The drive down to Sanur was quicker, because we didn't have to spend an hour crawling through Kuta. Maybe the driver also remembered the throwing up experience of a few days earlier and wanted us out of his car as soon as possible! Maybe not, because along the way the driver said ‘want to see waterfall'. DM said ‘why not?' Soon we were stopped by the side of the road. We handed 20,000 to a woman who handed us 4 stout walking sticks and pointed us to a sign that said ‘waterfall 246m'. The girls did their best Dora the Explorer imitation as they made there way down about a million steep steps on a rough, narrow track into a valley. There was even a rickety bridge of lashed together logs for them to cross. At the bottom was a little warung and a very nice waterfall that got us pretty wet. We chatted with a couple of local guys and then discovered that there was no escalator, so we had to climb up all those steps again.
We got to the Hyatt in Sanur mid-afternoon. Thy Hyatt is a lot bigger and flasher than we are, but we had persuaded friends to come to Bali who enjoy the finer things in life and DM managed to wangle a good deal when the Aussie dollar was sitting pretty. They arrived from Melbourne that afternoon and got out of the airport in under half an hour.
This was our friends' first trip to Bali and they have three kids (8, 5, 3). When we were in Bali for the first time we found that a good ‘behaviour management' technique was to not eat in to many different places for dinner and not to push them to try to much ‘different food'. That and the threat of no dessert. For these reasons we ate most evening meals at either Komilfo or Apa Kabar. Both had good, cheap food and child tolerant staff. The grass area out the back of Apa Kabar was great; because we tended to eat early, there were no other diners out there for them to disturb, so we could let the kids run around a bit and play while waiting for food. The only time we ate at the Hyatt was the buffet night and Kecap dance that was included in our room price. The food was magnificent and we ate by candle light under the stars which was nice and the kids were entranced by the Kecap performance, despite the fact that it all went on after their regular bed time.
One special night was a visit to Massimos for MM's birthday. We shared some fantastic pizzas and afterwards they dimmed the lights in the whole restaurant and wheeled out the most enormous chocolate cake singing happy birthday with such gusto that the whole restaurant joined in. The chef came out to say happy birthday. We barely made a dent in the cake and they packaged the leftover up for us. We still didn't manage to get through all of it by the time we left Sanur.
We didn't really have much for lunch because the breakfast at the Hyatt was amazing. DM still misses the waffles.
From Sanur we did a day trip to Bali Zoo because everyone (except DM who has done it before) wanted to ride an elephant and get their photo taken with some animals and it was cheaper to do it there than at Safari Park. Safari Park seem to have jacked up their prices since we were last you couldn't mix and match bits of the different packages. The zoo wasn't as good as Safari Park, but with little kids it was great and the elephant ride bit was fantastic. We did another trip up to Ubud and had lunch at Murni's Warung overlooking the river and then some went to Monkey Forest and some to the ‘art market'.
There was a trip to Waterbom and plenty of swimming in the fantastic pools at the Hyatt. The kids went to ‘Club Sanur', the Hyatt Kids Club a few times (70,000 per monkey for half day) and our monkeys especially loved the session where they were dressed up and made up and learned some Balinese dancing. They also loved the fish feeding and cookie making.
DM and MM had some things made by Putu at Bali Brumby in Tuban, but got a bit over the commute over there for fittings because the traffic seemed so appalling this trip. The trip back from Waterbom took an hour and twenty minutes because there had been an accident.
Sanur was the only place where we did any real shopping; some woven place mats and coasters and some sparkly thongs for the girls and some summer dresses. We were surprised how quiet it was in the beach markets at Sanur, but not complaining!