Exploring Bali – Ubud & Lake Batur

I’ve been in Bali for just less than a week and I’m already completely in love with the place. It’s beautiful, hot, the people are completely relaxed and lovely, the food is delicious, and everything is super cheap – what’s not to love?!

We’ve been staying in Kuta so far, which has a lush beach but is a bit of a party town and isn’t especially overflowing with culture. Ubud, further north, was already on my must-see list for Bali, so we decided to take a trip further afield to see more of the island.

After chatting over a tasty and very cheap omelette with Lisa (she’s Indonesian so I’m not entirely convinced that’s her actual name) who helps run Pub Bagus on Popies Lane 2, we agreed to sign up for her one day tour, which cost 600,000 rupiah (about £35) for the car and driver.

This was supposed to take us to see a traditional Balinese dance, a gold/silver smith, a hindu temple, wood carving, the active volcano Batur and Batur Lake, and rice paddies in Ubud.

However, the traffic in Bali is absolutely awful, especially across Denpasar, and it quickly became clear that we were never going to fit all this in. But we went along to the dance, which I highly recommend, as it was surprisingly hilarious! It was more like a play and had a lot of Chinese style dragon costume dancing, but before I knew it an evil spirit had turned into a wild boar and had his willy chopped off! The one we saw will set you back 100,000 rupiah each.

After that we decided to just head straight to Lake Batur in the north, where we enjoyed a rather expensive Indonesian buffet. When I say expensive, it was 130,000 rupiah each so only actually cost me about £7, but as most meals are less than 40,000 it felt like a sting haha! You could pile your plate high with the likes of satay chicken and deep-fried banana fritters, though, and it was the view of the volcano and lake that you paid for really – which was incredible and completely worth it.

We then headed back to the centre of Bali to Ubud, which was by far the highlight of the day. I even loved driving around the little roads that were either lined with restaurants and market shops or rice paddies and palm trees.

But the rice terraces at Tegalalang (main pic) were on another level completely! The Balinese have farmed their rice fields into the hills into a valley and it’s just incredibly beautiful. It really made me realise I was in Asia seeing all the locals in their weaved, pointy hats working away in the pools of rice, with each level draining water down to the next one via intricate pipe systems. It was so, so much fun wandering and clambering about the terraces and the place was so beautiful I could have stayed there all day! Although climbing back up them in the heat and humidity was pretty strenuous – I was pretty devastated when I dropped my water bottle into a swampy pool of rice!

As we’d missed off a lot what our tour was supposed to be, we decided to swap that for a visit to the nearby Monkey Forest, which was also in Ubud. This is exactly what it says on the tin – a forest absolutely teaming with monkeys! The forest itself is beautiful, with massively tall, tropical trees and temples dotted around. But the main attraction, of course, is the cheeky monkeys! You can buy a bunch of bananas and the ladies on the stall will then take a picture as you hold the banana and have a monkey jump on your head! The clever little things will wait a few seconds for you to have your photo taken and then grab the banana and run off with it. Or they’ll try to eat the hairclip in your hair as was my experience! They’re not tame though, they just do what they need to get fed, so you can’t touch them or make eye contact with them. But it was a fantastic experience wandering around and having baby monkeys take bananas out of our hands – one cheeky guy even ran up my body onto my head and rummaged into my bag to steal the banana! Absolutely hilarious :)

It’s well worth a visit for just 40,0000 rupiah each (about £2.50) – but if you’re on a budget take your own bananas as they’ll charge you the same again for a bag of those.