This is a post I've been meaning to share for a while, I love holiday planning and finding great deals and Bali was the first long holiday adventure I've planned. (Iceland was my first big holiday I planned, you can read all about that trip here)
I love researching and put a lot of time into planning holidays, with this trip I quickly decided we didn't want to do a planned tour so I set about searching out cheap flights before I planned anything. C had friends in Kuala Lumpur so we decided we would fly into here and home from here as it worked out cheaper to get a return flight then a single from the UK to Kuala Lumpur and a single from Bali to the UK. We flew with Qatar, there were a few operators we could fly with and all of them had prices within £100 of each other, in the end we opted for Qatar as they were reasonably priced and we had a change in Doha which meant we only had 7 hours on a plane at a time so it broke it up nicely.
We spent two night in Kuala Lumpur on our way to Bali and one night on the way home. This really worked out well for us, we had heard there wasn't too much to do so we decided not to spend too long here.
This left us 13 nights in Bali. I spend a lot of time then searching to see what I want to do in a country. After looking into it I realised it would be best for us to travel around Bali and be near where we needed to be for certain activities. This worked really well for us, it did mean that we stayed in around 8 places though. I loved travelling around and exploring the different towns and cities though. We also travelled over to the Gili Islands and spent a few nights on those.
My Top Tips
- Research to see what you want to do and how long it will take then search skyscanner for good flight deals for that length of time. I search for whole month so you can see the cheapest days to fly. I really recommend this as you don't want to get all that way and realise you don't have enough time to do all you want too. Also think about things like do you need to go to all of the major temples (C told me after a few I'd be done and he was right, they were amazing to see but I didn't need to see them all!)
- Check Expedia, we combined flights with our first accommodation in Kuala Lumpur to save money, you can book hotels for part of a stay.
- Travel around Bali, taxi's are cheap so we just booked these from hotels to take us to the next city.
- Tours can be expensive and not worth it, I saw trips to the Monkey Forest for £50, entry is only a few pounds and in the centre of Ubud so if you split your trip in different areas you can save money.
- You get a much better exchange rate for money in country, use money changers. We only had a problem in Seminyak with these but still got a better rate than in the UK. Count the money they give you yourself before you leave and you won't have a problem.
- Check if it's cheaper to fly to another country and spend a few days there, this saved us money by going to Kuala Lumpur first.
- Search around for the best accommodation deals, we used expedia, AirBnB and booking.com. Pay extra for a pool too, it was so nice to be able to go back to the hotel and have a dip in the pool after being so warm all day and pools were usually only a few pounds extra a night. (you get used to being constantly sweaty!)
- Think about what vibe you like in a place, we travelled from Ubud down but found Ubud was our favourite place and wish we'd saved it for last.
- Pre book your boat if you plan to go to the Gili islands or Lombok and don't go for the cheapest (we did and it was late, non air conditioned, and took longer.)
- Eat the Nasi Goreng - it took us a few days to try but it was sooo good!
- Enjoy, it's an amazing country.
I'll be sharing where we stayed and what we got up to over the next few weeks, looking back on it still makes me smile, it was an amazing holiday!!
Have you been to Bali?
Love M
xxx
