The Villa Agung Khalia, that we stayed in, was heaven! When we arrived at the villa, we were very confused, because they told us to pick one of the two houses. We figured they were both open, so they were just letting us pick the one we wanted. However, we found out that each house had three rooms, so we had unknowingly rented out two houses with a private pool between the two! Each of us had our own room with three being in one house and the other three in the other house!
The houses were huge!! Two rooms upstairs and a room downstairs. Each had a kitchen, formal dining room, and two large living rooms. All of our rooms had private bathrooms and A/C units.
It was huge and gorgeous and smelled like exotic spices!
When I woke up, I walked around the grounds just drinking in the fresh green rice fields, the beautiful clear smog-less sun, and the smells of spice.
At the foot of our house, the other house and in key locations around the property, I found gorgeous offerings. The offerings had incenses burning and were filled with flowers, candy, cookies, fruit and other beautiful objects. The offering was intricately made out of palm leaves. One of my favorite things about Bali was seeing these offerings absolutely everywhere! Our driver even had one in his car! The hard things was when they were in the middle of the sidewalk, and if you weren't watching where you were waling you would trample someones beautifully made offering. I only did it once, I felt so bad, but as a group, I'm sure we did it at least three times a day!
After we were all up, ready and ate breakfast, we had the villa driver drop us off in Ubud. We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon walking the streets of Ubud.
The first place we went was the Ubud Palace. We found out that the ruler of Ubud actually lives in the Palace. At first we just thought it was an old exotic building that attracted tourist. But we quickly found it that it was still occupied.
The building was old, ancient and absolute beautiful! There were statues with sarongs. These sarongs are like wrap around skirts and are a sign of respect and the temple clothing of the Balinese people.
The Ubud Palace had huge plates of offerings and also the small palm leave offerings places everywhere throughout the palace.
The archways and walkways and stone carvings on the building were memorizing!
After spending about an hour at the Palace just loving the beauty and mystery of the architecture, we learned from an elderly couple that just down the road a ways was a beautiful and huge lotus garden! Our next stop was to find the lotus garden.
When we found the lotus garden, I couldn't believe my eyes! There were so many flowers and they were so gigantic! They were so perfect looking, that I figured they had to be fake flowers.
I have never seen a real lotus flower, so when I saw one up close, I was even more resolute that the flowers were fake. The center of the flower has this bright yellow cone that has large holes in it. The cone looks as though it is made from plastic. The leaves were so vibrant and large that I had to touch one before I believed they were real. The entire lotus garden was a small pond that had large lily pads and the flowers growing straight up out of the water.
Behind the lily garden was the beautiful temple, Pure Taman Saraswati Hindu Temple. This temple was also adorn with statues with the sarongs wrapped around their loins. The temple had beautiful offerings all around the grounds.
The temple was the perfect backdrop for the lotus garden.
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