Ubud, Bali, Indonesia (29 March)

We both woke up at 6am as we had gone to bed so early. We looked into some hikes we could do and one suggested route was Sayan Valley and it was recommended to buy a Bali Pathfinders map for trails to hike and cycle. We had breakfast at 8am when it started and went to find where we could buy the map. We asked a few taxi drivers how much they would charge to take us to Sayan and they were quoting between 80,000 and 100,000 rupees. You can hire your own scooter for 50,000 for the day so we headed back to the hotel and hired one – they gave us a nice pink one! Ha ha

We bought a map and headed out to Sayan, driving in Ubud is a lot different to Nusa Lembongan island – it is crazy and really busy. When we arrived we had a look at the map to see where the path started and the map was useless – it didn’t tell us a thing. Luckily a guy called Babong walked past and asked if we needed help, we said we wanted to walk the Sayan Valley and he landed up taking us around on a 2 hour hike of the most beautiful lush, dense jungle and rice paddies. We landed up going through a few people’s properties and even his own property and met his father. Shame he was so sweet. The walk was amazing. We saw people white rive rafting down the river which looked like great fun. Once we got back to our bike we gave Babong some money for his time and headed off to try find Tegallalang – an area with big rice paddy’s.

We found Tegallalan town no problem but didn’t know how to get to the rice paddy’s so we took a random right turn and landed up driving down the most beautiful road. It was so green and lush with the road lined with palm trees in some parts. It was great fun to drive up and down the hills but the poor bike barely made it up a couple of hills carrying both Pete and I! We found some rice paddy’s which were stunning. We got a bit lost but finally popped out onto the main road of Tegallalan. The town is really cute with loads of shops selling hand crafted goods lining the main road.

It was only 2pm decided to drive to Goa Gajah (Elephant Caves). It only took about 20 minutes to get there. They give you sarongs to wear as you go through the entrance so that was a first for Pete :). The caves themselves aren’t great, it is more like a dug up archaeological temple with some water features. We wandered around and kind a path that led down to a beautiful garden. We found another path and decided to follow it – we landed up at another temple where we were blessed by this crazy but very sweet religious guy. We did a little ritual with him and he poured holy water on us and sent us on our way down another path. This lead to a very overgrown path that we weren’t sure we should be on. We then bumped into a local girl called Annie who said the Buddha temple was at the bottom of the gorge and she guided us own. The path was quite hairy in places answer had to cross a rickety old bamboo bridge that was very scary!

The Buddha temple was in a cave under some rocks – it was very plain but very peaceful. There were also other temples but they were half submerged in water as it is just coming out of rainy season so we couldn’t go in. The view from the bottom of the gorge was stunning, very overgrown and lush and made me feel like I was in the middle of the jungle somewhere wild.

We left Goa Gajah around 4pm and headed back to the hotel, we didn’t realise our road was a one-way so we couldn’t turn down it and landed up doing a big detour down a very bumpy dirt road but we amazingly popped out across the road from our hotel! We were so hot so jumped straight in the pool when we got back.

Later we found a great little restaurant for dinner – we are loving the local food, it is so fresh and healthy and they add chilies to most dishes :). After dinner with a belly full of food we headed back to the hotel for an early night again! (must be getting old!)