Break In Bali

Ahhhh......I had my first real break in years over the weekend. All my previous holidays were so hectic, rushing from one place to another with no real time to just rest and relax. Took a short 4D/3N break to Bali and stayed with Kanako.

Now, if I'd known her place was so wonderful, I would've gone much much earlier! It was like a page straight out of some exclusive property magazines, complete with swimming pool, the 'illusion' of a wide open space (a rarity in Bali houses) and tall glassed windows.

Kanako's dining room

The double-storey glassed windows looking out into the pool

For a small pittance, the pool cleaner comes twice a week

The entire weekend's itinerary was just eat, sleep, massage, and then eat, sleep and massage some more. Heavenly.......

Uma Ubud - view of pool and pool bar from the reception lounge

Uma Ubud - koi pond view from the Restaurant

Breakfast with Kanako in Uma

The only photo with me in it, taken on the last day before I left. Too busy doing nothing to take photos!

One word of caution for those planning a trip to Ubud, Bali. Be sure to arm yourselves with good insect repellant and spray every single exposed part of your body. Those little gnat-like insects will attack at every opportunity they get! That was the only drawback of an otherwise perfect weekend break. Will definitely be back!

Thank you to Kanako for the wonderful hospitality, and to Thamu for the recommendation of Cheap and Good Massage :-)

In Search Of A Royal Gift

My 3rd trip to Singapore in 5 months. It's either I don't go at all, or I keep going!

This time, it was to search for a birthday present for one of our Sultans. With alternatives in KL drying up, we decided to try our luck in Singapore. Happily we set out thinking that this will be a piece of cake. After all, it's Singapore! A country that's famous for its shopping, and it will definitely have everything, including something that's fit for royalty. Boy, were we wrong.

After all the traipsing, we ended up with only ONE suitable item ~ a beautiful black glass vase with gold and silver trimmings, that was actually within our budget. Hooray! Mission accomplished and we have the rest of our trip to do our own shopping. Alas, our elation was shortlived as we found out the next day that HRH already has this particular piece. And so, we are back to Square One.

The ill-fated vase



We went through all other alternatives in our minds but to no avail.

Luckily, we had better luck with our second 'mission' - that of looking for a possible tenant for the Hotel. Our first choice 'Flair', had no plans for expansion at the moment and we were at wits' end when we were directed to another shop 'Anthropology' which worked on the same concept as Flair and had some similar items stocked. Managed to make contact with them and hopefully something will come out of this meeting.

Window display at Flair

Sneak preview of Anthropology

The rest of our time were spent exploring the 'touristy sights' of Singapore - the shopping malls :-) Managed to cover Chinatown, Raffles City and part of Orchard Road. I must say that the 'results' here were definitely more satisfactory and we managed to stuff our limited overnight luggage to well within the 15kg weight limit of Air Asia! That's also a personal record for me, as 99% of the time, my luggage has always been overweight, irregardless of what airline I take.

Scarlet Hotel.....where we made our base

The ULTIMATE durian pancake at Goodwood Park - this was the one thing that made this trip totally worthwhile!!! YUMMY!

Came across these 2 very interesting items (which we ended up buying of course) - door stoppers!

And finally, my fixation with pigs.....well, there were a lot of them in Singapore! In all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Of course, our trip could not just end smoothly, something just had to go wrong. As we were flying back on Air Asia, we just automatically assumed that it will be departing from the budget terminal. The First Mistake we made was thinking that Terminal 3 was the Budget Terminal, which obviously, we found out the hard way that it wasn't! With 5 items of luggage between the 2 of us, we had to go in search of another taxi to bring us to the Budget Terminal from Terminal 3.

After another struggle with loading the pieces of baggage onto the trolley, imagine our chagrin when we couldn't find our flight on the list of departing flights on the departure screen! The very nice lady at the service counter told us with absolute confidence that Air Asia takes off from Terminal 1. I seriously believe she must have repeated this piece of information many many times to just as many unsuspecting passengers like us!

So off we went again in search of another taxi to take us across the road to Terminal 1. By then, my already pounding head just expanded another 2-fold, and by the time we landed in KL I was experiencing a full-fledged migraine.


Me and Ju, my partner in crime :-)

What a 3D/2N. Really looking forward to my coming break in Bali.....