Bali - Ubud - The Komaneka at Bisma Hotel

Our first stop in Bali was in the town of Ubud, which is known as the cultural center of Bali. This is where you find about a million shops selling all the different crafts created around Bali like dresses, sarongs, paintings, wood carvings, and stone sculptures. You can also enjoy fine Asian dining or a dance performance - there are 7-8 different types of dance performances to choose from every evening.

I will tell you more about Ubud in future blog posts but this one is just about the hotel we stayed at, called the Komaneka at Bisma. In short, it was a wonderful experience. The Balinese people are overly friendly and eager to please and no exercise was too big or too small for them to perform with a smile. We managed to eat two meals per day free here because breakfast was included with our room price and it was 4 courses and absolutely enormous so then we didn't have to eat again until they had complimentary afternoon tea from 3-6 every day when we'd have some little snacks to tide us over until dinner. Not a bad deal.

Here are the flowers on our bed upon arrival:



The white flowers smelled amazing. I'm still not sure what they're called even though we asked somebody and they told us but we had never heard of it.

And every night we got the softest nightgowns to wear to bed, free of charge ... we should have bought some but we didn't. They probably sell them online somewhere.

Here are some views from our balcony:



There were rice paddies right on the hillside outside of our room. They were not fully grown yet and still just little tufts of grass sticking out of little ponds.



We didn't spend much time on our balcony though because there were enormous bees outside - I called them wasp hawks and bee hawks - not many of them but every once in awhile one would fly by and I had forgotten to bring my epipen with me so I avoided the balcony the entire time. Since the entire wall of our suite was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows, it was no big deal to sit inside and enjoy the view instead of outside.

And the pool! 32 meters long, perfect for some nice long laps though we did more relaxing in it than lap swimming.

This view of the pool is taken from the lobby, which is on the top of the hill while the rest of the hotel sits below the lobby on the way down to the pool:



There is another level to the pool, down another story, but we didn't get any pictures of that level because we always sat at the longer lap pool. The other pool snaked around in a circle.



See the little baskets of flowers on the deck in front of the pool in the picture above? Those are offerings, placed in every place of business every single morning in hopes that everybody will have a good and prosperous day doing whatever they're doing. These little baskets are even put in taxi cabs and tour buses. Everywhere.

And here's the lobby, with a nice view of the forest beyond. There was a bar here as well and you could sit and look out over the forest (and the pool) and have yourself a nice chilled beverage of your choice.



This was an enormous table in the lobby that Martin was really impressed by:



And another view from the lobby level, looking out over the rice paddies:



Such a gorgeous view. I was sad when we had to leave here and move on after 4 nights. I realize this is basically an advert for the Komaneka. There was nothing lacking in our experience here though so if any of you ever go to Bali, you should definitely consider this hotel.