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Enjoying the beauty of Bali

Our third stop for five nights was a Banyan Tree resort in the little village of Buahan, north of the city of Ubud by maybe 30 minutes. This was very much a rain forest kind of experience, way up in the hills of Bali. Very isolated and definitely putting the “rain” in rain forest.

There wasn’t a lot to do in Buahan so we didn’t do a lot. Not even a gym here, the only one of the six resorts we’ll be visiting without a gym. That’s not to say we couldn’t get exercise. Late one morning we walked down to a waterfall. It was a long way down on steep and rough-cut stairs but surprisingly even longer coming back up – it really wiped me out. And I did a few long walks along the road into the countryside that, notwithstanding a few rogue dogs, were pretty pleasant.

Mark and Jim down at the water falls. It was beautiful but the hike back up was intense.

The highlight here was the food. The place is sufficiently remote that the room rate included both breakfast and dinner; there were no realistic options for dinner besides the resort. And while sometimes we can get bored with the same resort menu this one was pretty spectacular: every night a different menu that was almost Michelin-star worthy. To top it off, we learned that the menu is on a four-day cycle but we were staying five nights. So the chef made us a special meal on the fifth night, just so we wouldn’t have to repeat anything. That was really over-the-top service!

Dinner at the resort. The portions were small but there were multiple courses all amazing. I assure you we never went hungry.

A lot of the produce served here was grown on site. Here Tanti is giving me a tour of some of the garden. She would keep pulling one leaf after another, explaining how they used it both in cooking and for medicine. I was enchanted!

The other food highlight was a restaurant called Begawan Biji, maybe 20 or 25 minutes south of the resort. It’s actually much closer to Mandapa, our last stop, and we’d gone there for lunch once and LOVED it. The restaurant is surrounded by its own gardens and most of what they serve is very local and very fresh. So off we went for a return lunch and it was just as good the second time. Definitely a keeper!

Lunch at Begawan Biji. The food, the view, the company, the weather – it was perfection.

One of the things we started to notice years ago was that the higher up the “food chain” you go in terms of resort quality, the less likely you are to meet and get to know interesting people. We’re seeing that in spades on this trip: three stops, 17 nights in and we have literally not had a single conversation with anyone except staff. It’s all just very private and discreet with enormous amounts of private space. Which is great in many ways, but we enjoy meeting other travelers, too.

Thus our stop in Buahan was decidedly low key. A lot of reading, a bit of hiking and walking, a couple lunch excursions, some of the best resort meals ever and a lot of rain. On and off, on and off, day after day. Not really complaining – I guess you can’t expect a rain forest without rain, right?

Early morning view over the valley and our private pool

The rooms in Buahan were all individual cabins, all built without exterior walls so you just blended in with nature. When it rained you could get under the roof and at night there were mosquito nets but during the day it was seamless indoor-outdoor living.

The public pool. Since all of the cabins had private pools, this didn’t get a lot of use. After breakfast sometimes we’d go sit there to read, but sooner rather than later – typically sooner – it would start raining and we’d head to shelter. And you can see in the pool here, it was raining.

A view from our room

The birds liked our (heated) pool too

Another lunch excursion, this one to Jihwa at the Akohara resort. Good food and nice setting, but to be honest no Begawan Biji…

Jim at Jihwa

Another view from our lunch perch at Begawan Biji

A banana plantation on one of my walks out of the resort

Rice fields on my walk

Three times while I was walking outside the resort I’d see these groups of school kids out marching … somewhere

In this picture I was headed down to the waterfall but turned around for the picture. By the time I was coming back up I was way sweatier than this!

This was the walk down to our room

And Mark enjoying the pool

The pool at Mandapa resort near Ubud, overlooking rice paddies, jungle, and river

There are places in the world that impress you the first time you visit them. Then there are places that keep drawing you back because they make you feel something very special. Bali is one of those places for us.

What we love most about Bali is its extraordinary natural beauty. The island is impossibly green. There are towering palms, rivers cutting through deep jungle, volcanic mountains that seem to appear out of nowhere, and rice terraces sculpted into hillsides that look more like works of art than farms.

The path through rice paddies to get from the pool to our room

Got a hair cut!

Our view of the river from lunch. This may well be the same river where we first tried white water rafting 30 years ago.

But the beauty isn’t just natural. The Balinese have an almost remarkable devotion to beauty itself. Every morning, tiny offerings of flowers appear outside homes, shops, temples, and restaurants. Shrines are draped with fresh cloth. Gates are carved with astonishing detail. Even ordinary places seem to have been designed with an eye toward grace.

We’re not remotely spiritual people, but it’s impossible not to notice the spirituality here. It isn’t tucked away inside churches or reserved for holidays. It seems woven into everyday life. The island has an atmosphere that suggests the sacred and the ordinary comfortably coexist. I once heard that the Balinese are the only people in the world who believe the afterlife is very much like the place they live now.

One thing that surprised us this trip was the weather. We’ve always visited Bali during our own winter, when it’s also Bali’s rainy season. It’s always very hot and humid, which is okay because we are escaping winter at home and we enjoy cooling off by a nice pool. But here we are in July, during the dry season, and the climate is perfection. Days have been in the 70s and low 80s with little humidity. Even more of a tropical paradise.

When you move from place to place things looks rather chaotic. It’s a relatively small island — about twice the size of Rhode Island — but home to well over four million people, making it one of the most densely populated islands in Indonesia. Drive almost anywhere and you’ll find yourself inching along narrow roads packed with scooters, cars, delivery trucks, and an endless procession of little shops, workshops, cafés, and roadside businesses. There are stretches where it feels like one long, endless town.

Then, almost without warning, you turn down a side road.

Suddenly the traffic disappears. The noise fades. You’re surrounded by towering bamboo, ancient banyan trees, emerald rice paddies, rushing rivers, and temples that seem to emerge naturally from the landscape. Every village seems to have several temples. Every valley seems more beautiful than the last. It’s astonishing how quickly Bali can transform from chaotic to serene.

Bali is also home to innumerable wonderful places to stay. From stylish boutiques to ultra high-end resorts, the choices are almost daunting. We decided to divide our stay into 6 stays of 5 or 6 nights each, giving us half a dozen experiences in hotels and parts of the island with very different personalities. After our initial stay in quiet Eastern Bali, we’ve now moved to our first stop in the Ubud area, the physical center and spiritual heart of the island.

Jim crosses the rice paddy

A heavenly lunch overlooking the river

One day we walked 10 minutes down the chaotic Main Street to a neighboring resort for lunch

And quickly stepped into yet another stunning and peaceful landscape

Walking past one of the ubiquitous temples after lunch

Can’t stop taking pictures of this landscape

Another day we walked to a lunch place overlooking this beautiful spot. We ordered a bottle of rosé but were quite surprised when the lovely waitress tried to serve it. She kept struggling to twist the top off the bottle, until Jim explained that it required a corkscrew.

The temple on the grounds of our resort

The pool in our room after a quick afternoon rain storm rushed in. The river rushes by just below the pool, and we frequently hear the excited shouts of the rafters going past.

The resort has a special beauty under the sudden rain storm

Crossing the rice paddy

The entrance to our room

We really love Bali

Donning pink shirt and pink-striped socks, and I’m ready to settle into the beach cabana that was to be our home most days at Amankila

We first came to Bali in 1996, 30 years ago. We loved it then and it’s a place we love coming back to. A Buddhist island in the world’s largest Moslem country – and the fourth largest country in the world after India, China, and the U.S. – it’s an island of incredible beauty, happy people, great tourist infrastructure, and often amazing food. We’re spending four-plus weeks on the island with six stops, all in beautiful resorts. It should be an extremely relaxing journey.

First, though, we had to get out of New York City. We’d waited until after the Fourth of July semiquincentennial celebrations, forgetting back when we were planning the trip that Trump would of course totally screw up what should have been a unifying national celebration. And on top of that on July 1, the day we normally leave for our summer vacation, the weather turned brutally hot in the city – a couple days with temperatures over 100 degrees. Definitely could have missed that.

Finally on the evening of of July 5th we set out on an 18-and-a-half hour flight to Singapore, the longest flight in the world, before connecting to Bali. Not so fast, though: a big thunderstorm stranded us on the tarmac for something like two-and-a-half hours, not exactly what you’re looking forward to when waiting to set off on the longest flight in the world. The delay, of course, meant that we would miss our connecting flight, further delaying our arrival in Bali. And as though that weren’t enough when we finally got to Bali my suitcase didn’t. Ugh. Not a great start.

View of the beach area from half-way down the hill. There were three pools above us and the one down there, plus of course the beach. Altogether 292 steps from our room to the beach, but they had buggies if you were lazy.

From there though things got way better. First stop for six nights was Amankila, part of the Aman chain on the east coast of the island. It is perhaps the premier hotel/resort chain in the world and we were pretty excited to stay there. And once my bag arrived the next morning we were set.

The resort was every bit as beautiful as we could have hoped, with service that was nearly perfect. It was all set on a steep hill above the Lombok Strait (Lombok being a neighboring island that we visited in 2014) with a variety of pools and a very private beach. Our days consisted of an early breakfast, then down to the beach where individual cabanas provided all the privacy and comfort you could dream of. A couple hours of lounging and reading, then off to the gym for some exercise before lunch. Afternoon was more reading and napping, then dinner. Not a tough regimen to fall into.

Our beach faced the Lombok Strait. At one point during our stay I was confused whether Bali was in the Pacific or Indian Ocean. Turns out the north coast faces the Pacific while the southern part of the island faces the Indian Ocean. And the Lombok Strait is one of the main passageways to exchange water between the two oceans. On top of that, the Strait is remarkably deep, making it a great resting place for these container ships waiting for their next assignment.

There was one off-resort excursion, dinner in a nearby town at Vincent’s, a jazz club that got pretty good reviews. It was definitely cheaper than eating at the resort but the food wasn’t that good while the music and ambience weren’t any better. So we stayed on the resort for the rest of the visit. Fortunately there were three restaurants available so we didn’t really get too bored with our options.

One thing that I found remarkable was that, oddly, we had almost no jet lag. I mean, Bali is 12 hours ahead of New York so you just can’t get further away. Yet by the second day I was sleeping until 5:30 or even 6:00 AM which is just about ideal. So we’ve settled in pretty well here. (Note about that 12-hour time difference. I’m writing this the night after Trump’s stupid, lying speech about election security. I wanted to know when it started so I asked ChatGPT. It said that the speech was set to start at 9:00 PM EDT, so in Bali that would be 9:00 AM Saturday. Umm, no, 9:00 PM on Thursday in DC is 9:00 AM on FRIDAY in Bali, not Saturday. Important lesson about trusting AI!)

The view from our typical lunch restaurant on the beach. I’m not sure I’d ever obsessed about the evolutionary genius of these palm trees, unbelievably tall yet remarkably stable even in heavy winds. How can something that long and thin hold up?

From here we had towards Ubud, the heart and cultural center of the island. Very different from the beach vibe here but, based on our earlier visits, someplace we’re pretty excited about.

Mark with a bowl of gazpacho and glass of rosé for lunch

The view from our private pool across the Strait

More resort beauty

One afternoon on the beach I watched these guys hauling a big old stump through the water heading … somewhere

But then they had to bring it ashore. Turns out floating it was a LOT easier than dragging it across the beach. I mean, that’s how they moved heavy things in medieval Europe!

Reading at low-ish tide

And settling in for for my morning read

Mark liked these piggies decorating the lunch restaurant

And finally, when we think of Bali the most remarkable thing is that the Balinese take beauty very seriously. Here you will see they even decorate the urinals with frangipani flowers. That is taking beauty seriously.