Not so Isolation Journal - Managing to use our wedding gift Yurt stay...

The past 2 weeks have been quite exhausting with work and so I've struggled to keep things up to date, but I wanted to properly document a lovely trip away that we had to Swaledale Yurts.

When we got married last September, Alan's lovely work colleagues had bought us a few lovely gifts including a voucher for a 2 night stay at Swaledale Yurts as well as a voucher for a meal at The Ivy and a voucher for Alfresco Adventures.  In February we got organised and booked in things like the meal and booked our yurt stay for June not thinking for a minute we would end up where we are now.  Swaledale very kindly moved our booking back in June to October and we were booked for a Friday and Saturday night and had confimed our included hot tub session for 9pm on the first night.

Being more organised than usual the weekend before I'd checked the website for Swaledale and seen that there was a shared kitchen and bathroom facilities, but that you could have hot evening meals and breakfast delivered to your Yurt and you could also order packed lunches if you wanted to.  We decided to order for the Friday evening two portions of steak stew with dumplings and then two shepherds pies for the Saturday night.  I ordered croissants for breakfast for Alan and a bacon baguette for me and a cafitiere of coffee and two orange juices for both mornings.  I emailed our orders over, but on Thursday I'd not had an email back which was unusual so I'd emailed again and had a phonecall straight away from Michelle (one of the owners) to confirm the food was all fine and booked us in for 7pm for our evening meal.

I packed the night before because I knew that my work was going to be full on for Friday and that we'd need to leave at 5pm as it was only 70 miles away, but through lots of cross country roads and estimated around 1 hour 40 to drive to Keld.

We ended up leaving slightly later than planned as I had so much to finish off at work and we didn't have a chance to stop at Wetherby Services for drive through coffee and the sat nav had our ETA at 7pm so it was tight!

Alan drove us up the A1 and then we ended up heading past Catterick Garrison and through loads of windy and hilly roads (I was pleased he was driving, especially as it started to get dark).  We had no mobile phone signal for around 40 minutes, so I couldn't even ring up to let Swaledale know that we might be a few minutes late.

It was just about on time when we arrived (about two minutes past 7pm, very grateful for an accurate sat nav and postcode) and Michelle met us and told us that she'd taken our dinner out of the oven in case it burned.  She pointed out where our Yurt was which was the furthest away from the main barn (and the best location in my opinion!) and it was the blue yurt.  Alan parked up the car and we unpacked and the yurt was lovely and warm with an electric heater plugged in to warm us up.

Moments later our dinner was delivered and it didn't necessarily look as we'd expected - two very substantially sized pyrex dishes with stew and 4 chunky cheesy dumplings on top and they were delicious!  Warming on a cold and rainy night and very flavourful.  I didn't know if I'd be able to finish all of it, but we both did!  We'd brought a bottle of fizz with us, but I'd not spotted we'd need a bottle opener so Alan had to use my nail scissors to dig out the cork and we enjoyed slightly corky sweet fizz out of white mugs.

We set up the bed for the night as there were two single beds with additional beds underneath that you could move next to the single bed to make a double.  There was also a sofa as well as a dining table, 5 chairs a coffee and tea making area ledge, a small fridge and a boot tray.

We then got ready for our hot tub and put our swimming costumes on and some clothes and head torches before heading to the hot tub near the barn.  It was very dark and remote and we got out of our clothes and into the hot tub and Alan turned on the jets.  It's worth mentioning that it felt very Covid secure as there were loads of hand sanitiser points everywhere and lots of space, so even though some of the facilities were shared, we didn't feel worried at all and everything was kept very clean.

Spending nearly the full 90 minutes in the hot tub we listened to the water jets in the hot tub and the waterfall next to the site and watched the stars in the very dark sky.  It was also fun to watch the cars driving along the windy road and their headlights bumping up and down.  

Getting out of the hot tub and was really cold!  We got dressed again quickly and headed back to the Yurt and got into our warm pjamas and tried to get the DVD player working on my laptop, but it wasn't working and so we watched a bit of The Terminal and put a log on the little log burner inside the cabin we were really warm so I turned off the heater and until the morning we were warm enough.

The alarm went off just before 8am the next morning so that I could be awake to take in our delicious breakfast delivery which came on a tray.  Alan enjoyed the croissants that smelled delicious and came with plenty of butter and jam and I ate a white baguette with bacon and lots of ketchup and HP sauce.  The coffee was good and the orange juice made it feel less unhealthy (i.e. at least we had a fruit involved).

It was pouring with rain and so running to the toilet was a mission and it was nice to be cosy back in the yurt listening to the rain thumping down on the roof.  We had a nice after breakfast nap and then woke up and it was stil raining so we opened up the new game I'd bought a few weeks ago and played Sagrada which took us a little while to work out the rules, but was suprisingly quick to pick up and became very addictive.  

As it was still raining hard, we planned our walking time for later that afternoon to avoid getting too wet and so had some cheese, bread and jam and crisps for lunch.  At 2pm the rain had finally calmed down.  We took a look at the maps provided in the guest book and took some photos and headed off up hill first crossing a bridge to admire the strong flowing water that was going behind our yurt.  

We were roughly following one of the routes in the guest book in the Yurt, but in case we got off course we used my Garmin watch to navigate with really good GPS which allows the "navigate to start option" as with no map, compass or working mobile phones we wanted a back up option.  

The first bit of the walk was really steeply up hill and some cyclists giggled as they spotted a rather aggressive 4x4 car ground out on the road.  We took the footpath and walked the ridge behind the yurt site and enjoyed some lovely sunshine as it broke through the clouds.  We didn't pass too many people in the first part although did pass a larger group of people walking all drinking lager and playing music as they walked and then got to a waterfall section with a bench where more people were drinking Red Stripe next to the river.  

It started to rain a little as we walked on and we passed an abandoned building that I had a look in and also an old tractor that was part of the landscape after many years.   After getting to a point where there was a totally stunning waterfall that almost looked manmade we decided to go back the way we'd come in case the rain got heavier.   

On the other side of a ridge we thought we'd spotted a railway track, but when we took a slightly different route back to Keld we discovered it was this strange path, maybe used by a quarry?  It was really steep!

We got back to the Yurt and decided to check out the private waterfall behind the bunk barn and it was really loud and powerful!

It was around 4 miles in total and I tracked it onto Strava

We settled back into the Yurt and got out of our damp clothes and warmed up and then at 7pm our next dinner arrived - delicious shepherds pie, it doesn't look like much, but was completely delicious!  

I had some red wine to go with it and also heated up apple juice in the communal kitchen for hot apple brandy and dialled into a zoom call for the launch party of a fellow parkrunner George Webster's short film S.A.M. (I had to watch it later as it was a bit hard with little WIFI or phone signal) and I also went back a bit later to heat up milk for hot chocolate although tragically discovered the hot chocolate tin I'd packed in actual fact contained loose tea!

We put a couple of logs onto the fire to keep us warm and went to bed and had a lovely night of sleep.

In the morning it was lovely blue skies and I got up to use the bathroom before coming back to have breakfast that again was delivered to our yurt door.  We had the same as the day before with croissants, a bacon baguette, coffee and orange juice.  

Realising that there was another way of looking at the waterfall, we went around the front of it and it was even more stunning with the sunny morning and hopefully if we ever go back in the summer, we'd be able to do some wild swimming if it's not too powerful!

We paid the bill including an extra log for the fire (you get one complimentary log per night and then it's £3 per extra log) and were really pleased that our voucher had included not only the evening meals, but also a few other bits and so there wasn't as much to pay as we'd anticipated.

I came to the conclusion over the weekend that sometimes in a very stressful and increasingly digital world a bit of time away from phone signal and constant information is really good for my stress levels and mental health.  I thought about Maslow's hierachy of needs and weirdly even though you'd think being further up and having all needs satified would be ideal, it was actually nice to have to focus on the more basic needs of keeping warm and dry for a bit  I also think that the smells of grass, bracken and the outdoors do something to my brain that really calms me.  It was a happy coincidence to be there on World Mental Health Day  

It would have been a different experience to visit in June, we could most certainly have gone swimming, but the Autumn has a special feel to it and it also reminds me of when Alan & I first got together and had our first glamping trip to a tree lodge at Swinton Bivouac.  

Swaledale Yurts has extremely good tripadvisor reviews and I can definitely see why, I really hope that we get a chance to visit again at some point.

Day 4 - Bali Adventures Day Tripping!

Rachel's husband like many Balinese men seem to be has many different talents and different jobs including a bar job at Hibiscus (where Rachel met him when he was doing magic tricks - another talent!), raising/herding ducks, wood carving, export and driver/tour guide!  We booked Made to take us on a day of exploring.

Made picked us up from our hotel at 9am (well 20 past by the time we stopped messing around) and we headed off first of all to have a look at some silver smithing.  There wasn't a huge amount of demonstration to be seen, but we got to have a look at some of the raw materials and then we looked around a huge shop of some beautiful pieces.  For the equivalent of £8 I bought some lovely silver and amythyst stud earrings.  

Next stop was a beautiful waterfall - It was a few steep steps down to the waterfall and then a scramble over some rocks and then edging around a watery ledge to get right up in front.  The roar of the sound of the water was at the same time intense and crashing, but also extremely calming.  I clambed across to get a closer look whilst Anna looked at butterflies - there are so many gorgeous butterflies in Bali, just hard to get a decent shot as they have a habit of moving around!  I asked a nice couple by the waterfall to take my photo, but in actual fact my "selfie" was probably a bit better!

We clambered up the steps again - hot work! - and then it was onto our next stop - coffee and tea tasting.  A lovely chap took us through a garden of all sorts of interesting plants - I'd never seen cloves growing before and they look as you would expect, but also quite different, also he showed us chilies, cocoa, coffee, evil lemon, ginger, a strange looking different type of rhubarb and ginseng.  

We got to meet a Civet - the mongoose type creature that is used in Bali to create the famous Civet or Luwak Coffee.  Civet Coffee apparently is produced only in Bali and only 300kg per year is manufacturer so it's considered a real delicacy!  In fact whilst all the other coffee and tea we tasted were free - our Civet coffee was 50,000 rupiah (£2.50) for a cup.  Civet coffee is produced by getting the Civet to eat coffee beans, these are then fermented in the stomach and quite frankly excreted before being collected for roasting.  The shell of the bean is removed and the bean is roasted and ground as you would with a usual coffee bean.  We waited with anticipation to compare and contrast standard Bali Coffee with this delicacy of Civet coffee.  

We were fortunate enough to sample a whole host of different varieties of tea and coffee and so here are my opinions on each taste test!

Mangosteen Peel - fruity, but not overly sweet, apparently good for all sorts of ailments including preventing stress, cancer and anti aging - I decided to buy some of this to take home at the end!

Coconut Coffee - Like a syrupy latte that you might get from Starbucks, really sweet, but not too sweet.

Bali Coffee - slightly bitter, a bit like Turkish coffee, but without all the sugar added - grainy finish at the end of the coffee grounds.

Ginger Tea - sweet, much more fiery ginger taste than you usually would expect.

Ginseng Coffee - considered buying some of this - good for male virility and tasted almost similiar in sweetness to the Coconut Coffee.

Lemon Grass tea - loved this one as I love the flavour of lemon grass and it was sweet as we found out they had added sugar to everything!  

Cocoa Spices - similar to the "aztec tea" that they give you to try at Cadbury World - really fiery spice and dark chocolaty flavours.

Lemon Tea - Sweet and sour - nice lemony flavour - I would have bought this as well!

Vanilla Coffee - Again - very similar, but nicer, to a Starbucks latte with vanilla syrup.

Bali Cocoa - chocolatey and not overly sweet - not quite as spicey as the Cocoa spices, a really smooth flavour.

Red Ginger Tea - Similar to the ginger tea, but not quite as fiery.

Luwak / Civet Coffee - So this was nice, smoother and much less bitter than your usual Bali coffee, but the question of whether I would buy it specially or take any home, not for the price as the differentiator wasn't really there.  

We also got to try milk chocolate, vanilla chocolate and orange chocolate - all were lovely flavours, but slightly unusual textures - a bit too gritty and waxy compared to what we are used to in the UK.

Anna has been on the hunt for some wine glasses and with a whole host of glass shops on the route we were driving she got Made to pull over and have a look around, although nothing quite right for what she wanted to pay, but looking at the craftsmanship was really interesting in itself.  

We then reached the Elephant Cave Temple which oddly had a pan-piped version of "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion as we arrived.  I had long trousers on, but Anna had to borrow one of the stock sarongs to be "decent" enough to walk around the temple.  In the temple there was a very shallow pool with lots of huge fish that couldn't even seem to fully submerge themselves in it.  The entrance to the "Elephant Cave" was an ornate, and quite scary looking carving.  Once in the cave it was a heady smell of lots of different types of incense burning in a very enclosed space and it felt almost sophorific - would be good for all sorts of strange thoughts whilst meditating I thought.  The temple was set in quite shelving slopes of jungle, so it gave us a good opportunity for exploring and we passed a few locals including one lady who was naked and having a wash in the stream!

After a brief drive we got to the Holy Water temple - I've been here before, but it's really stunning and I was happy to have a second visit.  There are various jets of water that the idea is that you walk along and pray at each.  People make loads of colourful offerings that run into the water and make a beautiful watery scene and there are even bottles on sale so you can collect your own holy water to take home!

There is a huge fish pool with loads of Koi carp everywhere and the colours make an incredible sight.   I particularly liked the view of the garden where they were washing and drying all the tourist sarongs that you borrow to be able to enter the temple against the lovely lush green rainforesty setting.

They cleverly make you walk back past all the shops to get out of the temple and so you have people running after you offering you all sorts of good bargains and less value for money options - i.e. 1 banana 1 dollar!  I especially liked that they had a Princess Diana head to model one of the kaftans on sale!  Anna bought some carved masks after a bit of negotiation, but I managed to escape without spending any more cash as it's dangerous in Bali as there are so many lovely things you can buy that aren't even tourist tat and they aren't expensive, but I'm on a desperate mission to declutter!

By this point we were pretty hungry and so were pleased to get driven up to Kintamani for lunch!  It was a buffet style lunch, not cheap for Bali at 120,000 rupiah or £6, but it's the price you pay in tourist places and we got to eat whilst looking out over a volcano which you don't get the opportunity to do all that often!

We started the route back to Ubud and stopped off at Tegalug rice terraces - beautiful view that they used in Eat Pray Love I believe and I got a nice picture of a chap working in the rice terraces complete with a hat that was woven from banana leaves!

The last stop on our whistlestop tour - Made crammed in loads for us on the one day! - was to see some white cranes flying over at 6pm to a particular tree - there were loads of them!  They were on time and it was really strange how they all navigate to the same place each day - you can tell that this is the case based on the amount of guano on the ground beneath!

We arrived back to the hotel exhausted from our fun, but busy day and so then it was a quick meal at one of my favourite places in Ubud - Juice Ja where I tried a locally brewed beer called Stark.  I also decided to be naughty and have some ice cream and tried both Pannacotta and Tamarillo ice cream - Pannacotta was pretty much just a very vanilla flavoured ice cream, but Tamarillo definitely tasted as described!