Hello everyone! Just back from paradise, just a few notes on our trip. I will keep it as short as possible...
This was my seventh trip, travelling with my two daughters (14 & 16)and our friends , one's second and one Bali virgin(40 & 17).
We flew Air Asia on the 5:10pm flight, which got changed to 5:40pm. It was an uneventful flight( which was great as I am a nervous flyer), the meals aren't great, but certainly edable. The smoked chicken foccacia was the best IMO.
Denpasar airport....We arrived early by about 30mins, but so did at least two other planes. While we were all in the long lines for immigration, at least two more landed. There was signs everywhere explaining the fingerprinting procedure, but it wasn't until we could see the counter, that we realised that they weren't actually doing the fingerprinting or the photos.
Once clear of the nightmare that was immigration, we got our bags, shooed off the many porters, and headed for customs. They are x-raying everyones bags now as you leave. My friends daughter was silly enough to put her ipod touch loose on the convayer belt through the xray machine. I swing around quickly when I heard my friend screaming at the poor guy running the machine (who I suspect didn't speak much English) to stop the belt. Her ipod had become tangled in the rollers and was now holding up all the bags etc that was coming through. By the way, my friend (lets just call her Red) has a quick temper, and is not really a seasoned traveller, so she doesn't always calmly get the quirkyness of Bali...Crisis averted, we made or way outside to glorious Bali, where our drive Ketut was waiting with flower leis for us all.
It cost us 80'000rp for 5 people and two hotel drop-offs.
Red and daughter (we'll call her little Red)stayed at The Vira hotel in Tuban, and myself and my girls were at the Febris also in Tuban. First impressions of the Vira, nice looking small boutiquie type hotel, small but nice pool area. One big problem, I think, was how hot the hotel was. The rooms are nice and cool, but the hallways, lobby and thier resturant The Grill was a sweat box! Even with fans going, I didn't want to spend much time there at all.
The Febris...IMO deserves more than a two star rating. I don't what people on here were talking about when they picked on the food. Breakfast was okay, but not great. They have an egg station that does all your fresh egg dishes of course, but they also make yummy waffles! Only problem there was there is only one waffle iron, so the queues were generally long. The resturant food was nice, I had one of the tastiest Mie Gorengs in Bali there. I think maybe that so people that blamed the Febris for thier Bali Belly, probably got it somewhere else.
The rooms are huge, especially the quad room that we had. It had a king bed, and two singles, plus a small couch and a full sized fridge. The air con gurgled a lot, but we got used to it, and it didn't bother us at all. We made friends with a family of cats that lived in the hotel. At first I wouldn't let the girls touch them, but they did look healthy and free of ringworm. After a day or so, my eldest(we'll call her Dare Devil)wrapped her finger in a tissue, and patted the very pregnant mummy cat. The cats are very at home in the hotel, and clean up your room service trays when they are left outside. However they don't seem to come into the resturant area, or become a pest. We found ourselves bringing home any meat left-overs for them. One couple staying there, even went and bought Whiskers for them. Ohh yeah, the staff at the Febris are great! They came looking for us when they noticed we didn't come down for breakfast one morning, to make sure we were okay...The Spa at the Febris is one of the best in Bali in its price range too!