Back in August, I took a spontaneous weekend trip to Bali, Indonesia. Looking back, it was a period where I felt crazy unstable – both at work and in my personal life, and hence spent an ungodly amount of time surfing budget airline websites looking for cheap getaways. Usually, I didn’t even care about where I was going – I just wanted out, the travel planning can come later. It was like this that I bought myself tickets to Bali, not knowing where in the island I would go. In the end, I ended up at a small mountain village called Munduk, at the north tip of the island, and as far away from a beach as you can possibly get. Talk about the irony.
I had an absolutely disastrous experience at Denpasar Airport. It took more than two hours to clear immigration courtesy of the Friday tourist rush, and I subsequently got conned into paying an exorbitant amount of money to reach Munduk. The journey took about four hours through one lane mountain roads, and to make matters worse, when I reached, all I could see was darkness. There was hardly a town! Being too tired to think much else, I collapsed into sleep in a windowless guesthouse.
BUT….at 7am the next morning, this stunning backdrop of sunlit mountains greeted my half-awake senses. I walked out onto the patio and saw endless plantations of clove and coffee, flanked by swaying coconut trees.
Munk is known for trekking, especially the DIY-friendly routes around the village. The friendly guesthouse owner passed me a hand-drawn map of the surroundings. “You walk along the small road behind the guesthouse, descend into the plantations. There are some rice terraces there. Then turn right and after 3km, there is a water fall.”
Ok, not the most clear instructions, but time is the only thing I have in abundance here. What’s there to be afraid of?
This was the small road behind the guesthouse.
About an hour later, I reached the beautifully illuminated rice terraces. This view alone was worth the entire trip.
Wandering on from the rice terraces, it was another two hours before I realised I had been lost for a while. There was no waterfall in sight, and with the harsh midday sun beating down, it was no longer pleasant to trek the hilly mountain roads.
Being unable to read a map to save my own life, another hour passed in hopeless wandering. By this time I was starving and hopelessly lost. That’s when I met this man.
He didn’t speak English, and I clearly can’t communicate in Balinese. He took a long, searching look at my sweat-soaked hair and empty water bottle, and headed down a muddy path, beckoning me to follow. Uh-oh, he was taking me through the jungle. Do I trust him?! Realising I had no choice, what followed was one of the most difficult treks of my life. We waded through rivers, tip-toed along the fragile muddy edges of rice terraces, cut through thorny branches, and voila – a ROAD!
There onward, I successfully found the waterfall. 🙂
I would highly recommend Munduk as a destination for trekking enthusiasts and introverts. It is a fantastic place to spend a few days if you are sick of the city and could use some time to be alone with the mountains. It is also where I saw the most beuatiful starry night sky of 2013.
Ending off with my favourite thing about Bali – the thrice-daily offerings to the gods ubiquitous to every family, shop, restaurant, and house. They consist of flowers, tiny rice cakes, and even cigarettes! A joy to witness and photograph.
Musings of a Leaf 