After 1.5 months of fairly rigorous (but very rewarding!) travel through Myanmar and India, we needed a break. Additionally, despite spending almost 6 months in Asia, we had only spent roughly 2 weeks of that time at the beach – an amount of time that Jess wasn’t a big fan of (not that I can blame her at all for feeling this way). Therefore, we decided to take a vacation within our vacation by enjoying a leisurely period of time in Bali, which is effectively the Hawaii of Southeast Asia.
Ahhh…we were greeted on our first evening in Bali with this view.
Our first stop in Bali was at a beach area known as Canggu, which is a kind of hipster and boutique-y area that is less of a party zone than other parts of Bali. While there we did…very little, which was absolutely delightful. We spent 4 days largely hanging out at the beach, wandering around stores or laying by the pool, just soaking in the sun and the ease of a largely western existence. Jess went out and around the area more than me, mostly due to my exceptional laziness and in part due to the fact that my toe was still swollen/discolored/achy after its violent confrontation with some furniture in Mumbai. [Editor’s note: Between his toe and another cold that struck Rorie, I was pretty much left to my own devices to wander the streets and beaches of Canggu. They were very pretty, though the beaches were better suited for surfing than swimming, so I mostly just watched the surfers from the sand.]
One more sunset photo because, come on.
The original plan following our time in Canggu was for me and Jess to have another episode of his/her time by having us both go to the nearby island of Nusa Lembongan, but for her to go to a yoga retreat for a 5-6 days while I’d go to a different yoga/surf retreat. Jess stuck with this plan but, in light of my toe injury, I aborted my plans and instead just decided to spend some downtime on the island doing my own thing.
[Editor’s note: What follows is our separate accounts of our time on the island – in the next post, we’ll continue our island relaxation together and then head back to mainland Bali for some more activities in Ubud!]
Yoga Retreat on Nusa Lembongan (by Jess)
I booked a package with a yoga studio on the island that included accommodation, yoga twice a day, and a few extras like a snorkeling trip and a massage. I had a private bungalow next to the pool, with the yoga studio just steps from the back gate of the hotel. Not too shabby! It wasn’t a “retreat” so much as a set of activities, so I had a lot of downtime during the day between the morning and evening yoga classes. Luckily, on my first day I met another girl, Brynn, from Australia who was also doing the package, so we became friends and ended up hanging out a lot on the island with Simon, one of the yoga instructors, as well.
At Serenity Yoga, the location for my time on the island.
Not a bad place to do yoga every day, right?
Flowers greeting us one day for yoga class.
Though I didn’t have a motorbike of my own, I was able to ride with Simon and along with Brynn, we managed to explore a bit of the island to find different places to eat, watch the sunset, and relax. One of the evenings, Rorie came and joined us for dinner – it was a strange interruption to our “his and hers time,” but nice to have Rorie meet my new friends. I also rented a bicycle one day and pedaled to an awesome beach bar with hammocks and swings in a nearby mangrove forest one day, and another day I rented a paddleboard for a couple of hours, so between the pool and all those adventures, the days went by pretty quickly.
The view from a pathway connecting a bunch of bars and restaurants and beaches on Nusa Lembongan.
The massage was wonderful (Balinese massages include oil and aromatherapy), but the real highlight of the package besides the yoga itself was the day of snorkeling! It started inauspiciously, as a man on a motorbike pulled up to our hotel and when we confirmed that Brynn and I were ready to go, indicated that we should both hop on the back of his motorbike behind him. While unsure about the safety of this endeavor, we placed our trust in him and hung on for dear life as we zoomed into town, where he unceremoniously dropped us off at the beach and zoomed off again to pick up some other people. After sitting on the beach for a while, other pairs of tourists would show up with slightly windblown hair and anxious looks on their faces until our whole group was assembled. But then, once we got to the boat and started snorkeling, it all worked out! We went to three snorkeling spots – at the first two, we were in shallow, calm water with fish and coral just a few feet below us, which was really nice if not spectacular. The third spot, though, was Manta Bay.
Some pretty coral from my snorkeling trip.
As we headed to Manta Bay on the boat, the waves were much higher, the water much darker and deeper, and the area was lined with rocky cliffs not too far off – we all looked at each other with a bit of apprehension, like “we’re going to jump into that?” However, as we pulled up next to a few other boats, the drivers excitedly yelled to each other in Balinese, pointing into the water around us. Our driver started shouting “manta rays! Go, go, jump in!” so I threw on my fins and mask and hopped over the side into the waves. At first I couldn’t see anything, but soon, out of the murky water, enormous manta rays started swimming directly at, under, and around me. It took me by surprise and I yelped underwater a few times, not gonna lie! It soon became clear that the mantas (I’m not sure how many, but probably at least 6-10) were slowly looping around and taking laps through the exact area that we were snorkeling. Two or three would make a slow pass by, then a minute or two later others would loop through as well. While I know they aren’t dangerous to humans, and they clearly did not care whatsoever that we were there, it was still a little scary – these things are big and a lot more graceful and mobile in the water than I am! It was an incredible experience, even more so because I wasn’t really expecting much from a random morning of snorkeling at a yoga retreat. It ended up as one of the top wildlife encounter experiences in my whole life, and I didn’t want to get out of the water.
Me swimming with manta rays – how many can you count? I see at least three in this photo.
A huge manta with sunlight patterns on its back.
A snorkeler on the surface as a manta swims just beneath.
This is me picking up my fins in surprise because I looked down and this manta was almost running into me!
One afternoon, I’d heard from the family that runs the hotel that there was some sort of big ceremony on the island. It turns out that the Balinese have some big religious ceremony or performance basically all the time, but I was excited about the chance to see a little of the local culture! I headed to the biggest temple in town and was able to watch over the wall from the outside as a huge local ceremony started. Every person was wearing the same thing – white and yellow traditional outfits – and every family had brought elaborate offerings of fruit and food on ornate banana-leaf offering plates. There was music and a dance performance, and I loved watching and trying to figure out what I could, since the only talking was in Balinese. I wondered at first if it was ok for me to take pictures, but then I noticed that tons of the locals in the crowd had their own cellphones out, taking photos, videos, and scrolling through facebook, so I figured I was probably fine. At one point, everyone sat down while a few elders came around and flicked (presumably holy or blessed) water onto everyone. There were so many people there that the crowd didn’t all fit inside the temple grounds, so dozens of people out on the streets just sat down facing the temple and waited patiently for the elders to come outside and scatter the water on them too, stopping traffic completely for a while until that portion of the ceremony was over. All in all, a very cool thing to witness.
Locals in their traditional clothes seated in the courtyard of the temple.
Women prepare for a dance performance at the temple.
Colorful offerings on the table during the ceremony.
This dude is pretty awesome.
Overflowing onto the street outside during the ceremony
After my retreat ended, Rorie picked me up on his motorbike and, with all my stuff (big backpack on my back, holding on to Rorie who is wearing my day pack on his front), we headed to his hotel to continue our island time together.
Relaxation and Scuba Diving on Nusa Lembongan (by Rorie)
First order of business was to book a beachside room for myself to just relax and enjoy the beautiful island, which I partially succeeded at. On the one hand, I ended up with a super cheap ($14/night) room with its own porch and views of the ocean. It was beautiful! On the other hand, it was located in front of a local temple where, for 14 hours a day, they alternated between blaring ceremonies from the loudspeakers and having musicians rehearse for future religious ceremonies (fun fact: they REALLY love steelpan drums in Indonesia). By the end of my second night of this temple noise, I legitimately thought I was going to lose my mind and was beginning to hear the sounds even when they weren’t there. I was definitely in a dark place. To deal with this, I harassed the owner of the hotel and demanded my money back for the remainder of my booking so I could relocate elsewhere that was quieter. [Editor’s note: While Rorie is great at dealing with a lot of life’s little struggles, he is very noise sensitive and so this scenario is pretty much the worst thing that could have possibly happened with the accommodation. For my sake, I’m pretty glad I wasn’t here for all this. For his own sake, I’m glad he moved to a quieter place!]
Sunset from the beach-front hotel. Almost perfect, except for that temple noise!
The plan was for Jess to spend some time with me on the island once she finished her retreat and she really wanted to be near a good swimming beach, so after extensive research I decided to have my next room be at Mushroom Beach – reputed to be the best one on the island. To accomplish this, I rented a motorbike ($4.50/day – great deal!) and rode while wearing both of my backpacks to the other side of the island to book a room, which ended up being fantastic – walking distance to the beach, super cheap, really pretty/nice and quite quiet. Victory! From this spot I was able to spend the next few days just relaxing on the island, riding my motorbike around to various spots and catching up on sleep. No complaints in the slightest.
The one activity I did while apart from Jess was to go scuba diving at Manta Bay, which was supposed to be a phenomenal place to see manta rays located off of nearby Nusa Penida island. I knew Jess had gone snorkeling there as part of her yoga retreat and had manta rays practically swimming all over her, so I was stoked at the prospect of seeing even more of them (being able to go further underwater means seeing more manta rays, right?). I arranged to scuba dive with a nearby island and was stoked to finally dive at Manta Bay…except there were no manta rays there. What the heck? We saw a single manta from afar, but that’s it – otherwise it was just some (admittedly) beautiful fish and coral. Ironically, a guy snorkeling with our group saw a bunch of mantas at the surface, with them again swimming all over him. Such crap! We were cursed as scuba divers, I guess. We went to another dive site where we saw a sea turtle swimming from afar, but otherwise it was uneventful. Overall it was a nice experience, but luck just wasn’t on our side. However, given that I saw a whale shark on my third scuba dive back in Thailand (most people have to wait hundreds of dives to do so), I’m still in no position to complain.
Scuba selfie!
Dive buddy and coral and fish galore
No mantas, but good nonetheless.
