A Brief Trip to Bali

Ah, Bali. Where to start? An island that in so many ways displays the worst that travelling has to offer. “It’s an Aussie Magaluf!” exclaimed a friend as I stuffed my board shorts and camera into my backpack once more.

The truth was, despite all that you hear of the bad side of Bali, I couldn’t help but be excited. Sure, I’ve been told that if you go diving you’ll see more plastic bottles than you will tropical fish. And yes, I’ve also heard that the locals you encounter will have little to offer you except magic mushrooms. However, despite my penchant for the path less travelled, I have always reasoned with the snobby backpackers, the ones that turn their noses up at the first whiff of Thailand, these places are popular for a reason. The travel agents, the lads on tour, the 18 year olds that are basically just there to get fucked up, they mar the place somewhat, but you’ve just got to learn to look past it.

Landing in South East Asia never fails to catch me off guard. The taxi rank at the airport, a baptism of fire. After fourteen hours on a plane the last thing you want to do is haggle with a sleazy taxi driver determined to rip you off. After a half-hearted negotiation and a typically life threatening taxi ride, we arrived.

Kuta. Bali’s main beachside town. Loud. Crass. Full of sunburnt Aussie’s wearing Bintang tank-tops. I was to only spend a couple of days here, the weather was fabulous, the surf was ok, the beaches a bit too busy for me. Kuta is what you’d expect, roadsides lined with street vendors selling amazing food and knock off football shirts. Places like these are what you make of them, if you want a bit of a party, a few beers on the beach, it’s a good laugh, but really you could be in any touristy beachside town from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur.

I did what I always do in South East Asia, hire a mopped. Time to head inland. Ubud. Now, this is the type of place I came for. Ubud sits right in the centre of Bali. It’s a town in a rainforest, still inundated with backpackers, but more character and charm than the beach towns. Normally on my first day in a new place, I do all the “must-do” touristy things, so we visited the sacred monkey forest, and it was pretty cool. Monkeys climbing everywhere, in a rather beautiful setting. But the next morning is what I was looking forward to most. The fabled sunrise hike up Mount Batur. There are two main sunrise climbs you can do in Bali, Batur and Agung. I wanted to do Agung, it was bigger and more epic, you climb through the night. But Mount Agung is a volcano and it was on a high eruption warning so they’d closed the trails to tourists. We awoke at 3am and began a scrambled ascent for several hours in the dark. I was jittery with excitement. Climbing it in the cold and the dark just makes it that much more mysterious, you don’t have much of a sense of what the view will be like at the top because you’ve not seen anything on the way up. A couple of photos below show the view from the top, I tried to catch a time lapse of it for you, but I accidentally just videoed the whole thing, and I thought a 36 minute video of a sun slowly rising isn’t quite what the people want. The clouds formed a funky wave pattern for us which was cool. One thing the darkness had masked though was the sheer amount of people on the climb, as far down the mountain as I could see people were queueing up. Across the valley sat Agung, unclimbed and enticingly free of people. Steamed poured out of the top, it seems the seismologists were right. The climb down offered some incredible views. Descending I befriended a backpacker from France. Hugo was telling me about a waterfall he’d found the previous day with some Indonesians. “Its right in the centre of Ubud!” he implored “Except no one seems to know its there!” Later on in the day we visited it, and he wasn’t wrong, less than two minutes on a moped from Ubud’s main street is a calming little brook, with a pretty impressive waterfall. I was shattered today following my early rise, and more than happy to lounge around a waterfall.

My favourite place in Bali however was undoubtedly Uluwatu. A funny looking peninsula that stretches south of the island. Uluwatu is a haven for surfers. Padang Padang beach is well known, but even better, just west of the famous Uluwatu temple is the the creaky, cavernous Uluwatu beach. We clambered down a staircase carved out of the cliff, past a scratched up surfer with a broken surfboard. He looked like a hsark attack victim. Uluwatu is a famous reef break, which means it offers consistently good waves but in scarily shallow waters, it’s one for the thrill seekers with a screw loose if you ask me. Riding six foot monsters only inches above a viciously sharp coral reef (see first picture). If you do make it to this beach, I’d recommend making it to the top of the cliff for to watch the sunset from Single Fin bar, the sunsets over an ocean littered with surfers, spectacular. By sheer luck we caught wind of a reggae festival that was happening a few miles away. We spent the rest of the evening sat on beanbags around barrels listening to a Balinese band play Bob Marley tunes, not bad, huh?

Our last stop was the tiny island of Gili Trawangan just off the coast of Lombok. Famous for it’s idyllic beaches, it has very much become a party island, its the largest of three small islands, but it’s so small I circumnavigated it on a bicycle in just forty minutes — a necessity given that there is no cars or roads on the island! If you’re ever on Gili T, get yourself to the Trawangan Night Market, a street vendor food market on the beach front, a sensational assortment of local food often cooked infront of you, I ate from a fishermen who had his colourful catch laid out on ice, you picked which fish you want and he barbecued it infront of you, immense. Gili T was great fun, beach parties, turtles swimming in the ocean just metres of the beach, beautiful snorkelling, but for the endless bleached coral of course. Every local on the island seems to be either a drug dealer or a peasant farmer.

I love Bali, it is fun, and it is beautiful. It in many ways shows the best that backpacking in Asia has to offer, the beaches, the coral reefs, jungles, mountains, rice paddies and as much nasi gorang as you could possibly hope for. But its hard to get over the way tourism is decimating the island, all the coral is dead, plastic bottles, fishing nets and band aids litter the oceans. My favourite moment of the whole trip was when a friend and I mounted our mopeds and took off into the countryside, weaving through the rice paddies and the small traditional villages. Quiet, peace, no one trying to sell my fake weed or knock of sunglasses, away from the bachelor parties and even further from the tank tops. Bali has a lot to offer, but it’s very much an advert for the necessity of sustainable tourism.

Happy travels,

OH x