Our First Time In Bali – Sanur and Canggu
- Kelly McKenna
- Oct 1, 2017
- 4 min read
So I’m going to do something slightly different in this post to those I’ve previously written in that we did not visit these destinations consecutively. In real life we visited Ubud, Sanur, Gili Air and then Canggu, however I rabbit on far too much on this blog to be able to talk about all three destinations in one post and I feel like we experienced more noteworthy things in the Gili Islands so Sanur and Canggu can be more easily grouped together.
Sanur
So the first line of my journal from our time in Sanur reads as “our bubble has slightly burst”. Sanur has plenty to offer tourists and should not be discounted as a destination, but unfortunately it just isn’t a place for us and we wouldn’t return given the chance.
After our final night in Ubud and a beautiful lantern lit dinner at the Terracotta restaurant overlooking the rice terraces, we set off from the villa the next morning being driven by our hosts son, who we were very happy to report was a better driver than his Dad! It was one of the few times we felt relatively safe on the roads…
Wonderful evening at the Terracotta Restaurant
It took us about an hour, driving towards the southeasterly side of the island and then we arrived at our next hotel, Maison Aurelia. The hotel is really beautiful and had been very highly rated on both TripAdvisor and booking.com so we were feeling pretty excited about our stay. Our initial excitement was soured by the unwelcome check-in we received, the hotel had recently changed its policy on complimentary breakfast, but basically blamed us for not booking it. This was a hotly debated topic for the duration of our stay and they finally relented on our final day and gave us a complimentary take away breakfast as we were leaving early, which was bloody awful.
Beautiful night view of the pool from our balcony – one of the only things we enjoyed about our stay!
Nonetheless, I think although the hotel didn’t live up to its 5 star reputation (and the fact that we’d been totally spoiled in Ubud), that’s not the reason we wouldn’t recommend Sanur as a destination. The problem is that it reminded me of a Tenerife strip and whilst I’ve had many a wonderful holiday in Tenerife, that’s not what we were looking for in our Balinese adventures. It was the sole reason we’d avoided Kuta. There were some really nice places in Sanur, we ate at the Three Monkeys restaurant on our second night and it was really yummy food, but to get there we were constantly harassed by people trying to sell us things and drag us into their restaurants/shops instead.
Dinner at 3 Monkeys
We enjoyed the peacefulness of the beach, but not much else during our stay. We did do a phenomenal kayaking tour, which I will write about in more detail later, and that was probably the highlight of our stay. We personally believe that Sanur used to be a fantastic destination that has unfortunately been destroyed by Western tourism and will sadly follow the same road as Kuta, continuing to earn Bali the tacky reputation it really does not deserve.
Rich on our last night in Sanur…
Canggu
After a somewhat emotional journey to Canggu (all will become apparent in our Gili post), we arrived at Wayan’s Guesthouse to a couple of fairly loud dogs barking at us as we dragged our painfully overpacked suitcases down the driveway.
We definitely describe ourselves as “flashpackers” when we talk about our travelling style and although our tastes have become less flashy the more we’ve been on this adventure, we definitely still prefer the finer things in our hotels and expect a certain comfort level.
Wayan’s Guesthouse was the most budget of our accommodation in Bali, but we actually really enjoyed our stay and it made us wonder if perhaps we’d unnecessarily overspent on other hotels throughout our trip.
Canggu is on the southwestern side of the island. We stayed a little bit out of the main town, on Perencak beach. The area was very quiet and we spent the majority of our time there at Finns Beach Club which was just a couple of minutes from our guesthouse. Finns was right on the beach, with beautiful sunset views over the ocean and really yummy food.
Finns Beach Club
By the time we finally arrived at Wayan’s it was gone teatime so we headed straight for Finns for some very Western food – spag bol and chicken parma, finishing off with a banoffee tartlet– and watched the sunset with a couple of Bintangs.
Before we knew it, we’d made it to our final day in Bali. Being us of course, it wouldn’t be smooth sailing and breakfast was a bit of a disaster. After walking down the main “road” to our preferred breakfast restaurant of choice, there were queues out of the door and it was cash only (we had no cash left.) We ventured on to the only other place we could find serving breakfast to find that they too were only taking cash. With few other choices we ended up back at Finns…
As we’d had a bit of a slower start, Finns were already on their lunch menu and so I ended up having yummy arancini for breakfast. The Grumpinator was sulking about this and claimed not to want anything, but I made him have a dessert that seemed to be the most breakfasty thing I could find – a granola and fruit smoothie – and a few months later when we were reminiscing about this he admitted it was one of the best breakfasts he’s had on our travels!
As the rains set in, we had a lazy day packing and watching movies in our room. In the evening, we got into our Bluebird (blue coloured taxis, very cheap) for our final run with death on the roads and headed back to the airport. After a seven hour delay, drama with the Hard Rock Café and an interesting couple of hours asleep on the airport floor, we were on our way back to Australia to begin our East Coast Adventure and to spend the next month living together in a van…
“Free” money from Jetstar
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