful, 1 piece of toast with jam, yucky coffee (didn't even tasty like nice bali kopi!)..."
Hope this helps.