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Michelle Matthews

@secretshq

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Ultra-Melburnian shooting fresh perspectives of my favourite city. Host of @dunkeldsecretgarden & @melbournewarehouseapt

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A brief stay in London but I squeezed the most from every hour catching up with two dear friends and being reminded how much I love this city. taken in e5 bakehouse by @secretshq

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a month ago

taken in Dubai, United Arab Emirates by @secretshq

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a month ago

We often spend our last night in Bali in downtown Denpasar. We love watching this city evolve. In the last twelve months alone, the number of noteworthy cafes here has roughly tripled.

A few of our favourites, each with its own distinct fit-out and its own product vibe.
First, The Ruum. Their speciality is the dirty latte: a glass straight from the freezer, frosty with cold milk, then a shot of espresso poured over the top—iced coffee without the dilution. By the bottom of the glass, it's turned into something closer to a coffee slushy. Fabulous.

A few doors down, Crafty Coffee. Not the first time we've seen deliberately/naturally decrepit interiors housing a genuinely brilliant venue. Somehow, here, it just works.

Third on the list is Series Coffee, over in Sanur but away from the beach. Roasters and pour-over specialists, run by Ken, Indonesian but a long-term Melburnian. We had the salt bread with steamed egg, and it was a proper taste sensation.

#coffee #pourover #denpasarcafe #indonesiacoffeescene #theruum taken in Crafty coffee by @secretshq

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2 months ago

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2 months ago

Jia Curated, Day One of Five 🌊

First lap of Jia Curated done, walking the whole site before settling on favourites.
The FORMAT × Kayou Tori Stool stopped me in my tracks. Named for the torii gate, it's a proper dialogue between wood and metal, stackable and built for flexible everyday use. Simple concept, beautifully resolved.

Also drawn into @exotiscape's world, a Bali-based aquascape and paludarium studio building miniature rainforests and aquatic landscapes indoors. Genuinely different from anything else on site.

And a lovely find at @moonjar_design, tiles by Ana, originally from Ukraine and now calling Bali home. Warm, textured work, a gorgeous glazed wall.

Rounded off the walk with a glass from @sababaywinery, Bali's own, because a proper design crawl calls for a proper drink.

Four more days to go courtesy of @jia.curated.

📍 Pengembak Beach, Sanur
#JiaCurated #BaliDesign #DesignFestival #MoonjarDesign taken in Sanur, Bali by @secretshq

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2 months ago

🧮 Melbournians love a laneway, and Glodok has more than we could count: car-sized ones, scooter-sized ones, and the pedestrian-only alleys where you'd never fit either.

Temples appear at every turn: Buddhist, Taoist, even a Catholic church with a distinctly Chinese Jesus, with shops nearby selling paper offerings to burn as gifts for the afterlife. Want the latest iPhone in the next world?

At a centuries-old apothecary, the abacus is still in daily use. Barbers double as ear cleaners. Fruits and vegetables, familiar and unfamiliar, like edible reeds (Alang alang), white tumeric, and yellow dragon fruit.

We're working out how to bring you here properly.

📍 Glodok, Jakarta

#glodok #RasaVoya #jakarta taken in Glodok by @secretshq

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2 months ago

Every @rasavoya scouting trip comes with a carbon footprint, so this one comes with a receipt of a different kind. Above is our Atmosfair breakdown for the Melbourne–Jakarta return leg: the emissions, the offset.

We started using @atmosfair.de after @JulietKinsman of @Bouteco pointed us their way. If you know Juliet's work, you'll know she doesn't recommend things lightly, and Atmosfair's calculations are about as rigorous as offsetting gets, funding renewable energy and clean cooking projects rather than the vaguer forestry schemes that dominate this space.

We're not pretending offsetting undoes the flight. It doesn't. But if we're asking guests to fly to Indonesia with us, the least we can do is be honest about the cost and put real money against it.

#carbonoffset #transparenttravel #ResponsibleTourism #atmosfair taken in Melbourne Airport by @secretshq

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2 months ago

🥃 Ubud's newest lesson in restraint: a perfumery that also happens to pour a serious non-alcoholic list.
Stillroom sits behind Oaken Artisan Perfumery, and it's not a mocktail menu bolted on as an afterthought. Zero-proof gin with vetiver and rice water. Burnt plum and green tea. A pomelo and Aperol riff that doesn't miss the Aperol at all. Add nitro cold brew, a lemon balm kombucha and a sparkling iced tea built on black tea and rosehip, and you've a proper drinks list for anyone touring dry, pregnant, or done with hangovers halfway through a Bali trip.
This is exactly the kind of address we're tucking into the Rasa Voya Bali itineraries. Sophistication doesn't need proof.

#RasaVoya #Ubud #Bali #NonAlcoholic #ZeroProof taken in Ubud by @secretshq

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3 months ago

🐒 Spotted a troop of dusky leaf monkeys at The Datai this evening, come down from the trees to snack on the foliage around the kids' pool. Among them, an infant still in that impossible orange coat, mid-transition to the slate grey of adulthood. A small blaze against all that green, and the pool tiles. 🧡

Some facts I gathered afterwards, because you cannot watch an orange baby monkey eat leaves by a swimming pool and not go down a research hole:

1. Dusky leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus obscurus) are also known as spectacled langurs, thanks to the pale rings around their eyes that look uncannily like glasses. 👓

2. Infants are born bright orange, a colour thought to help troop members spot and protect them more easily. 🍊

3. The transition from orange to grey happens gradually over the first few months, patch by patch, rather than all at once.🩶

4. Adults have a specialised chambered stomach, similar to a cow's, to digest tough, fibrous leaves. 🌿

5. Because of that leaf-heavy diet, they rarely need to seek out open water, getting most of their moisture from foliage and dew, though resort grounds like this one clearly make for good grazing too. 💦

6. They live in troops typically made up of one dominant male and several females with their young. 🐒🐒🐒🐒

7. Other females in the troop often help care for and even nurse infants that are not their own, a behaviour known as allomothering.🍼

8. Despite their calm, unhurried manner, they are remarkably agile leapers, able to cross wide gaps between trees without touching the ground.🧗🏼‍♀️

9. They are found across the Malay Peninsula, southern Thailand and parts of Sumatra, mostly in lowland and coastal forest.🇲🇾🇹🇭🇮🇩

10. Habitat loss has pushed them onto the IUCN's Near Threatened list, which makes the pockets of protected forest around resorts like this one genuinely valuable, not just decorative.💁🏼‍♀️

Watched the little one cling to its mother's chest for a good ten minutes while the rest of the troop went about their evening snack, entirely unbothered by the poolside audience.

#DuskyLeafMonkey #TheDatai #Langkawi #RainforestEncounters #RasaV taken in The Datai Langkawi by @secretshq

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3 months ago

A day with Made Masak, nomadic chef and forager extraordinaire, courtesy of the Ubud Food Festival, and Tabanan Regency delivered on every front.

We started at Alit's farm, where the living fertiliser machines (Balinese cows, doing their bit) share the land with passionfruit the size of small melons. Huge, sweet, but with none of the tartness you'd expect. Fiona meanwhile found her calling as a foraging faux radio announcer, narrating our experience with her torch ginger (kecombrang) mic with real commitment.

Alit then scaled a living bamboo ladder to reach the palm syrup source, which becomes either alcohol or sugar depending purely on how quickly and how you process it.

Further along, what looked suspiciously like a nest of dragon eggs turned out to be salak, snake fruit.

We foraged a little ourselves under Made's patient instruction, though "helped" might be generous, then handed everything to the local community kitchen team, who turned our modest haul into a proper feast. The kind of day that reminds you why we build these itineraries around people like Made in the first place.

@ubudfoodfestival
#mademasak #nomadicchef #forager #ubudfoodfestival #tabanan taken in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia by @secretshq

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3 months ago

This is one of my favourite views at The Datai, and it's all because of this tree. The Sea Grape. Handsome, unusually shaped leaves with red veins, and bunches of grape-like fruit (yes, I'm partial to a glass of wine). The leaves are used to make signs to personally welcome guests to their chosen dining table: a charming, memorable, nature-led touch. Can you tell I've been spending time with @julietkinsman, hospitality's solutions-led storyteller‽

'Coccoloba uvifera, for the botanically minded: a flowering tree in the buckwheat family, commonly known as seagrape or baygrape.'

@thedatailangkawi #TheDataiLangkawi #Langkawi #SeaGrape #SustainableTravel #ResponsibleTourism @bouteco taken in Gulai House by @secretshq

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3 months ago

🍕 I was invited to a group dinner on the tropical island of Langkawi. A pizza omakase restaurant, they said. My first thought was, "What?"
It took us quite some time to find the place. This is not an easy restaurant to find. It's on a hill out of town, on a road with no signpost. Exactly my kind of restaurant, the one that feels like such a find, such a discovery. My delight antennae were vibrating.
From an operational perspective, the omakase model is genius. The chef cooks what he wants, when he wants. The wait staff don't hover, waiting for decisions to be made. They note dietary issues, then the pizzas start coming.
Looking online en route, I saw a picture of what looked to be a pizza covered in banana. At this point I was still nervous. Still slightly apprehensively curious.
Once the pizzas started coming, it was all great.
A margherita to begin, with homemade stracciatella
A fungi and truffle oil pizza
Bresaola with rocket
A Waldorf Salad variation with blue cheese and walnuts
All were fantastic. Your classic artisan pizza quality with the rapidly cooked crust still chewy and tangy.

#PizzaHills #PizzaHillsLangkawi #LangkawiEats #OmakasePizza #pizza taken in Pizza Hills by @secretshq

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3 months ago