Our Home Away from Home in Sanur: Villa Joglo
For the first stop on our gap year adventure in Sanur, Bali, we chose to stay at a private villa that we booked on Airbnb.
Overall, we have been pretty happy with our choice. The villa has a traditional Balinese layout, with a big open living room, dining room, and kitchen area that separates two ensuite bedrooms on either side. The entire front wall of the house is made of giant glass doors overlooking a beautifully lush garden and pool area. The furniture is rustic, but comfortable.
The villa provides the opportunity to test out a more traditional, “open air” lifestyle — none of its rooms are hermetically sealed to the outdoors, as they might be in a western home. There are large gaps between the roof and walls and under the sliding doors. Even the bedrooms, which have air conditioners and so are somewhat more airtight, remain open enough to allow bugs of all kinds, geckos, and other small creatures to pass through. This might be a deal breaker for some, but we’ve managed pretty well, for the most part — even with the occasional unexpected late-night visitor in our outdoor bathrooms, and the discovery of a resident monitor lizard in our kitchen! We would, however, note that the local geckos, dogs, cats, and cockerels can be surprisingly noisy at 4 am.
The beds are comfortable and equipped with mosquito nets, which limits bug bites — although no matter how tightly we tuck the nets in, our squirmy kids still seem to manage to poke their limbs out during the night. The mosquitoes tend to get active just before dinner time, before we’re able to seek the refuge of our mosquito nets, but this is pretty well addressed with some bug repellent. (Buy the one in the pink bottle they sell everywhere — the brand name is Soffell.)
The small pool has also been an excellent addition for this stop on our trip, being just big enough for the grown ups to get in some (very) short laps in the mornings and perfect for the whole family to swim and cool off in during the hot afternoons. It’s by far the best way to beat the heat!
Another point of note is that while the kitchen is fairly well-equipped, it’s very rustic, and definitely not the type of kitchen where you can prepare intricate dishes. However, for some easy meals like pasta, scrambled eggs, and cereal, it does the trick just fine.
While the location of the villa — in a relatively quiet residential area, easily walkable to a grocery store and a number of really good inexpensive local restaurants (many of which cater to the expat community) — might be optimal for some, for families with young kids like us, it can be a bit challenging. From the villa’s location, the beach and main strip are realistically only reachable via a taxi or a Grab car, since we’re separated from the main tourist area by a highway bypass that is basically un-crossable with kids, unless you want to put their lives on the line playing Frogger with the hordes of motorbikes whizzing by. While taxis are affordable (everyone here seems to recommend the Bluebird Taxis), Grab has been our preferred mode of transit to and from the beach simply because of the ease of use of its app, its built-in translation feature for messaging with our drivers, and its affordability. A ten-minute Grab ride to the beach for four persons costs us 2 to 3 USD.
While we would definitely recommend this villa to other travellers, if we were to come back to to Sanur again, we probably would choose to rent something that’s walkable to the main commercial strip and the beach — which means anything south or east of the Sanur Bypass (officially called the Jl Bypass Ngurah Rai). However, we recognize that the convenience of a location closer to the beach would likely be offset by higher costs, more bustle and noise, and smaller spaces (and maybe even, god forbid, losing the pool!). All that said, we think the trade-offs would likely have been worth it for us, given that we were only here for a short time.
Villa price: 1832.90 USD for 30 days via Airbnb