After examining what makes a good bathroom in Southeast Asia, for the second and final piece in this series I’m looking at, well, the rest of the shebang. And while the bathroom is especially easy to get totally wrong, crappy hoteliers are no slouches when it comes to the rest of the joint. Let’s start … read the full post

Preparations for this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival are bearing excellent fruit with a raft of prominent international writers confirmed to be attending the October 5 to 9 event. The full programme is set to be announced in a few weeks, with discounted early bird tickets set to be available within that time frame … read the full post

In the last almost seven years of running Travelfish.org I’ve personally reviewed more than 2,500 places to stay in Southeast Asia. Sure some have been flasher joints, but the vast majority have been at the budget end of the scale — the sort of place you’d most likely get some change from a crisp $20 … read the full post

Bali’s Green School is a spectacular campus set just outside Ubud. Nestled in a river valley among rice fields the school is surrounded by village paths and backroads, which, as it turns out, make excellent fodder for a bit of cycling around Bali. With that in mind, some of the more pedal-minded parents have put … read the full post

Canggu is a beach and ricefield area out to the northwest of Seminyak. It’s famous for three things: the surf, the ricefield views and the private villa rentals. Given private villas in Canggu generally fall outside the reaches of the meagre Travelfish.org budget, we just spent a weekend traipsing around looking at everything from cheap … read the full post

It’s a common complaint from first-time visitors to Bali (we were guilty of this ourselves) that Balinese beaches are just ordinary. I remember the first time I stepped onto a Balinese Beach — staying at Villa Kresna in Seminyak, I strolled down to check out the surf I’d heard so much about and found a … read the full post

Yes, there is puh-lenty of beach for kids to play on in Bali, but sometimes when you’re sick of the sand or the sun, or you’d like some beach bar time away from the kids, you’d like them to play on their own for a bit. If you’re not staying somewhere with a kids’ club, … read the full post

There was a stuff up the other day when I headed to Fivelements outside Ubud for what was supposed to be a very special treat for myself and my four-year-old daughter: a spa treatment, an afternoon tea and a puppet show. The show was cancelled, but I didn’t see the email they sent me; I … read the full post

July 23, 2011: UPDATED! The Bali iPhone app has been approved and is now available in the AppStore. You can read more about the Bali iPhone App right here. Just a quick note to let you know that our long-awaited iPhone app for Bali is in the final stages of compilation and testing. It’s been … read the full post

We had the good fortune to hear Bill Dalton speak in Ubud last week. Bill is the founder of Moon Publications and the author of what started as the first proper guidebook to Indonesia, eventually becoming the Indonesia Handbook. For years it was the guidebook to the archipelago. During the talk, the question was asked … read the full post