Sliding cherry and glass doors open on our balcony. For dinner we sit on cushioned benches and eat szechuan eggplant and curried chicken. At night we hear a lone libidinous cricket. The beach near the hotel, which we discover in the morning on a pre-breakfast stroll, is black rock and oily iridiscent pools. Large swells come in and close out on the shore.
Fishing boats are barely visible on the horizon.
Off to the right is Tanah Lot, an island temple out just far enough that you can only walk to it at low tide. For swimming, the hotel has provided a labyrinthine network of swimming pools connected with canals and waterfalls, crisscrossed with bridges, tiled with a mosaic of varying shades of blue. I get the impression of a half-submerged Greek or Roman city. There is even a couple half-pipe waterslides, lubricated with narrow streams of water, curving around artificial waterfalls. The rock of the artificial waterfalls, the rock separating the different elevations of pool, is Disneyland rock, the same stuff you find on Thunder Mountain Railroad and on the Indiana Jones ride, it's gnarled and bumpy and cracked like natural rock but somehow you can tell that it's manufactured.