Indonesia

We woke up to another beautiful morning as we headed down to try and see the Red Coral and Labuhan Kebo waterfalls. Despite it being 7am, we were spotted by who we later found out to be the ‘ticket lady’ from her house, who then raced us down to the ticket booth…she knew a short cut! We didn’t realize you had to pay so hadn’t brought any money with us! They charge for everything here 💰

After attempting to interpret questions about where we are staying/names etc she let us through, but said we must pay the staff at our villa. The Red Coral was worth a visit in the end, but after 3 wrong turns we wended up in Munduk village instead of at the Labuhan Kebo waterfall! We decided to head back and spend an hour relaxing before we had to pack up, but to do that we had to walk past the ticket ladies house! On the approach we kept quiet and tiptoed our way up the stairs trying to keep a low profile, but then BOOM 💥 there she was…waiting. There was lots of uncomfortable eye contact and more questions that we could barely understand. We assured he we would pay the villa staff but she for sure didn’t trust us!

With the waterfall payed for…or so we think 🤷🏼‍♀️ we met our driver at 11am to take us to Songan. Sadly the nice weather didn’t last as we had a day of rain ahead of us! A good chance to make the most of the ponchos nonetheless. On route we stopped at a restaurant for lunch which turned out to be the most expensive place we had been to! It was an all you can eat buffet made up of 90% meat dishes which wasn’t ideal for us newly found vegetarians after Sams 💩 disaster. I ended up with a plate of fried rice and noodles and decided to try every sauce that was available. This turned out to be a terrible idea as the spice level was through the roof 🔥 I shoveled down the green beans in hope of some relief only to become the new fire breathing dragon on the block covered in sweat 😅 Learning from my mistake Sam decided to go for the meat after saying a short prayer to the poo gods 🙏🏻

We checked into our next place and it was safe to say it was FREEZING! The temperature here was definitely different to the south of the island. The room however was spotless and the host Edi was amazing. We had a swim in the natural hot spring from the volcano and wondered around the local area to get our bearings. At one point we spotted to most humongous NEST of spiders 🕷 From then on, everywhere we looked there was more! With a bit of research it turns out that this town is known for being infested with these spiders, supposedly harmless 😱

After recovering from the spider trauma we had a cheap dinner from the supermarket…pots noodles and eggs and seasoning for Sam - sounds strange but is a fairly standard Sam meal. Early night in preparation for our sunrise Mount Batur trek in the morning 🌄もっと詳しく