Our third full day in Bali meant our last morning at Mara River Safari Lodge/Bali Safari Marine Park so we relished our last “morning meditation” aka feeding the zebras and the gnus. For those of you who don’t have kids, Little K enjoys a book series/tv series called “Llama, Llama” (created by Anna Dewdney) and LLama LLama’s best friend in the book is Nelly Gnu. Little K was super excited to “meet” Nelly Gnu and her family in Bali. 
After our morning ritual, we headed back to Tsavo Lion restaurant for our breakfast buffet and to bid good morning to the meerkats and lions. 
We also met a Burmese python that Little K safely avoided. However, J and I needed a picture of our new friend… especially since the snake and I had matching outfits. 
After breakfast we headed back to the room to pack up a bit and I got some morning snuggles in with Little K.
We had pretty much everything packed up for our upcoming check-out (e.g. we made good time) so we headed over to the Tiger show (also included in our package). Before we got there though, Little K made a friend.
After the Tiger show, we headed to grab our luggage and some lunch before our ride to our next stop… Kuta Beach. At lunch Little K asked to practice her photography skills a bit more. She was able to capture a successful shot of mom and dad with celebratory drinks. 
On our ride to Kuta Beach, we learned that Little K’s name means “rich” in Indonesian. We also learned that our driver grew up farming rice paddies and he had recently decided to become a driver so that he could interact with people more. He was young, in his early 20’s, and told us a little bit about how social interactions had been difficult for him having grown up mostly working in the solitary environment of his family’s rice paddies. It was really interesting.
We soon arrived at The Stones Hotel, a Marriott Autograph Collection site located in Kuta Beach and where we’d be staying for the remainder of our trip. Upon our arrival we were greeted with a cool towel and fresh fruit popsicles. Since our room wasn’t quite ready yet, we decided to walk around to explore a bit of what was nearby. We needed to find an ATM (or so we thought) and man oh man does the bank make it hard to take out money in Indonesia. J ended up on the phone with the bank no fewer than five times during our trip. Below is the view from our room, a junior suite on the 4th floor (the hotel had five floors).
Once we were able to check in and get our room, we decided to enjoy a little bit of the pool and we ordered pool-side dinner that evening. We chose this hotel because we love the Marriott hotels, particularly the Autograph collections, and we initially chose Kuta Beach because it was somewhat in the “middle” of some of the places we wanted to visit yet still across the street from the ocean. Relaxation — we are READY for you!
andyoumaysayimadreamer 