Firstly, I found this place to be very overrated and overpriced, to be honest, I’m sorry to say. I cannot believe that it’s a called a 3-star hotel – I had just come from another one of those in Ubud, and that one was almost twice as expensive but at least 4 times nicer. I’ve added photos of this place so you can see what the official photos don’t show: the broken and/or poorly kept aspects of the room and grounds, the unappealing building just next door, the many, many steep steps up to the road, etc. All of this would have been fine with me if this had been represented and priced honestly, but it looked so nice online that I was planning on coming here for our honeymoon, and I’m SO glad I tried it out in time to cancel that. The other important thing to be aware of is that if you have any issues at all during your stay, you’ll be treated like an adversary! This happened to me twice during my two-night stay, and I was extremely uncomfortable – I was very eager to leave. First, when my laptop couldn’t access the internet via their wifi (but could on my phone’s hotspot), I asked them if they could just reset the modem. Wayan was bizarrely combative about this simple thing – he kept saying his internet is excellent and I obviously needed to go get my laptop repaired, etc. (Their network was not secure, which my laptop had flagged, and in the end installing a VPN via my hotspot did help for most of the rest of the time.) But his attitude was basically ‘how dare you!’ and it all felt quite unnecessarily adversarial. The other major issue was that Wayan took *great* personal offense to the fact that I still wear a mask in certain settings (people I know keep getting Covid these days, and I’d just like to stay healthy in general during my travels -- especially as Wayan was coughing repeatedly the day I arrived). He lectured me about how Covid is over all over the world and especially in Bali, and we know this because the president had reopened the airports. He asserted that if Covid were to return, the airports would automatically close again. I tried to explain that I had seen many tourists coughing a lot on line for immigration, but he flatly ignored me and just kept repeating the same things over and over no matter what I said. Then, just before I went to bed, I started getting a string of nasty messages from Wayan via his wife, Ayu, on WhatsApp. They said that I was engaging in “defamation of Bali” by not believing that Covid is 100% gone from the planet, and that they were very offended. They sounded very angry and vaguely threatening, with language like “we might snap at you,” and saying that they would not help me to take my luggage up the (very many, very steep) stairs when I left in the morning. I honestly felt pretty afraid, and extremely unwelcome. I have traveled a lot, but never experienced anything remotely like this anywhere else. Even if we were to assume that my laptop was at fault and my Covid precautions were unreasonable, it’s
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