Frank Sinatra couldn’t have sung it better. Bali has that exact effect on you. Some people say that it’s easy to enjoy Thailand but Bali you need to earn. When we arrived here it was exactly that. It reminded me strongly of somewhere I had been before, which had the wrong effect on me. I didn’t get the sense that I was visiting somewhere exotic – like Thailand – nor did it feel like I was visiting an island paradise. It was all a bit hum-drum to be honest. It was busy, it was hot, it was certainly different from the cold and wet Cape Town we had left the day before, but somehow it didn’t feel new and exciting. I didn’t get that rush that I had gotten when I walked out of the airport of other countries for the first time.

I wasn’t disappointed, just a little deflated. Maybe it was the jetlag or the fact that everywhere in the southern parts of the island, you can’t walk around without bumping into a red-necked, speedo-clad, overweight westerner. Or get asked if you want transport or a massage. Maybe it was because I had too-high expectations which I had been building up inside of my head.

A week or so later we hired a car in Padang Bai, a small coastal town in the eastern part of the island, which is famous for being the main ferry port to Lombok. Unsure whether my driving skills could take on the maniacal truck drivers or the kamikaze scooters, we took the quieter route out of Padang Bai and headed along the coast, in the direction of Amed – a popular part of Bali for diving and snorkelling. It was along this quiet, narrow road that passes through tiny villages and crosses streams coming down the mountain that we saw what ‘Old Bali’ must have been like. Just about every person we passed stopped to wave and stare, their bright white smiles and yells of ‘Hello!’ disappearing behind us as we went around another bend. When we reached Lipah, the first main village before Amed, we caught glimpses of the colourful fishing boats (Jukungs) neatly arranged along the black-sand beaches. The area was quiet, laid-back and beautiful.

Reflecting back over my last 7 weeks here, I can pinpoint the exact moment I really started to really enjoy myself – the moment I got that feeling of excitement of being here. Arriving in Amed, in the hot afternoon sun, with views of the Jukungs sailing out for an evening of fishing it dawned on me: we were completely independent, we could sleep, eat and go anywhere without a care in the world. We stayed in the Amed area for 8 nights, and were invited to a Balinese baby-ceremony where we were treated to local delicacies. We sat on the floor around a large plate filled with satays, blood sausage, meat from a pig whose death screams had woken us up that morning before sunrise, vegetables and the Balinese staple, rice. To say that I ate a lot of mystery-meat that day is an understatement, but it was delicious and it was handed to us with such generosity and goodwill. The father even sat down with us and had his second fill, eating more than both of us combined!

This is why I love Bali. The Balinese are proud enough and friendly enough that they want you to experience their culture with them. That they display it everyday with their offerings at just about every building, temple or business. That they invite you into their homes to experience something new and different, but something very close to their hearts. So if you ever get the opportunity to visit this beautiful island, don’t come here only for the beaches or for the restaurants or for the nature, come here to meet the people.

There are very few places in this world that are so beautiful and so wild and untouched. Kuta, Lombok couldn’t be more different to Kuta on the neighbouring island of Bali. Azure water, deserted white-sand beaches, very few tourists, even fewer tourist facilities, bad roads and a surfer’s paradise. We decided to head to Kuta in the south and avoid the crowds on the Gili Islands, off the northern coast of Lombok. I managed to get a cheap, wreck of a Suzuki Jiminy in Sengiggi after nearly an hour of haggling, waiting and arguing over deposits. Two and a half hours later, after negotiating the chaos of Mataram’s cars – the motto being: “keep driving, if there isn’t enough space they will make some” – and we were pulling into the dusty, dry village of Kuta.

To say the least, it didn’t look like much: windswept and clouded in the smoke from villagers burning their rubbish, children playing in the streets, teenagers whizzing by at high speed on scooters and horse carts – Cidomos – transporting people home from work. (For every 2 cars in Lombok, there is a horse cart.)

The vegetation is completely different too. The land is covered in hardy grasses and there are very few trees. The people are also a lot poorer and many along the coast live in straw huts and are subsistence farmers.

Our little Suzuki Jimny felt like it was going to give out any moment while we were driving on the roads. The odometer read 189 000km, which is insane considering Lombok island is only 70km across! It ground, groaned and bounced around on some atrocious roads (if you can call them that), but in the end it got us the 18 km west we needed to go to get to the most incredible beach – Selong Belanak. The drive took us approximately an hour.

The beach appeared to be over 10km long and the sand is bright white and incredibly fine and silky. There is a tiny village on the corner of the beach that we were on, a few fishing boats and a 2 small snack huts. It was a special place and a sight hard to forget.

This is part 2 of my account of the Rinjani Trek on Lombok Island in Indonesia. You can read Part 1 here.
 

I think the numbers speak for themselves. Total metres ascending: 3000. Total metres descending: 3700. That makes a pair of very painful knees at the end of the trek.

The descent from the summit of Gunung Rinjani back to the crater rim takes roughly 1.5 hours. In our case it took a lot longer since we had a clear view of the crater and the Sembalun Valley thousands of metres below us and this meant that we stopped a lot to take photographs. We passed the last of our group on their way to the summit, Ritchie and Karlien. Little did we know, that due to the their leisurely pace, we would end up sleeping at the crater lake, something which is not recommended by the Indonesian authorities due to the recent volcanic activity of Gunung Barujari.

Normally, when you hike in a mountainous landscape the path alternates between ascending and descending throughout the day. When you are climbing on a volcano, it is the complete opposite. There is very little variation in steepness and there are very few flat sections where you spend most of the day going up or coming down. We set off from Base Camp One rather later than planned, due to Ritchie and Karlien summitting later than everyone else. Alam, our guide, said it would take roughly 7 hours to get from where we were to Basecamp Two. We would never make it before sunset and after reaching consensus amongst the group, we managed to convince Alam that the only option was to sleep at the lake.

The mid-morning clouds started to roll in and obscured our view of the very steep descent into the crater. We would go from 2600m to 2000m in roughly 3.5 hours. My knees were aching. Give me uphills any day, downhills are just plain painful. You have to remember that this was the same morning that we had climbed 1100m up and down from the summit already and we had walked for nearly 7 hours before we left for the lake. Even if we had had enough time to get to Base Camp Two, it would have meant an exhaustive trekking time of 14 hours and total a whopping 1700 metres in altitude going up and the same down. The porters on the other hand, make you feel ridiculous, they virtually run down the mountain with their heavy, bamboo baskets balanced on their shoulders and flip-flops on their feet. Albeit, most of them didn’t go to the summit and had a good sleep-in while we were scrambling through ash and rocks, it is quite impressive.

The timing could never have been more perfect. The angle of the path started to get less steep, we were approaching the base of the crater and the thick mist started to lift. The crater rim came into view, towering over us on either side. The beauty of this place really does leave a lump in your throat as you stare, slack-jawed at the sheer scale of it. And then, just as you start to grow accustomed to the serene scenery all around you, you walk around a corner and it sits squarely in your view. The barren, bald mass of the little volcano, Gunung Barujari. Except this time, it doesn’t look so little. At over 400m high, steam and smoke leaking out in thin whisps from its twin vents, it is an awesome site. Add to this, the monster is set in the most beautiful scenery imaginable – a glassy-grey lake surrounded by pine trees and enclosed on all sides by the green crater rim.

There are two reasons – besides just sitting and staring at the surroundings – that trekkers visit the crater of Rinjani. The first, is to visit the steamy hot springs and the other is to swim in the lake. The normal temperature of Lake Anak Segara varies. In times of little volcanic activity it is fairly cold, 16ºC. It has however, been known to increase to over 25ºC and the reasons for this are quite obvious as the slopes of the little volcano run straight into the lake. To put that into perspective, the lake is over 200m deep in the center and roughly 8 km long and about 2km wide. One can only imagine the sight: molten red lava flowing down the sides into a steaming lake, a giant cloud of ash and smoke rising kilometres into the sky above, flashes of volcanic lightning streaking through the massive cloud illuminating the top of the mountain. Not to mention, the cacophonous bangs and explosions reverberating through the air. This is God’s kitchen and we’re walking in his mixing bowl.

We were walking with Alam when we came to the lake’s edge. Porters from another group had already started pitching camp. It would seem that sleeping on the lake is more popular than we thought or were led to believe. Alam told us where to go to swim in the hot springs, which was a 20 minute walk along the river that runs out of the lake. The baths were just as we had imagined: turquoise, milky water, flowing through steaming, yellow pools. The local people believe that if you spend a few hours bathing in these pools, it makes you younger. A swim in the hot water was definitely welcome after 10 hours of heavy trekking. There are three sets of pools, the topmost is roughly 35ºC, the next set down is about 45ºC and the last set is a scorching 55ºC. The water is warmed by the rocks from underneath and some of the pools are quite deep. The colour is attributable to the algae living in the water and the steam has a faint sulphurous smell. The swim was revitalising – to say the least – and after a few minutes I forgot about my tiredness and my aching knees, feet and back.

After spending a good deal of time swimming in the hot springs, we went back to our camp where the porters had set up 2m from the lake’s edge. Our exhaustion from the day’s events meant that we went to sleep shortly after dark. Little did we realise that sleeping next to a recently active volcano is not a peaceful exercise. The first set of rumblings were the loudest. The sounds are difficult to describe, a mixture of jet engines and thunder but on a grander scale. The ground shakes and you wake up instantly – your heart racing. I could picture our small tent getting washed away in a mini-tsunami. After what seemed like a few minutes but what was more like 20 seconds, the beast calmed, the echoes faded and everything was silent again. We were to be woken 3 more times before we got up the next day. On the last occasion, the sound was different, it sounded like a giant canon going off right next to our tent. Alam told me afterwards that he saw molten rocks (what he called lava) get thrown out that time.

The third day was to be the easiest. We left fairly early in the morning on a path that followed the shoreline of the lake. Along the way, I noticed a number of dead fish lying in the water, which are killed by an increase in water temperature. The path left the shoreline and headed straight up the crater rim. The volcano sent off a puff of smoke twice while we were on our way up. I think Ritchie’s comment, in his heavy Scottish accent was most fitting: “This place is just mental.” It was.

On the top of the crater rim we said our goodbye’s to Gunung Barujari, the summit and the crater and headed back down the gentle slopes to Senaru – our finish point. Along the way we met a few groups who had started their trek in the opposite direction. A couple of sweating Australians, on a long tea break, told me that it was particularly steep back to the bottom. Little did they know what they were in for over the next few days.

As you come down from the mountain the vegetation changes dramatically. On the summit, it is a moonscape. Ash, rocks, sand – all in varying shades of grey, red, yellow and black. The crater rim is covered in thick, hardy grasses. At the altitude of the crater lake, it becomes alpine. Go down lower and the pine trees lead to cloud forest. A cool respite from the hot sun. On some parts of the mountain, depending on the rainfall, you find savannah in this zone too. The last section is fairly dense jungle and it was here that the heavens opened on us and it poured with rain, the path in front of us became a river. When the rain finally stopped, we came out at the top of the village of Senaru. To my surprise, only a kilometer further down the path – which eventually became a road – it hadn’t rained one drop.

We ended our trek at our guesthouse where we had spent the night 3 nights earlier. Part of the package was being given transport to either the Gili Islands or to the beach resort area of Sengiggi. Margarét and I chose to go to Sengiggi as we had read that it was a good base to explore the rest of the island and also because we would find some excellent luxury hotels with big specials. Our decision was rewarded with a stay at a 4-star resort where we could recuperate after a few days of grime, toil, basic food and sleepless nights.

Looking back, I think we underestimated how difficult the trek would be. Don’t be fooled. It is a lot of walking over very steep, dangerous terrain. I wouldn’t recommend to do it with children under the age of 10. It was however, incredibly rewarding and it has been a major highlight of our trip. If you are up to the task, then I highly recommend it. Just be aware that you need to research your trekking company beforehand and come prepared. Make sure that they have good equipment – sleeping bags and tents especially. If you can, ask how many porters are to accompany your group and if the guide can speak good enough English. Our guide didn’t understand us very well and it detracted from the experience a bit. Also, bear in mind that prices for the trip can vary wildly (900,000 – 1,500 000 Rupiah per person), with some members of our group paying $50 less than others for the same thing. The money goes to the travel agent and the trekking company you use and very little goes to the porters and guides.

Take the following besides the obvious with you: shoes (we did the trek in trainers, which made the summit easier but the rest of the trek would have been better in hiking boots), a trekking pole would have been fantastic, a headlamp (forget about a flashlight – you need both your hands to scramble up the summit), a warm, windproof jacket, a good camera, some sweets (the sugar boost is welcome every once in a while) and lastly, a rain coat or poncho. Also be aware that it is unlikely that the porters and guides have a first aid kit with them, but they do all have cellphones.

The camps do have a lot of litter in them, so a great idea is to clear up as much around your camp as you can and pay your porters a little extra to carry it back down with them. This will also show them how much you respect the place and possibly encourage them to do the same.

Three steps up and one step back down. That was how my morning was going. I was woken at 2:30am. A relief really as I was struggling to sleep. It was cold and noisy in our tent, partly due to the icy wind buffeting it and partly because the sleeping bag I had been given was really thin – not to mention – smelt like an old pair of socks. I put on my shoes and popped my head outside the tent. It was even colder. This is going to be a long morning. 1100m, 3.5km and -5ºC on the summit.

We got this crazy idea after a long, uneventful ferry trip from Bali to Lombok. We had bought tickets to go to the Gili Islands in the north of Lombok, but on a whim we decided to climb Gunung (Mount) Rinjani. A trek we had very little knowledge of apart from the fact that it would take a couple of days to complete. When you want something in SE Asia from a travel agent and you have a bit of money, you can usually get it very quickly and so 3 hours later and a hellish ride through blackout stricken villages we found ourselves in the tiny trekking town of Senaru in the northern part of Lombok. Since we’d arrived at night, we had no idea how big an undertaking this would be.

Gunung Rinjani is at the center of the Indonesian island of Lombok. It is the second highest volcano in Indonesia after Kerinci volcano in Sumatra and rises to a height of 3726m. To say it dominates the landscape of the island is an understatement and it is largely responsible for the island’s weather patterns. Within the 8km wide crater is a lake called Anak Segara or Child of the Sea and a caldera called Gunung Barujari or New Finger Mountain. The lake is estimated to be around 200m deep and is at approximately 2000m above sea level. Gunung Barujari forms the active portion of the volcano and spouts steam, rock and lava every few hours during the day. Up until May 2010 the area was considered too dangerous to trek in as the eruption rate of Barujari had increased. The ‘small volcano’, as the locals call it, is slowly growing out into the lake giving it an irregular crescent shape. According to the charts in the Sembalun Trekking Centre, the volcano used to rise to over 5000m up until 10 000 years ago where serious of catastrophic explosions led to the formation of the giant crater and a drop in size. To give you an idea, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is 5895m high and it is the largest free standing mountain in the world. Gunung Rinjani in its current form is the same height as Mount Fuji in Japan.

The next morning while we were eating breakfast we got our first glimpses of the peak we would be climbing in the dark the following morning. From way down below, it didn’t look too challenging and the slope to the summit seemed average. Our first clue that we were in for a harder time than expected came from trekkers who had just returned from the mountain – a couple from Thailand. They had turned back 200m from the summit. When we passed their room, we saw muddy hiking boots outside. “Oh shit, we only have running shoes”, I said to Margarét. More trekkers arrived at the bungalows, they had the same report: it was tough, steep and they had also failed to summit. We were rather unprepared having left most of our cold-weather trekking gear back in Bali.

The briefing from the trekking company that evening described the program for the next 3 days. We would start from a village called Sembalun at an altitude of 1300m and would be hiking for around 8 hours to get to base camp one at 2600m. We would then set off at 3am for the summit which is at 3700m, return to base camp one, pack up and head down to the crater lake at 2000m for lunch, where we could enjoy some relief at the hot springs. Afterwards we would climb back on to the crater rim (2600m) on the other side to spend the night at base camp 2. The third day would involve a fairly easy stroll back down to Senaru.

At the briefing, we met our guide – Alam. A tall, wiry, chain-smoking Indonesian in his fifties, sporting a large mustache who spoke very broken English. He was responsible for 9 trekkers and 5 porters. We would later find out that this was inadequate and that Alam’s skills as a guide (according to him he had been up 500 times over 22 years) left a lot to be desired. Add to this the fact that he had just returned that day from another trek. 4 of the trekkers – Joseph, Laurence, Ariane and Elizabeth were from Canada, there was Ritchie, the mad Scotsman, his girlfriend Karlien and Felix from Germany and finally, Margarét and myself to make up the last two of the group.

The next morning we set off after breakfast in a small flatbed truck for Sembalun. A tight fit, considering there were 9 trekkers, 5 porters, the driver, tents, sleeping bags, our food for 3 days and Alam. The scenery was nothing short of spectacular. Lombok is a very beautiful island. In my opinion, it’s natural beauty even surpasses Bali. We were taken through rice paddies, onion and garlic farms and a bustling village market – all under the shadow of the towering Gunung Rinjani. The closer we got to the mountain, the larger it appeared.

The first half of day one was easy. It went through fairly flat farmland and a bit of forest, all the while the gradient gradually increasing. After lunch things changed dramatically. The once flat path had become very steep. The surrounding temperature had started to drop too. At about the halfway point, we noticed some of the porters from another group had put on jackets and beanies. The trail had jacked up to between 20 and 30 degrees in angle and the vegetation had changed completely. Near the crater rim, it was quite cold, approximately 10ºC when outside of the wind. The exertion was keeping us warm but every time we stopped to rest we could feel our sweat cool and chill us.

Finally, after 8 hours we reached base camp one. Perched on the crater rim on a flat piece of land, was our tiny tent city at 2600m. The top of the mountain was covered in thick cloud but every now and again we got glimpses of the summit. It looked impossibly high.

After a Nasi Goreng (fried rice) and a piece of chicken we settled down in our tent and tried to get a little bit of sleep before the 2:30am wake up call. My sleeping bag smelt like stale socks and was very thin. So I put all of my clothes on that I had brought with me. A pair of tights, hiking pants, a t-shirt and a fleece. It was going to be a long night – or a short one, depending on how I looked at it. The wind started picking up and our badly pitched tent was flapping quite loudly in the wind. Add to that, the heavily excited 40 Singaporean school children, staying in the camp next door and you can imagine the amount of rest we managed to get.

It was with a degree of relief that I stumbled out of my tent into the icy wind, ready to tackle the last 1100m to the top. Due to a habit I have inherited from my father, I had brought 2 headlamps along to Indonesia, these turned out to be indispensable as the others in our group were walking with flashlights.

The first part of the climb was very steep. We had to scramble up a 200m high, very loose section onto the ridge that led to the top. Once we reached this ridge, one of the girls in our group turned back with Alam as her torch had stopped working. Ariane, fresh out of medical school in Canada, asked if she could walk in front of me as her flashlight had also stopped working. So with Margarét in the front, me at the back and Ariane between us we slowly inched our way up toward the summit.

Climbing on a volcano in pitch blackness can be a very scary experience. The path of pebbles and gravel was very steep and narrow. If I shone my headlamp to either side I was greeted by a black void and the ground under my feet consisted of loose gravel, which my feet sank into with every step. I was also trying to shed enough light on the path in front of Ariane. We soon lost sight of the 3 trekkers in front of us and the rest behind us. The rough, grey path loomed up in front of us, so steep it looked like we were climbing a wall. Dim shapes briefly appeared in the inky blackness on either side. The icy wind howled, kicking up dust and ash into our eyes. What on earth were we doing here? This is nuts, stupid, just plain dangerous. Soon it was a case of 10 steps forward and then a short rest, then another 10 steps. The angle of the climb had jacked up to around 30 degrees and the ground was slushy, consisting of loose stones and ash. One of the Canadians described it afterwards as similar to walking in snow.

Panic started to creep over me. Something which I had to swallow. I didn’t want to go back down in the dark, a prospect which seemed even more dangerous than heading up. If we stopped and waited for sunrise we would freeze. The only option was to continue upwards. In some parts, we had to scramble on all fours. Our rests started to get longer and longer. We could feel the difference in altitude. The darkness was made thicker by a cloud that was moving over. My panic levels were growing by the second. Who knew how far the drop was into the crater on my right or how long I would tumble off the mountain to my left? “This is so stupid”, I could hear Ariane muttering in front me. I was cursing the mountain, my ineptitude, our stupidity for being here, it seemed like the only thing to keep me sane – a very dark moment. We passed Felix, one of the trekkers in front of us. He was on his way down. He hadn’t summited, but he said he was too cold and that he had had enough.

The cloud on the mountain had lifted and we could see the faint lights of the other 2 trekkers and the lead porter in the distance. It looked very far away. Suddenly, we saw the lights coming back down towards us and our first instinct was stop and wait. Ariane didn’t want to go any further and Margarét looked tired and cold. It took a bit of courage, but I told them we had to continue, we were so close and the group in front of us must have reached the summit. It was about 5 am and the horizon to the east was slowly starting to show a faint glimmer of light. With every step we took it got brighter. This part of the climb was the steepest and for every 3 steps that we took, we slid back one. 100 Metres from the top it became bright enough to turn our headlamps off. We could see the summit. We met the group ahead of us – Joseph, Laurenz and the porter – huddled behind a rocky outcrop, out of the wind. They were freezing. The porter was nearly stiff, he was dressed in long pink socks, flip-flops and shorts, holding a packet of cookies in one hand and a cigarette in the other and wrapped in his thin sarong. He was offering the cookies around.

The last 30 metres to the summit was fairly rudimentary and in that moment I caught a glimpse of why mountaineers do what they do. It is quite an adrenalin rush to be standing on the top of the world, exhausted and staring at the 360 degree view of the scenery around you. It was about 6am and the sun was just peaking its head over the horizon. The clouds started to give way and we got glimpses of Lombok’s neighbouring island, Sumbawa. I rattled off as many photos as my frozen, clumsy fingers would allow me. More trekkers from other groups arrived at the top and as the light started to spread over the volcano crater below, we saw the most incredible landscape appear beneath our feet. 1700 metres below, the Lake Anak Segara, hemmed in on all sides by the 600m high crater rim – the menacing 400m high cone of Gunung Barujari in the centre. It felt like I was in a chapter of The Lord of the Rings.

The descent back to camp was amazing. As the sun rose more and more, the landscape around us became clearer. We could see all the way down to the bright green Sembalun Valley and to the sea. The 1000 metre sheer drops on the other side, into the crater, were even more astounding and to say the least unnerving.

After spending some time on the top, freezing my fingers and face, we decided to start the descent back to camp. We passed numerous trekkers at various points in their ascent. Many of whom were part of the Singaporean group. The way down took us about 2.5 hours. Partly due to the fact that we stopped every 20m to take more photos and partly because we had to keep emptying our shoes of small stones and ash.

We got back into camp at around 9:30am, where we greeted by our porters with a cup of hot tea and a cold banana pancake.

In retrospect, as gruelling a climb as it was, the feeling of standing on the summit and the views of the landscape around us on the way down, blocked out the difficulties and dangers of what we had done in the darkness that same morning. Reward doesn’t come without a bit of hard work and that could never be more true than when climbing a mountain.

You can read the second part of our trek on Rinjani here.

We got back from the mountain 2 days ago, but it’s taken about that amount of time to recover. It was one of the most difficult things I think I have ever done. Partly because we had no idea how difficult it would be and partly because we didn’t have the right equipment. I haven’t had time to write a blog post about it yet, but I will put something together over the next few days.

For now, here is a bit of information about the mountain:

• It is the second highest mountain in Indonesia
• It is 3726 metres high
• The lake inside the volcano is 200 metres deep and is at 2000 metres above sea level
• In 1994 a series of eruptions led to the formation of a smaller volcano within the lake

You can read a bit more about the volcano on Wikipedia

I haven’t written about Ubud (Oobood) as yet as it’s one of those places that makes you lazy, and in a good way. 45 minutes drive from Denpasar, Bali’s largest city, it is known as the island’s cultural centre. On the approaches into central Ubud the streets are lined with hundreds of craft shops producing and selling paintings, statues, furniture and clothing. It is quite unbelievable how many crafts are practiced here and the results are quite stunning. That heavy, dark, Balinese furniture you see in fancy department stores back home probably had its origins somewhere in this area.

Most tourists come to Ubud on a day trip from the busy South of Bali. Thankfully, most of them stay in the central parts of Ubud and keep the annoying taxi drivers busy. The main streets in central Ubud are lined with glitzy restaurants and cafés and there are few bargains in the air conditioned shops too, but if you venture down a side street or alleyway, you’ll be greeted by glimpses of typical Balinese life — children playing in the streets, women preparing offerings and many third-world dogs guarding their patch of pavement. Some of the side streets lead to rice paddies, neatly arranged and meticulously looked after. The rice here is called sawah, and is grown in a few inches of water. Everywhere you go there are drains and aqueducts channeling water through the streets to the paddies.

When we first visited Ubud a few weeks ago, we stayed in central Ubud, on a charming street called Jalan Kajeng, but after two nights we couldn’t take the building noise next door and moved to the rice paddies about ten minutes walk further up the road. We had a really great room with a view over a few paddies that were busy being harvested. All the work is done manually and from what we could tell, a family of four was responsible for the paddies in front of our place. Two of them cut the bundles of rice and handed them to the other two, who beat the grains off into a basket. It is back breaking work and the family worked from about 9am in the morning until 4pm in the afternoon with few breaks in between. It took about a day to clear a field half the size of a rugby pitch. The rice grains are then put in sacks and taken off to be sun dried, before having the husks removed resulting in the rice we see on the shelves in our supermarkets. We felt quite privileged to be able to witness this process and the workers were as curious of us as we were of them. Quite often I would find them staring right back at me while they took a few minutes break.

Ubud is also the place we first got introduced to Balinese coffee, also called Kopi Bali. The coffee is very finely ground and instead of filtering it, you put a heaped teaspoon in a cup of boiling water, stir and wait for the grinds to settle. The Balinese drink it by the gallon with a lot of sugar, but we prefer it with a little bit of milk and less sweet. You also learn very quickly not to take the final sip from the cup, unless you want a mouthful of coffee grinds.

Ubud is also great for simply strolling around and checking things out. My favorite place so far, is to visit the central market early in the morning. The food section of the market is a 3 story affair with fresh meats, spices and vegetables in the basement, fruit on the ground floor and clothing on the first floor. Visiting very early in the morning meant a tourist wasn’t in sight and we got to see and photograph a lot of the local Balinese busy with their day-to-day activities. One thing that astonished me, was the ability of the women to carry giant baskets filled with watermelons, papayas and pineapples on their heads, up and down flights of stairs. The variety and quality of the produce for sale is astounding and the din generated by people buying and selling is quite an experience.

We stayed in Ubud for about five days before leaving to see the Sideman Valley and then moved on to the northeast of the island. We then returned to Ubud four days ago, and hired a quiet villa in the western parts of the area, popularly known as the yoga and hippy area. The place cost us about $40 a night and included two bedrooms and a pool. Most importantly, it is quiet and tucked away from the traffic, insistent taxi drivers and day-tripping tourists. On the way to dinner, we walk on concrete pathways through rice paddies and villas and down our little street we have a spa and an art workshop, where scores of men, six days a week, prep wooden boards for painting. The area is also popular with artists and writers that stay for up to a few years at a time.  The place is perfect for us to get some work done, before we move on to our next destination.

I can highly recommend a visit to Ubud if you ever come to Bali. It is less hot than the southern parts of Bali, and we’ve been lucky enough to have a bit of evening rain to cool things down. It is also very easy to get around — just mind the death trap drain covers — and has a fantastic mix of good food, serene natural surroundings and concentrated Balinese culture. It has definitely grown on us and we can fully understand why so many people end up coming back and staying for an extended period of time. In fact, the villa we are hiring is owned by an Australian who stays here for five months of the year.

We need to be out of our place on Monday morning, as the owner is returning. So we’re unsure where to head next. Highest on the list of possibilities is to head to the island of Java, west of Bali. Java is the home of some of the most beautiful volcanoes, the Indonesian capital of Jakarta and ancient Buddhist temple of Borobodur. It is also home to 120 of the 200 million people that inhabit Indonesia. The other option is to go east and visit the neighboring island of Lombok. We will however, be returning to Bali to housesit a friend’s place for two weeks before we leave Indonesia for Malaysia and Singapore, where we need to get our Indian visas.

Best things we’ve seen, done and eaten in Ubud:

• The central market
• Made’s Warung in Penestanan – the food is excellent, cheap and the setting is beautiful
• Watching rice harvesting in front of our guesthouse
• Barbecued duck and fish on the side of the road
• Naughty Nuri’s for grilled ribs and martinis
• Gede, our housekeeper’s banana pancake breakfasts
• The moss covered buildings, statues and temples
• Rice paddies

We changed our plans. We intended on returning the car to Padangbai and heading by shuttle back to Ubud, but instead we continued west from Amed along the coast toward the seaside resort-town of Lovina. The road most of the way was bumpy and busy with trucks carrying black, volcanic sand. You quite often see it dumped, unceremoniously halfway into the road. This causes all sorts of issues in the more densely populated areas of Bali, where traffic has to stop when it can’t fit.

The north of Bali is very poor and the little villages we passed through were very run down and shabby. Every few kilometers we crossed what looked like dry riverbeds, but turned out to be lava flows from the 1963 Gunung Agung eruption. About halfway between Amed and Singaraja we pulled into a really interesting and brightly coloured art gallery called Art Zoo, which is the home of an American painter called Symon. The art is very colourful and can be described as Andy Warhol meets Matisse. I liked his paintings of Balinese landscapes especially.

When we got to Singaraja, men on scooters starting stopping next to us at traffic lights and handing us business cards for accommodation in Lovina. Lovina is the resort area where all the tourists go to see dolphins. Since we weren’t really interested in seeing dolphins and Lovina was full of annoying touts – we even got scammed at the restaurant where we ate lunch – we headed inland as quickly as possible.

Singaraja, is really hot and dry. My guess it was about 32 degrees, but as you head 15 mins inland, the landscape changes dramatically along with the climate. The slopes of the central mountains rise quite steeply from the coast as you head south and the vegetation becomes more lush, the air was cooler and it was wet and misty. The road was a bit of a nightmare, since it was a Sunday afternoon and a lot of Balinese were on their back home, buses, scooters and cars. For a comparison, take an hour long Chapman’s Peak Drive, on a Sunday, in December and then add about 1000 scooters and you get the picture. On top of all this, the people here are a bit reckless and tend to enjoy overtaking on blind corners. The best driving tactics are to remain calm, hoot at everything you see and ignore the scooters – just like the Balinese.

Along the top of mountains toward Munduk, we caught a few glimpses of the two of Bali’s smallest lakes, Tamblingan and Buyan. These lakes used to be one until a landslide split them in two. The lakes lie in a basin which was once a volcano.

When we arrived in Munduk we pulled into the first place we saw, Lumbung Bali Cottages. They have little cottages with huge windows that overlook the valleys on either side – and most importantly, they had refreshing outdoor bathrooms with a proper shower. After haggling with the owner, we managed to get the price down from $75 to $30 a night.

Munduk is quite remote, we hardly saw any tourists. We got lost in the rice paddies and ate Martabak (fried pancakes with an egg filling) and chicken satés (chicken on a stick) from street vendors. The scenery is very beautiful and the people are, as everywhere else in Bali, very friendly. It is also a fantastic place to visit if you are tired of the busy southern parts of Bali and want somewhere cool and quiet, without a Bintang vest in sight.

After spending 2 nights in Munduk we decided to head back to Ubud to get some work done. We stopped at the botanical gardens, in Kutuh, on the way which were huge and are definitely worth visiting. The rest of the trip back was rather uneventful and we are now in Ubud, where we’ve found a comfortable private villa to stay in for the next week.

We’re leaving the sleepy north-eastern side of Bali today. It’s been really beautiful and we’ve had a lot of fun in the last week. We aren’t entirely sure where we are going next but we will probably head back to Padangbai to drop our rental car off and then head back to Ubud. We’ll decide if we want to stay in Ubud or head into the central mountains from there. I can highly recommend visiting Amed. It is quiet and beautiful and the snorkelling is amazing! We snorkelled on a Japanese shipwreck yesterday and it was as good as diving, if not better, as you we didn’t have all the heavy equipment on us.

The food here was also great and we ate a fantastic little place with an incredible view yesterday. Fresh fish and chicken is available everywhere. And by fresh, I mean you can see the chickens standing outside in baskets!

I’ve uploaded a few of my photos so far to my flickr account. You can access them with this link: Flickr pics.

Margarét is taking a little while longer – maybe you should send her an e-mail to encourage her to download the pics off of her camera.

So it’s taken a bit of time to get settled and put this blog together, but I’ve finally managed to find some time to get everything going. We’re currently in Amed, in the north-east of Bali. It’s hot and beautiful and we have a clear of view of the +3000m volcano Gunung Agung from bungalow. The view in the photo above is from a lookout point between Amed and Lipah. We are staying Three Brothers guesthouse, which is on the beach. The beaches here have black sand on them due to their proximity with the volcano.