Our last morning in Ubud, we grabbed breakfast at Dough Darlings as we had seen the cafe earlier in the week and wanted to give it a try. Grant and I tried the vanilla glaze, salted caramel and red velvet donuts. We learned that morning that a piccolo was basically a small latte. Isiah and Ellen tried a Green Tea and a Chocolate cake filled donut. They were good but too rich for them to finish.

After breakfast, we stopped by an ATM to grab some cash to close out our bills for the Airbnb and begin our journey down to Uluwatu. This time Galih was our driver for the morning. It is funny when these drivers say their English isn’t that good, but Galih’s was actually pretty decent. We could easily have a conversation with him throughout the 1.5 hour drive. The crazy thing that we have seen a lot of, is Galih had no formal English teaching. He learned just from driving people around and listening to American music. He’d only been speaking English for 1.5 years or so and was pretty good.

When we arrived at the resort, we were greeted by the concierge with a lei that was placed around us. It was like what you see in the movies (sorry neither one of us had experienced that before!). As we had checked in prior to our rooms being ready, we headed up to the rooftop bar to take in the ocean view and enjoy their welcome drink.

Grant and I headed to our room while Ellen and Isiah explored the resort grounds. They headed down to the beach to take a look and feel the water and were able to see monkeys on their tram ride back!

We had read that it was best to get to the Uluwatu temple early especially if viewing the Kecak dance at 6 pm to ensure a good seat. We weren’t sure how big the property was, but when we were there it seemed like they had some areas that were closed off. My friend had said to watch out for the monkeys as they were again aggressive like the ones in the sanctuary and will steal stuff like sunglasses. We actually witnessed two ladies lose their glasses to a monkey and a friendly man had to use trickery to get them back from the monkeys. He found some candy to “trade” them but it seems the monkeys have trained the humans in that the monkeys now know they’ll get a treat if they steal shiny things off humans!

Prior to the show, they gave a handout explaining the different acts we were going to see and thankfully they did because I would have been so confused during the show. The dance was astounding to witness especially when the monkey freed himself and started kicking real fire around. I didn’t catch the moment it went too close to the crowd but you can see in the video how wildly he was just flicking the fire through the arena.

Afterwards, we headed back to the resort to grab some dinner. Isiah and Ellen decided to try the special being offered which was a traditional Balinese meal. We learned they cook a lot of their food with a shrimp paste so I had to avoid it with my shellfish allergy. Grant and I tried a couple of things off their platter and it was really good. But definitely safer that we didn’t get it with my allergy. We ended the evening with three different desserts as we couldn’t decide between the couples which one to get so we chose our top three. We learned over the course of the week that Grant and Ellen had similar tastes while Isiah and I shared similar tastes.