My Bali birthday

I am very lucky this year as I was whisked off to Bali for my birthday, or more accurately Johnny's friend had planned a trip there for his birthday and it just happened to correspond with mine. Am I complaining? Nope.

To be honest, neither one of us had any interest in visiting Bali thanks to all the awful stories about embarrassing bogan Australians. On the other hand, there's all the other stories you hear about people absolutely falling in love with the place. So, cautiously and with low expectations we went- and loved it. Loved that we could just be tourists, loved that things were so much calmer than Vietnam, loved that you could see their religion and culture everywhere and loved the lush greenness.

In essence- GO. Go to Ubud specifically, it's lovely.

My highlights in Ubud: riding on an well cared for elephant and being able to score the hilarious photo above, bathing in what I thought were the hot springs but were actually freezing cold because they weren't the hot springs, coming over the mountain and seeing Kintamani Volcano- holy moly it was so beautiful it looked like a painting of a dream of the most romantic moment you've ever had, eating babi guiling and eating at an organic restaurant twice which I don't know the name of (it's on Jalan Raya Ubud and is in the middle of a what looks like a fancy shopping U complex- fancy outdoor furntiure and a giant rock water feature in the centre).

My highlights in Seminyak: definitely our private pool and outdoor shower in our villa!, dinner at Ku De Ta which was totally worth the hype (the food was awesome and also happened to be about a third the money we spent) and drinks at Potatohead which felt like a Justin Hemmes wet dream (also worth the hype).

Thanks to Laura for all her tips! You can steal them all like I did here.