After 80 Countries, this is (almost) the best Hotel Experience – The Ritz Carlton Reserve Mandapa

A recent trip to Indonesia helped me check off my 79th country. During this time, I have stayed at countless hotels claiming to be the “ultimate” in luxury, service and so forth. They have more times than not, usually disappointed in some way or another. When a hotel makes a claim about service, magical experiences, and charges a high fee, they set people’s expectations high. Therefore, its easy to disappoint, and to be honest, this stay, STARTED out that way to the point where I thought to myself “yet another place with more talk than substance”. However this quickly changed. This is my experience at the Ritz Carlton Mandapa in a pool villa overlooking the rice fields.

On their website, the best villas are the ones overlooking the river. However, in practice, overlooking a rice field is more desirable in my opinion. While the river is beautiful, I think that its easier to get a hotel room or villa overlooking water somewhere in the world. A villa overlooking a rice field? Not so easy to find. Therefore, its more unique. That’s why I changed our booking from the river to the rice field. We had villa #10. Also, the interior of Bali is known for rice fields. As an aside, I preferred the interior of Bali to the coastal areas for a number of reasons: 1. the interior is less touristy; many parts of the coast have turned into something resembling resort towns of Mexico and 2. the beaches of Bali are not the greatest anyway.

The hotel picked us up from the airport and this where the only negative part of the experience took place. Before I get into that, something about the location of the hotel. Its in the interior part of the island of Bali in Ubud. Although only 40 kms (25 miles) from the airport, the traffic in Bali is horrendous, and it will take up to 2 hours to reach the hotel. That’s not their fault. However, the person that was supposed to pick us up at the airport was not there when we arrived. After a call to the hotel (if this happens to you, make sure to call the RC Reserve because there is another RC in Bali), they said they would call their driver to see where he was. I decided to take another pass to see if I could spot our names on the sign, and there was no one. After a few minutes, I went for a third look and then I saw him, holding a sign that said “RC Mandapa”. Another thing to note: they don’t put your name on the sign, you have to look for the hotel name. This wasted about 20 minutes of time which was frustrating because I was trying to get to the hotel in time for sunset.

Anyway, the first night was pretty much a write off as we arrived just minutes before dark, and there was a wedding taking place that night, with a huge tent set up across the rice field in plain view from our villa. Any photos would have to wait for the next morning. To the hotel’s credit, they gave us free massages and drinks to make up for the mix up. The first night was spent at the on site restaurant Sawah Terrace where I had the best skewers of the entire trip. The tuna skewers!

The next morning I finally saw the rice fields and they had taken down the large wedding tent. The sight was breathtaking:

Here is another look, but during sunset:

I decided to hit the gym before breakfast. The gym was well equipped and had good AC which is important because Bali is super hot AND humid.

After the gym, I ordered breakfast to the room. This video shows the incredible set up at breakfast. Breakfast was delicious and consisted of both local and Western dishes. It was included with the room. There were also unique items like an omelet topped with lobster and a delicious bisque.

Now would be a good time to explain a bit about the layout of the villa. You can see the video below for a quick tour as well, but basically, there are two structures to the villa. Once you enter the gates to your villa, to the left there is a structure housing the living room. This is where I had breakfast every morning. The living room has a TV and AC. There are also sliding doors on all sides so you can keep them open in the day and get that inside/outside living feeling. The second structure is the bedroom and bathroom. They are all surrounding the pool.

There is also an outdoor shower off of the main bathroom:

After breakfast, we had our first activity. A tour of Ubud in a vintage VW. This was an incredible experience.

Our driver and guide were fantastic.

They took us to various places around Ubud including Candi Tebing Gunung Kawi:

Pura Tirta Empul

The next stop was a coffee farm where we learned about, tried, and bought the famous luwak coffee of Bali. Our guide told us that he had tried as many of the farms as he could, and brought us to the one he thought was the best. The would say that this, and Costa Rican coffee, are the best I’ve had in the world so far. If you’ve never heard of luwak coffee before, you should Google it. Its a very unique process.

Next, the guides took us to 2 different rice fields and took photos. This is was something I was excited to see and it lived up to what I had pictured.

After the tour, we returned back to the hotel to a very nice surprise from our pith (which is the local term for a butler) Niti.

This would be a good time to talk about the service at Mandapa. Its perfect. First, you are assigned a personal pitch throughout the stay. Unlike other hotels, that have multiple butlers, you are assigned one who responds almost instantly on Whatsapp to whatever request or question you may have. I would message her to order breakfast, a buggy ride, to make arrangement or whatever was needed, and it was always taken care of quickly. On our last day, she was not aware of some parts of our itinerary which I thought was strange given how detailed she was for everything else, but this was a very minor thing.

Later that day, we visited the spa for a massage that Niti had arranged. While their main spa was under renovation, they used a three bedroom villa so we got to check that out. The massage took place in the master bedroom of the temporary spa. The service in the spa was amazing, just like everywhere else. I have to emphasize, there was not one poor interaction during the entire stay. EVRYONE, from the servers in the restaurant, to our pith to the guides, and literally everyone, was extremely friendly.

The next day we decided to stay at the hotel and not book any activities. We wanted to enjoy the property to the fullest. Basically, we stayed around our pool all day:

At lunch, we went to the Japanese restaurant on the property. At first I was hesitant about going to a Japanese restaurant at a resort in Indonesia, but I was pleasantly surprised by the food. It was good all things considered. Also, our table had an incredible view of the property.

The sushi was not bad:

The sando was good:

The tableside tartar was beautiful, but could of used more seasoning:

The tempura was battered very very well.

Our last day at Mandapa started with gym and breakfast, and then something I highly recommend – river rafting. We set out in the VW and took some amazing photos on the way:

…then it was time to go rafting. This was my first time and it was an incredible experience. The sun was out, and the scenery was incredible. Surrounded by jungles and waterfalls. Our guide also had arranged for people to photograph and video us along the river. By the time we got back to our hotel, I had a link to all the footage. Just incredible.

One of the highlights was stopping at this waterfall:

One really cool aspect of the rafting is that you will drive to the start of the river, but end up at the hotel. We got out of the raft and we went to clean up. There would be one more activity before we left the resort. Niti had set up a photoshoot with the resort photographer.

https://videopress.com/v/lv8K6Vhr?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

As we left Mandapa, we ended up at our next destination which was the coast of Bali. We immediately missed the near perfect past 3 days we had. During our time at the RC Mandapa, we decided to rate all the resorts had stayed at over the past few years spanning close to 80 countries. We rated each on 4 criteria: 1. room, 2. activity, 3. location, and 4. service. The RC Mandapa ended up coming in 2nd place but it was close. The #1, we both agreed, was Amanpulo in the Philippines, but not by much. This is truly an excellent property. The room, the activities, the location and service, are 99.99% perfect. Highly, highly, recommended.