Day 2 - Sunday 29th September

Each villa has four rooms - two at ground level and two above them. Suzy and I had a room upstairs. At ground level there is a pool and an undercover common area with a lounge, dining area and kitchen.

We'd organised to have breakfast at 8am. The staff are very attentive and organised an excellent breakfast with a choice of juices, fruit, eggs, omelettes, pancakes, etc. The girls were already enjoying a swim in the villa next door.

Although Joan had arranged for villa staff to buy supplies for us, we decided to go to a supermarket to buy more supplies that we'd need for our week in Bali. Villa staff had told us that we should use Bluebird taxis because other taxis try to rip you off.

So they organised two taxis for us. Although they told us to only get a taxi that has a meter, they told us the minimum fare was 30,000 IDR. It turned that they ripped us off too because, after driving for less than 10 minutes, they dropped us off saying we were at the supermarket. It turned out that there was no supermarket there.

We walked further up the road asking people where to find a supermarket. Most of the advice wasn't reliable. It was risky walking along the road because there was no footpath and we were sharing the road with cars and motor bikes. It was scary worrying about the two grandchildren.

Just when we thought we would never find a supermarket, we realised we'd stumbled across it. We spent a while going up and down the aisles with all seven of us adding to the trolley. We bought one carry bag but Suzy and Joan found three other bags in their handbags.

Then we had to find taxis to get us back to the villas. One taxi charged us more than Bluebird and the other was less than half. It was a learning experience. We had lunch in the Waha villa where the Cubbins are staying.

This afternoon, there was a match between Australia and Wales in the World Cup Rugby in Japan. Philip had found a sports bar in a pub that would be showing the match and so Steph, Matt and I joined him in catching a taxi there.

Along the way Steph stopped at a Commonwealth Bank ATM to withdraw cash. It was a surprise to me that CBA had a branded ATM here.

It wasn't as crowded as I expected. The other three had several rounds of Bintang beer whereas I initially settled for a soft drink. In the second half I decided to have a red wine and Matt bought me a glass of Pinot Noir which was the only red wine they had.

To our surprise, when we went to get a second glass, they told us they was no more. Matt joked that I'd drunk the pub dry. It wasn't completely lost because I ordered a glass of white wine instead. The bad news was that Wales beat the Wallabies.

After the match we walked down to the beach which was only about 250m away. It was close to sunset and lots of people had settled in to watch the spectacle. Unfortunately Philip had convinced me that it wouldn't be a good idea to take my camera to the pub. At least I could take photos with my iPhone.

The beach has black sand but the sunset was spectacular. They was a band providing music. It was quite an experience.

The taxi trIp back to the villa was an even bigger rip-off. Instead of a 15 minute journey, it took about 45 minutes. He took us on a long route rather than taking us directly to our hotel. We kept on telling him it was the wrong way and that he should turn the meter off.

Eventually we got there and the meter read about 300,000 IDR instead of the 50,000 IDR we'd paid to get to the pub. I was annoyed that my pocket WiFi wasn't working and so I had no way to determine where we were.

Tonight we had a booking at a fancy restaurant, Merah Putih, and so we needed to back in time for this outing.

We had pre-dinner drinks at the villa and when we arrived at the restaurant. The restaurant is high class with great atmosphere. It has imitation ancient columns that are illuminated. We had a table on the upper level overlooking the restaurant and next to the kitchen.

I got the waiter to take a photo of us all in our fancy pod. They were plenty of great shots to photograph all around the building.

The food was very good but the wine was expensive but - what the heck - we might never be coming back here again.

This was an opportunity to celebrate the 70th birthdays for the three of us this year - me, Suzy and Joan. So towards the end of the evening, the wait staff arrived with three cakes on plates with a single cancel.

We concluded that the single candle was celebrate the first time each of us had turned 70 whereas we had all turned 21 lots of times in the past.

Back in the villa, there was another opportunity to have drinks before retiring for the night.