Trying Freedom

Continuing on from the list of places to go and conscious that I only had a couple more nights in my current hotel, I’d decided that I was going to chain as many of them together into one day as possible into one big road trip which I’d worked out to be around 5 hours of driving.

I planned to leave at around 7 am but as soon as I woke up ready to go the heavens opened, again, this low season is no joke.

Giving it an hour to die down I donned my bright blue poncho and set off, the first stop was to Kintamani lookout to get a view of Mount Batur, which was suggested to me by the owner of the restaurant the night before, however, I actually ended up at Tegal Asri to try some Luwak Coffee after meeting the owner who made me jump out of my skin coming past me on my bike and clearly could see I could do with a coffee, so I followed him!

Definitely a happy coincidence though, Nyoman provided me with enough coffee and tea to keep me awake for 3 days, or at least the rest of the trip. I bought some Luwak coffee on the way out, which for those of you that don’t know is a delicacy in the coffee world, it’s made by feeding coffee beans to an animal called a Luwak, they only eat the skin of the bean and the rest cannot be digested so is then shat out. The farmers then collect it and make coffee powder from it, sounds disgusting but don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

On to Kintamani, not quite the view I was hoping for down to the weather but it was still pretty amazing. Maybe even one to try and hike in the future, a lot of companies offer a sunrise hike but not sure if I want to brave the 1 am start just yet.

Next on the list was the Handara Gate which I’m sure everyone has seen as the iconic photo people like to get for Instagram, again not my type of thing but I’m trying to embrace everything and then decide what I do and don’t like. The lesson here was I already knew I wouldn’t and should’ve stuck to it, arrived and left shortly after heading to Ulun Danu, a water temple which is just around the corner.

It was genuinely beautiful, a huge amount of people as it seemed to be a tour bus hotspot but it’s pretty big so you can still make a decent trip out of it. What I do not recommend is eating any food here, it was truly awful, but I guess I should’ve expected that considering it was a buffet and the first one I’ve seen while I’ve been here.

After that I decided to head over to my first Bali waterfall, I think I picked a good one considering the amount of tourists I’ve seen at others since. Shortly after I took this I had the place to myself for a dip which was very refreshing, although it had been raining pretty much the whole day it was nice to be on my terms for a change.

I had also planned to go to the Sekumpul waterfalls and the Jatiluwih Rice Terraces but just ran out of time in the end so I’ll have to reserve those for another day. In the end I rounded the day off by trying out my first day club, Cretya Ubud but again as with the Handara gate, not my thing.