Bali
My flight landed in Denpasar, Bali’s capital, late afternoon on Wednesday (April 1st).
First things first, the airport in Denpasar is really quite nice.
Near Denapsar, Kuta and Seminyak (among others), on the west coast of the island, are the most popular, crowded, beachy, surfer, partier destinations, which I avoided on the trip altogether for interest of time in other areas. There’s no way anyone could have seen all of Bali in 5 days anyways. Stop #1 was the more mellow coastal town of Sanur.
Sanur (+Tulamben)
Sanur is on Bali’s southeast coast, resorty, and very low-key, especially during early April since it’s the low season for Bali tourism. Took a cab from the Denpasar airport to Sanur’s Big Pineapple Hostel (which took our cab driver forever to find). The hostel cost virtually $4 USD a night for a bed and a shower. It was dark by the time we reached Sanur. After grabbing some quick Nasi Goreng (fried rice) from a small Warung (store), we wandered around to bar with live music. The Balinese band hit some classics: Sultans of Swing, Take it Easy, Your Body is a Wonderland, It’s My Life. The band even busted out The Doobie Brother’s “Listen to the Music” upon request.
Day 1 in Sanur was sunny, humid, and beautiful.
We were picked up from our hostel at 7am to go on a snorkeling adventure. Sruti got scuba certified in Singapore earlier in the semester, so she was going to go for a dive while the rest of us snorkeled. At the dive shop, I mentioned that I’d been diving before in Florida and the shop was very happy to let me pay the extra fare to go diving. So I did!
The site was Tulamben, the location of the USAT Liberty shipwreck. Tulamben was a 2 hour trip from Sanur and at the northern coast of Bali (totally worth the travel distance). Just off of the shore, the wreck is completely covered in beautiful coral and a plethora of colorful sea creatures. Sruti & I borrowed Bridget’s GoPro, so hopefully we’ll have some nice underwater pics soon.
Just so you can get a sense of the dive, here’s a great YouTube video of the site. Plus, “Breathing Underwater” by Metric is a pretty solid soundtrack (saw Metric two summers ago in Baltimore when they toured this song).
We made it back to Sanur in time to snag a photo near our hostel of the sunset from the beach that pointed somewhat toward the west.
The moon was full that night and we had a beach-side restaurant all to ourselves.
It’s hard to beat eating a fancy dinner as the only group at a resort for $8.
Day 2 in Sanur was beach day until 2:30pm and then a trip to the village of Toya Bungkah.
Beaches of Bali.
Stopped by the closest Warung again to get another quick bite before our 2:30 departure.
We set out to Toya Bungkah as the night stay for our sunrise hike of volcanic Mt. Batur.
Toya Bungkah
In transit to Toya Bungkah, we had a few great stops.
I’m not going to say the Lewak Coffee was the best thing I’ve ever had, but it was definitely a distinct cup of coffee. The beans ferment in the Lewak’s stomach with other fruits that it’s eaten to produce the world’s most expensive cup of coffee (?). It wasn’t comparable to Vietnam, but along with the ginger tea, lemon tea, ginseng tea, vanilla coffee, coconut coffee, et al. I was pretty satisfied.
Continued to drive to the village. I snapped this shot and thought the focus was interesting enough to post.
The scenery was outstanding.
I took a video of some of the drive:
Behold. Mt. Batur.
Upon arriving in Toya Bungkah, we were greeted by the most incredible guesthouse and the nicest people who ran the place. Again, because it was low season, we were the only tourists in the village.
The one resort-like hot springs area was completely vacant except for maybe one other family.
After a brief nap:
Mt. Batur
Alarm went off at 3:00am. We hustled our hiking stuff together and set out on an incredible journey to the 1.7km peak of Mt. Batur. Initially, I would have loved to do Mt. Agung, Bali’s tallest peak (3km), but it was closed. Batur was so fantastic though, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
A killer breakfast of passionfruit, mangostein, bread, tea, and a volcanic steam vent cooked egg.
We hiked around the rim for a while.
Some nice temples on the way back down.
After we finished our Batur hike, we slept in the car ride downhill to the town of Ubud.
Ubud
Market by day.
Balinese dance by night. The fire dance, Kecak, was an acted out story of the Hindu avatar Rama, his banishment to the forest, and folly of Sita, his wife. Coincidentally, Sruti had explained to me the entire story the night before coming to Ubud — just because I was curious about Hinduism. The Balinese are primarily Hindu, which was something Sruti fell in love with.
The second part of the dance:
I was exhausted from the hike, so after the dance, I went straight to bed.
Solo Trip
I spent the next day doing a “solo” guided trip to some of Bali’s more notable sites. I felt that until this point I hadn’t seen enough of what Bali had to offer, so I packed as much as I could into one day. I woke up on Sunday morning, grabbed a quick meal, and set out in a van with a Spaniard who lives in Taiwan, his Taiwanese girlfriend (?), a Mexican marine biologist, and a well-traveled Swiss man. We made 6 stops that day: another coffee bean plantation, a monkey temple, another rice paddy, a family temple, Bedugul, and Tanah Lot.
The Monkey Temple, Sangeh
The Family Temple, Taman Ayun
Jatiluwih Rice Terrace
Our driver stopped at this 120,000 rupiah lunch buffet that was filled entirely with caucasians (his commission stop). The five of us in the van called out the tourist trap and demanded we keep going and not stop. Our driver did not respond well to our request and he was quite grumpy for the rest of the trip. At one point during the car ride, I was speaking in Mandarin with the Taiwanese girl, the Spaniard and Mexican men were speaking in Spanish, and the Swiss guy kept to himself (though he spoke French and German of course) as we all trash-talked our driver’s rudeness.
Bedugul
The most iconic temple in Bali.
Tanah Lot
The last stop of my day trip was the highlight. Tanah Lot is a temple situated on a small, west coast, island-cliff with one of the most beautiful sunsets and surrounding volcanic and coral beach.
My DSLR ran out of battery just as the sun was beginning to set, but I did take out my phone and Instagram it. Truly only as a last measure, I swear.
Just as the sun set, probably 10,000 or so bats, flew out of the Tanah Lot cave into the night sky. Incredible.
Back in Ubud
After my long day, I returned back to Ubud, met up with my friends, ate dinner, and rested up for my early flight. My feelings of Ubud aren’t the fondest, unfortunately, despite the incredible praise the town sees from tourists. Ubud is hip, like Tiong Bahru in Singapore or Ekkamai in Bangkok, but it’s also incredibly fake. The hip, yoga, carpe diem, lulu lemon, namaste, Rastafarian craze that has swept many people in large cities in the US, surges through Bali like none other. I mean no offense — I have no problem with people doing yoga, living in the moment, or buying dreamcatchers. Those things are all fantastic and incredible cultural modes of expression, but too far is too far in Ubud. Ubud is run by tourism all centralized around exploiting the peculiar interest in what I see as an over-exaggerated lifestyle. Here is a direct quote of how I described Ubud to one of my friends in a Facebook conversation:
like all these white people eating in a restaurant pretending to be “living in the moment” eating their $10 nasi goreng and drinking a mojito sitting crosslegged on some crazy colorful cushion bench and then you walk outside and there’s a balinese woman lying on the street cradling her starving infant, begging for money
That picture I painted for my friend I saw at least 10 times when I was in Ubud. I only saw so many beggars in Ubud compared to the rest of Bali. It’s painful to see, and as Rachel pointed out, so many tourists in Ubud can act rich because the area’s poor and they have the chance to abuse the system.
I don’t want to leave this post on a bad note, so here, have another couple of pictures.
Cheers.
