Bali–Part 2

Day 5: Pemuteran Beach

Kristen at Pemuteran beach

We wanted a beach day.  We had assumed the hotel was beachfront, or at least had beach access, but it did not, so we really wanted to spend some time in the sand.

Now, we’re not really beach people.  We normally get bored after an hour or two.  But Pemuteran has one major draw – they are building a coral reef.  Dynamite fishing has destroyed lots of reefs in the area, so Pemuteran is trying an experiment in rebuilding.  They put several metal mesh structures underwater, and lightly charge them with electricity, which apparently stimulates coral growth.  We were a bit wary that the man-made reefs would be kind of lame, but we were pleasantly surprised.  There were good, interesting corals, and a good amount of cool fish to see.  We snorkled two parts of the reef, and easily filled the day.

One other interesting thing about Pemuteran, and the Northwest corner of Bali, is how dry and pleasant it is.  The mountains surrounding our hotel looked a lot like the San Gabriel mountains around LA.  We were pretty struck by how low the humidity was.  Bali really works as a tropical paradise, versus say a place in the Carribean – the weather in Bali is really, really nice (between 65-85 every day, not very humid). 

Day 6: Tulamben

Kristen watching the sunset in Tulamben

Tulamben sunset

Next stop was Tulamben, a beach town on the East side of Bali.  It’s a straight shot from Pemuteran to Tulamben on the coast road, ringing about a quarter of the circumference of the island.  It was easy going, and we made good time, arriving in Tulamben before noon.

Tulamben is known again for its diving.  Every hotel in town has a dive center attached.  The main attraction is a wreck just off the coast.  During WWII, a Japanese torpedo took out a US Navy cargo ship close by.  The wreck was towed to the coast of Bali so its contents could be unloaded.  After sitting on the beach for years, they decided to drag it a couple hundred meters off the shore, and now it is an amazing place for SCUBA.

We put on our snorkel gear that afternoon and headed to check it out.  You can snorkel out and see a big section of the stern, starting maybe no more than 10ft below the surface.  It was really, really cool.  We saw all sorts of cool sea life living in and around the wreck.  Coral had taken over parts of the hull, and we saw stingrays and sea snakes and all sorts of other cool fish like giant puffers.  One interesting feature was that the schools of fish were not at all perturbed by snorkelers and divers.  I would free dive down and swim through entire schools of fish, and they would barely move out of the way.

That night, we decided to have dinner by the beach and watch the sunset.  It was a nice day.  We went to bed at 8:00.

Day 6/7: Mt. Agung

The early sunrise from the rim of Mt. Agung.  Mt. Rinjani on Lombok in the distance.

Agung again, maybe 5 minutes later.  The light was changing so quickly.

Kristen on Agung at dawn.

Agung casting a shadow over the land on the way down.

We went to bed at 8:00 because at midnight we were getting picked up and driven to a temple at the base of Mt. Agung.  We planned to hike to the summit of the tallest volcano on Bali, with a peak elevation of just over 10,000ft.  Agung is the spiritual center of Bali.  The temples on the land are all laid out directionally from Agung.

The best way to hike to the crater rim is at night.  You have to go with a guide, and our hotel (Liberty Dive Resort in Tulamben) arranged transport and a guide for us.  We met the guide at the base, and we started the hike at around 2am.  There were probably 20 or 30 other people hiking with guides as well, mostly young foreigners.  Some were wearing t-shirts and shorts.  Guess who was shivering in the pre-dawn at 10,000ft.

They pace the hike to the slowest person.  It’s about a 3,000ft gain, up a steep and unrelenting slope.  The guides all set a very slow pace so that everyone would make it up for the sunrise. The hike was probably doable in 2 hours, but it took us 3 with a few mandatory stops along the way.  The lower part of the trail begins in jungle, then proceeds up a steep slope of loose dirt and rock as the trees thin, and finishes up on a bare lava flow covered in compressed ash.  Of course, we knew none of this because we were hiking up at night.  It was honestly pretty sketchy – there was some fairly exposed rock scrambling required, and it was unclear if there were cliffs on either side of us in the pre-dawn darkness.  Kristen was pretty spooked by the whole thing.  Again the Devil’s bargain – if you want to see the sunrise on Agung, you have to endure the super sketchy trail in the dark.

At the summit, the guide prepared us a breakfast of instant coffee, bars, and bananas goring (fried bananas).  It was a welcome treat after the hike up.

As the sun started coming up, the view was just incredible.  We could see the sky turning colors, and Mt. Rinjani, the highest volcano on neighboring Lombok island appeared in the distance.  It was really magical, and totally worth the ordeal on the way up.  I took tons of pictures, because every minute it seemed like the view was new and different.  Eventually it was bright enough to see into the crater below, and we saw we were on the edge of probably a 500ft sheer drop off.  Yikes, but oh so gorgeous.

The way down start out well enough – in the light, the going was much easier, and we made good time down the lava flow.  We saw that there were no cliffs and only minor danger.  And even better – Agung was casting its shadow across the entire land because of shallow sun angle at dawn.  I’d never seen anything like that before.

As with all hikes, the last hour or two was monotonous drudgery.  Our knees were hurting because of the constant descent, and we were going fairly slow because the loose dirt and rocks were so slippery.

Though, the landscape again was wild and totally unexpected.  There were pine trees interspersed with banana trees.  Dry climate, cool-weather plants and trees next to tropical trees.  So strange and interesting.

Finally we made it to the temple at the base, and said our thank-yous to our guide.

Day 7: zonked out in Tulamben

The grounds at Liberty Dive Resort

Kristen getting ready to snorkel after the hike

We planned day 7 as a chill day after the hike.  Kristen was feeling fine after the hike, but I had a headache, probably on account of the altitude (I have become more sensitive as I have gotten older).  Coffee helped, as did a massage ($10 for an hour!).  We went for a quick snorkel, but the visibility wasn’t great.  So we mostly hung out by the pool, and I did some work.

Dinner could not have come soon enough, and we were again asleep by 8:30.

Day 8: Ubud again

Us at Pura Lempuyang

The gates of Pura Lempuyang with Mt. Agung in the distance

Warrior dance at the Gunung Sari legong performance

The Barong!  A crowd pleaser for sure, about to fight with a Sea Witch

Day 8 was our last full day in Bali.  Originally we had planned to drive from Tulamben to Kuta, just to see the insanity (and also because Kuta is right by the airport).  But we decided we absolutely did not care about the tourist beach.  We cancelled our Kuta hotel reservation, and booked another night at Villa Sabandari in Ubud, so we could get some real coffee and go see another legong.

On the way to Ubud, we stopped at Pura Lempuyang.  Lempuyang is an important temple in Bali, one of the aforementioned directional temples.  It also probably the most beautiful temple in Bali, with the side benefit that it is so remote it sees almost no tourists.  We had until this point made no real effort to visit temples.  We had driven by and wandered by several, but apparently visiting the famous temples in Bali is a disaster – touts, scams, fake guides, hordes of people, the works.  So when we read about Lempuyang, we were set.  And it was all it was promised to be.  We had great views of Mt. Agung, which we had summited 28 hours before, and more or less had the complex to ourselves.

Lempuyang is actually comprised of 7 temples, and has 1,700 stairs leading to the top (with more views of Agung).  After our hike, our knees were still achy, and we were in no place to do the trek.  So we settled for the first temple, a modest climb up from the street, which also happens to be the most picturesque.

Once we arrived in Ubud, we went for a walk in town.  We had lunch at Warung Enak, which was by far the best food we had in Bali.  See, Indonesia isn’t really known for its food.  They mostly just fry things – rice, noodles, bananas, etc.  Every warung across the land serves more or less the same menu.  So Warung Enak was a real treat – Indonesian food done by a proper chef.  It was incredible.

The legong performances were somewhat limited on account of the Hindu holiday, but we found a famous and respected group called Gunung Sari would be playing that night, so we bought tickets in advance.  The show was great – just as good as the original we had seen a week before at ARMA.  They played Kristen’s favorite gamelan piece, the Oleg, and they even did the Barong.  In Bali Hinduism, the Barong is a good spirit who lives in the forest and wards off evil spirits.  It’s the classical image you see on all sorts of Balinese stuff – the monster mask.  We were glad to have seen it.

Afterward, we went back to Warung Enak for dinner.  It’s that good.

I am so, so glad we went back to Ubud instead of Kuta.

Day 9: off (and Kuta)

Kristen and I had a gap in our flights on our last day, so after I checked in, Kristen went off to spend a few hours in Kuta just to see how awful it was.  Apparently it’s just as bad as we thought.  Yes, the beach is very pretty, but everything surrounding it is a disaster.  She left after like an hour or two – she would rather sit in the airport than on Kuta beach.

Bonus videos of driving in Bali

Driving in Bali #1

Driving in Bali #2 - Narrow Road

Driving in Bali #3

Bali–Part 1

Kristen and I spent a week in Bali.  I’ve been in Hong Kong/China for work for the past 3 months, so it seemed like a great time to travel to a place we’ve always wanted to visit.

This entry is going to be a tome.  We experienced a lot in Bali, both good an bad, and I’m writing this soon after the trip, without the benefit of memory blocking out the bad.

Day 1: arrival and travel to Ubud

First, I’ll lay out a couple of things about this trip.  Bali is most famous for its beaches in the South, namely Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak.  We did not plan to go to any of these beaches.  Apparently they are a complete disaster, and we heard only awful things.  In fact, I believe Australia has a TV show called “Tourists Behaving Badly” or something that is based in Kuta.  These areas are basically the Myrtle Beach of Southeast Asia – a bunch of people trying to sell junk to sunburned drunk people in an uncomfortable setting near the beach, plus a Hard Rock Café.  I guess they have good surfing, though.

Anyway, we decided instead to venture further afield.  We rented a car.  Bali is a former colony, and they drive on the opposite side of the road, so I was excited to get the change to learn to drive like that.  We had intended to rent a manual transmission car, but apparently that vehicle was broken down, so instead we got an automatic.  I didn’t know it at the time, but thank god for that.

The drive from the airport to Ubud (about a 1-2 hour drive) was harrowing to say the least.  Driving on the other side of the road is fine, getting used to the location of the turn signal and mirrors is fine.  But I was unprepared for the lack of spatial awareness.  I had no idea how much room I had on the left, or how close I could comfortably be to the center line of the road without smacking into something.  This is fine if you’re in a place with good roads, but Bali is The Land That Infrastructure Forgot.  The roads are insanely narrow in many places – in fact sometimes one car has to pull off the road to let oncoming traffic by, and the rules of the road are insanely foreign.  There are probably 10 motorbikes (scooters really) to every car, mostly carrying entire families including babies, people just walk out into the street, and cars just go wherever they want.  Plus it was night time for that first drive.  Kristen was yelling at me that I was going to smash the car into the trees at the side of the road, and I was yelling at her that I had to keep to the side to avoid nailing oncoming traffic.  We arrived with nerves completely frayed, regretting our decision to rent the car.

Good thing the hotel – Villa Sabandari – was amazing!

Day 2: Ubud

Us by the pool at Vila Sabandari

Rice paddies up on Campuhan Ridge

Ubud is the “cultural center” of Bali.  They have performances of local music and theater every night, and the best museums and arts scene in Bali.  It’s a somewhat quaint place, a collection of villages really, but with good restaurants and transportation.  It’s in the center of the country, away from the beach, so the town and surrounding rice paddies are the main attraction.

Ubud is also one of the settings in the book Eat, Pray, Love.  Which means the streets are full of Western women wearing weird pants and Namaste shirts.  You can see the counter-culture vein in the town – the best restaurant in town is called Locavore, they have yoga classes advertised all over, and there are many tattoo parlors (yoga hipsters love tattoos).

On the docket for the day was to wake up early and walk up Campuhan ridge.  The ridge has a nice brick path leading right from the edge of town, through some nice open-air art galleries, and on up to some terraced rice fields.  It was a very nice walk.

Afterward, we puttered around town, checking out some of the local shops, before heading back to the hotel for a dip in the pool and a shower before dinner.

Dinner was quick and easy, at a warung (small restaurant shop) by the hotel.

Afterward, we went to a legong show at ARMA, the largest museum in town.  Legong is a form of Balinese performance dance, often telling a story.  The movements are quite flowy, supplemented by subtle finger and toe wiggles, plus eye movements to convey the story.  The dancers are complemented by a gamelan orchestra.  Kristen played in a gamelan called Galak Tika at MIT (one of the few gamelan in the U.S.).  When I first heard gamelan, I hated it – it sounds like a cacophony of noise to the western ear.  But I have come to really love it over the past several years.

The gamelan shows were frankly a major part of the reason we came to Bali at all.  I did a ton of research to find the best gamelan orchestras in town, so Kristen would see the masters at work.  The Arma group is known as the Peliatan Masters, and masters they were.  I was totally enthralled by the performance.  The players in the orchestra were clearly having a great time, and the dancers were super engaging.  Sometimes, when the dance was synced up with the music, it was unclear who was leading whom.  Kristen confirmed that the gamelan was top notch as well.

This show at ARMA was one of my favorite parts of the trip.

Day 3: Ubud to Pemuteran

The Jatiluwih rice terraces

Jatiluwih again

Day 3 was mostly a travel day.  It was also the day I learned to drive in Bali.

The plan was to drive from Ubud to Pemuteran.  The trip would take us up through the center of Bali, to the North Coast, and then to the far Northwestern tip of the island, within sight of Java.  People said the drive would take 4 hours or so.

After a bit of a late start (we wandered back into town that morning to get some coffee from Anomali, the best shop in Bali), we began the drive.  I had planned a stop at the Jatiluwih rice terraces.  These are the terraced rice paddies you see in pictures.  It’s a UNESCO world heritage sight, and well, well off the beaten path.  We got lost twice going there.  The final approach road was a narrow disaster you can barely even call a road.  But once we arrived, wow.  The terraces are unbelievable – a vast complex built onto the slope of a volcano.  We hiked down and into a terrace, and then had some babi guling (suckling pig) at a local warung.

The rest of the drive should have been beautiful, but it was pretty horrendous.  Narrow windy mountain roads, suspicions of getting lost (we learned the limitations of the Garmin), traffic, and several near-misses.  We wondered many times why we were even going to Pemuteran.  We both had doubts that I had done a good job planning the trip.

Oh, and also, people were burning trash everywhere.  This is again a symptom of Bali’s struggle with infrastructure.  People buy stuff, or use stuff, and there is not really any place to put the trash.  So they either litter (many temples, public places, and roads are strewn with litter), throw it in a heap on a hillside (we saw many garbage heaps), or simply burn it.  It seemed to be a daily ritual to burn trash at every house in every village we traveled through.  I’ve seen it blamed on culture – the Balinese historically ate out of banana leaves which could be discarded easily – but what we saw is far more extensive than that.

We finally arrived about 5pm, giving us a total travel time of about 7 hours, and were totally exhausted from the drive, though I felt like I was getting the hang of the language of the roads by the end of the trip – when to pass, when to pull off, when to honk, how to turn into traffic, normal traveling speeds, etc.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant and went to bed early.

Day 4: Menjangan Island

The boat to Menjangan Island

Selfie in the boat to Menjangan

Kristen on the boat from Menjangan after snorkeling

We awoke that morning to the sound of roosters calling at around 5am.  Apparently there is a chicken farm right next to the hotel.  The plan for the day was to go snorkel at Menjangan island.

Menjangan island is the main draw of the Pemuteran area.  It is an island in a nature preserve that is about a 30 minute boat ride from town, and it borders the only national park on Bali.  Menjangan is known for its massive coral reef system – probably the best in Bali.  It is quite remote, so the island doesn’t get very crowded.

Kristen and I “learned” to snorkel in Belize in January, so we already have all the gear.  We also learned to ID tropical reef fish, many of which were also present in Menjangan.  It was good that we were experienced, because the tour set up by the hotel was sort of a mess.  The guides didn’t speak English, and it was unclear what was going on the whole time.  There was no briefing, no buddy system, and no fish ID help or anything.  Some people were standing on the coral and breaking off chunks.  It was horrifying to watch.  It was not clear if we were supposed to snorkel near our guide, or even who our guide was.  So Kristen and I kind of did our own thing.

Luckily, Menjangan island is incredible.  None of the disorganization mattered.  The reef was absolutely jammed full of coral of all different colors and types we hadn’t seen in Belize.  Some of the fish were the same, and we were excited that we could ID some of them.  But there were some new ones, and way larger ones than we had seen in Belize.  We did two snorkels, and had a fantastic time.

Afterward, we went back to the hotel and went for a swim in the pool.

As we reflected on the past few days, we realized a pattern had emerged – Bali is a bit of a Devil’s bargain.  There are truly amazing things to do and see, but they mostly require some degree of horror or hassle to do and see them.