10th January 2024: Sari Ater Hot Springs, Ciater
Breakfast was served 6 am-10 am in the Family Restaurant where we had eaten the previous evening. It was a buffet with breads and cakes, rice porridge and weird and wonderful toppings plus a bar serving rice, curried potatoes and some sorts of stew. It is almost always a disappointment to come to a country famous for its coffee to find you get served treacly Nescafe.
The restaurant overlooked the pool and families were already bathing in the water. No swimming costumes here. The women were veiled and in long dresses and the men were covered in t-shirts and trousers.
Kevin was chuffed when a waiter offered to make him an omelette which came with the obligatory tomato and chili sauces.
After breakfast we thought that would check out the bathing facilities on site as well as the other amenities. There was horse riding, kayaking, peddeloes, skylines etc. It was quite developed and very different to many of the hot springs which we have visited in South America. Perhaps now we understood why our driver yesterday, Misnu, wanted to take us to somewhere more off the beaten track.
There is a campsite too, overlooking a pond where swallows were swooping low. Nearby there are other hot springs at Ciater but we were not minded to walk in the humidity.
We hadn't found the waterfall and hot springs shown on the website so we wandered back. We decided to take a brief rest on a bench under a shelter as a few spots of rain began to fall. Nearly an hour later we were still stuck there, with thunder and lightning bouncing around and the water levels around our seat rising. We kept thinking it was easing off.....
Worried that the rain might last all day, we did mad dash back to the hotel and our room.
The rain seemed relentless, so we decided to catch up on our blog. Just before we came, we bought a new small laptop. We wanted a Windows one but we were persuaded by a chap at Currys to take a Chromebook instead. "It does everything MS does," he claimed.
Big mistake! It didn't recognise our digital cameras and so we couldn't upload the pictures we had taken. It took Joan a couple of hours watching YouTube videos and reading FAQs to realise we had been sold a pup. Eventually she found a slow but successful way of extracting photos from our cameras using our old Samsung Tablet and WhatsApp.
The sun was out again so we headed to where we thought the spa pools were. What we found was a busy water park that had warm, natural stream running through it. It was busy with local families and there were lots of food outlets. Each pool had its own activity - massage, foot massage - and there was a charge for going virtually every separate pool. Despite having seen signs saying guests should not bathe fully clothed, everyone was dressed. Kevin had brought swimming shorts and Joan a skirted swimsuit but we got the feeling that those might have been too risque. So we paddled in the warm stream that ran through instead.
There were shelters and gazebos all around which were carpeted and families seemed to use to dress and picnic privately.
As it was growing dark, we decided to eat early as we had a 4.30 am get up. We headed to the restaurant, resigning ourselves to having another pizza meal. However pizza was off and no alternatives were offered. It took some protracted negotiations and several waiters to secure a club sandwich and chips. This was eaten on our balcony with a few beers.
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