Amankila

100   Recommended
October 20, 2014 by EXPERT

 Map | 14 Reviews | 100% Recommended
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Amankila
 Map | 14 Reviews | 100% Recommended

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Liked:
Location
Service
Food
Amenities
Room
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Room

The Amankila Suite. As expected, it’s sensational—the massive terrace and pool, the bales (one of which contains an iPod and docking station), the sound of the ocean booming below. The two separate living pavilions are exactly like the living pavilions elsewhere in the resort, and are in pristine condition, having just recently been refurbished. I was surprised to see a flatscreen TV and DVD player in the suite (Amanusa is the only other one of these resorts that has these), and we didn’t use them, but can imagine they’d come in handy during the rainy season. Nice details throughout: all of the books and paper materials in the room have been covered or bound with local woven material—including a book about the fruit of Indonesia that has been positioned next to the towering fruit display. Perfect housekeeping—nightly turndown gifts, and everything always fresh and perfect. We requested dinner at the suite one night and they decorated the terrace with the tall Balinese white flags, and placed several candles around the pool. One of the women in our party preferred sleeping outdoors, so they draped one of the bales with mosquito netting so that she could enjoy sleeping to the ambient noise of the waves.

Spa

We each had the “mepijet” massage treatment from Gusti, the “local healer,” and it was a superbly individualized, intuitive, and therapeutic massage—one of my friends, a real spa aficionado, felt it was the best massage she’d ever received.

Dining

The food at Amankila was the best of our trip, each breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu containing more options than we had days to sample.

Pool

We spent much time lounging around the pool at our suite, as well as the photogenic tiered main pool, and then an afternoon at the beach, where the gray volcanic sand is as soft as talcum powder and the waves were perfect – big enough to generate some excitement, but not too rough – and looking back up at Amankila, and a neighboring Balinese family temple, on the hill and cliff above, while bobbing in the waves, is a type of heaven. The beach service is superb—private bales fronted by lounge chairs. The neighboring beach pool is also very photogenic, and supremely relaxing place to while away a few hours.

Excursions

We scheduled two excursions, one of which was superb—the trek to Tenganan across the rice patties of East Bali. This was not a difficult trek, but did take 3 hours, as we stopped multiple times to avail ourselves of the quintessential Balinese landscapes of rice terraces, scarecrows, and shrines to the rice goddess. The trek does have a very humid, unpleasant downhill stretch through a narrow, rocky path, so if you’re not feeling like that part of the trek, you may want to ask them to take you down the main road to the village of Tenganan, where the trek ends. The other excursion was the morning sightseeing cruise and snorkeling expedition. The snorkeling was just so-so, and the sightseeing consisted of circling a small off-shore island. The boat was very pleasant, since it’s arranged so that you can recline in pillowed comfort on the roof, and of course the Aman staff take very good care of you, but the highlight, frankly, was sailing past Amankila and seeing it from the sea.

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