M&C: Munduk

When we landed in Bali, there was a pretty good flood of tourists queueing to get through immigration, and it took substantially longer than any entrance we'd had so far. It was already kind of late, and we had one night booked at a cheap resorty hotel in Sanur, about half an hour from the airport. We ate an actually quite bad meal at an overpriced tourist restaurant before calling it a night.

The next morning, Michelle had signed up for an aerial circus open gym at a place nearby. She got to warm up with the group, do some strength training, and play around on the lyra for a while, leaving her incredibly sore afterwards. That afternoon, we caught a taxi from our hotel about two hours up into the mountains to a small town called Munduk, where we had booked three nights at a kind of glamping, yoga-retreat-y place a little ways outside of the town itself.

The drive up was absolutely stunning, and we passed through several incredibly cute villages filled with beautiful Balinese Hindu temples as well as tall decorative bamboo poles called penjor. At one point, we passed a procession of at least 100 people preparing for the celebrations surrounding the upcoming silent day, Nyepi, that marks the Balinese new year. As we climbed higher into the mountains, we were treated to some spectacular views with dramatic combinations of mountains, jungle, lakes, mist, fog, billowy clouds, and patchy sunshine.

Our accommodation, Ekommunity Farmstay, turned out to be just as gorgeous as advertised. Tucked onto a steep hillside of lush jungle, it consisted of about half a dozen large tents scattered among beautifully landscaped paths and natural foliage. There was also a large roofed, open-sided space that served as reception, restaurant, and common area. Our tent was simple but quite comfortable and looked out across a steep-sided valley, often with tendrils of cloud drifting down it at about our eye level.

We had planned on spending our three days doing a lot of chilling, so rather than try to squeeze in an activity that afternoon, we just decamped to the common area, ordered some food, and had a great evening playing cards, chatting, and watching the colors change around us with the sunset.

The following morning, we got a slow start. Michelle was incredibly sore from her aerial activities, and after lunch, we walked down to the bottom of the valley and did some stretching on a little purpose-built platform right by a small river. There was a trail running along the river that we had been told ran about 7 kilometers before reaching Munduk proper. It had been raining off and on, but we had waterproof bags for our phones and decided to try the hike.

Once again, everything was just as gorgeous as promised. Despite being pretty small, the stream transmuted every so often into gigantic waterfalls cascading some 50 feet or more. At over 3500 feet above sea level, the air temperature remained very pleasant through the whole day, but still warm enough that we didn't get too chilly after getting rain-drenched a couple times. Some of the trail overlapped with a network of narrow, paved roads that provided access to rural villages and little businesses along the route. At one point, we stopped at a small coffee shop to peruse the selection of little souvenirs, enjoy a hot beverage, and wait out a particularly long downpour.

After hiking at a very leisurely pace for a few hours with frequent pauses to shelter from the rain, it was starting to get towards dusk. We didn't have a terrific map, just a photo of a hand-drawn one from one of the coffee shops we'd passed. Eventually, after a nearly thousand-foot descent, we reached the fourth and final waterfall on the map. It indicated that there was a trail just beyond this waterfall that led directly to the town. All we could find, however, was an overgrown and disused-looking path that didn't really resemble any of the trails we'd followed that day so far. But since the only other option was to turn and climb the thousand feet back the way we came, we decided to trust it. We switched back and forth up the side of the valley as the sun spectacularly set until we eventually arrived at a small road marked on Google Maps (just a single-lane paved track). It was now fully dark, but at least we knew we were on the right path. We followed this for another 20 minutes and made it to town, soaking wet from sweat and rain.

We had a nice meal at a restaurant overlooking the darkened valley on the opposite side of the ridge. Cacophonous music and singing floated up from an unseen temple off in the distance somewhere, and our waitress said that it was more preparations for the new year celebration. After our meal, we walked around a little until we found two guys who were willing to take us back up to our accommodation on their motorbikes.

The following morning, we rented a motorbike for ourselves, hoping to head in the opposite direction from town, where there was a spectacular ridge overlooking a couple of lakes. Once again, it was raining fitfully, but we only wanted to go about 15 minutes up the road, so we decided to set off anyways. We'd only been going for about 2 minutes when it started absolutely pouring. Within a minute, we were both soaking wet (phones were protected once again, though), and we pulled over to a little shelter to try to wait it out. 15 or 20 minutes went by, and we decided to abort our mission and turn back for a restaurant we had passed earlier. There was a very slight let-up in the intensity of the rain, and we made a break for it, scooting about five minutes back the way we came.

We arrived at the restaurant just drenched to the skin, and the people there kindly gave us towels to dry off with and even a blanket to keep warm. The food itself was so-so, but the meal was made much more interesting by the sweeping views as well as the ongoing torrential rain, the hardest we'd seen yet, just absolutely pounding down for over an hour. Finally, there was another small let-up, and we seized the opportunity to leap onto the scooter and very carefully drive the last five minutes to our place. We took a much-needed hot shower, did some emergency mopping-up where water had seeped into our tent, and parked ourselves in the common area for the rest of the evening.

Learning our lesson from the previous day, we set out on the scooter relatively early the following morning to try to avoid the afternoon showers. We drove along the ridge, enjoying the beautiful sunshine and views, before descending sharply to a medium-sized town located near one of the lakes. This town is home to the Ulun Danu Temple, a place of particular holiness for Balinese Hindus as well as a major tourist attraction. We paid our surprisingly steep admission and were actually a bit disappointed to find that the bulk of the area had been landscaped into treeless green grass and the temples themselves were small and off-limits to visitors. But also we were there in the glaring midday sun, and we've since read that the temples are most famous for their atmospheric sunrises and sunsets. We did still get some nice photos of some of the structures with the lake in the background, though.

Before heading back to our lodgings, we had a bit of an adventure in finding an ATM that involved Chandler accidentally taking a one-way motorway to the next town over and having to wind through the hills to return, not to mention the two ATMs that didn't work at all, before we finally got enough cash out and scooted back, just beating the first of the afternoon rain. We had arranged for a driver to take us back down to the coast where we'd be catching a boat to Nusa Ceningan, our next (and, it turned out, final) stop.