Looking at the brightly colored and aptly-named Blue Lagoon.
Random beachside bar + infinity pool + happy hour + sunset = happy Jess.
A deserted, wild lookout point on Nusa Ceningan.
My biggest accomplishment of these days was getting Rorie to agree to try stand-up paddleboarding (aka SUP) for the first time! Though all beginners to this particular sport tend to have a lot of difficulty, Rorie was a relatively good sport, only getting slightly annoyed at me and only complaining part of the time as he managed to wash all his sunscreen off (resulting in sunburn) by falling in the water over and over again (oops). [Editor’s note: Feebly attempt go from a kneeling position to a standing position; briefly succeed, with wobbly knees like a baby giraffe; fall wildly off the board while yelling an expletive. Repeat frequently. Grumble additional expletives throughout. This was my experience for most of the day. Clearly I developed a passion for SUP over the course of the day.] By the end of our hour on the water, though, he was standing consistently and we even managed to explore a small cave I’d found nestled into the cliffs. I love SUP, having done it a handful of times over the past few years, and I’m glad he was willing to try it with me at least once! [Editor’s note: “Willing to try” = “cajoled incessantly by his lovely fiancé until he finally agreed to do it”] Other than that, we enjoyed more beautiful sunsets and water views before heading back to Bali for the city of Ubud.
Photographic proof that we were both standing on our paddleboards for at least the length of a photo!
Ubud is a city in the middle of Bali, one of the few major tourist destinations that does not revolve around beaches. It’s a mecca of yoga, vegan food, and general hippie culture, all set in a very walkable few block radius. The first major activity we scheduled was our Indonesian cooking class, which was located in a beautiful compound with a rainforest view a few kilometers from Ubud. Before we started we received a tour of the family’s temple, a gorgeous and impressive series of carved stone altars where they leave religious offerings every day. [Editor’s note: This was a surprisingly remarkable site. Our host explained that it took 3 months of 20 workers carving daily to complete the structure. Just insane. He also said that every family has a similar temple at their home, with the size and intricacy of the temple being contingent on the family’s wealth.] As for cooking, the friendly instructor (the matriarch of the wealthy family who lives in the compound) explained all the locally-grown ingredients and led us through our cooking class, including how to grind ingredients into paste using a stick as tall as I was! [Editor’s note: She also liked to call us all her “honeys,” which was amusing. The class had a lot of students and different dishes, but they were remarkably well-organized and efficient in transitioning between them such that it never felt like a problem. It was maybe the best run cooking class we’ve had thus far.] It was well-run and a lot of fun, and the food was delicious. In a nod to the eco-conscious vibe of the area, our menu included both tofu and tempeh dishes alongside chicken and fish. Successful cooking class #8!
Inside the family’s personal temple – pretty amazing.
Listening to our matriarch explaining the next steps.
Rorie working on the giant mortar and pestle. Our team’s paste was obviously better than the other team’s.
Working on one of our delicious dishes
The super cool grill for our minced chicken skewers.
Some of the fresh, beautiful ingredients we cooked with. Yum.
Despite being located inland, Bali isn’t that big, so we scheduled a day-trip to go scuba diving from the city of Tulamben in the north of the island. We did three dives in one day (an exhausting first for both of us), and all three were shore dives (where you enter from the beach instead of jumping off a boat). I like shore dives because they allow a slower and easier descent, which is good for my ear and equalizing issues. Our first dive was a wall dive alongside a natural deep drop-off, where we saw tons of fish and coral, as well as some nudibranchs (sea slugs) and other small things that interest me far more than they interest Rorie. [Editor’s note: We’re a weird diving team. She likes super inane stuff that most people don’t notice or care about while diving, while I’m super basic in that I’m exclusively drawn to large, colorful and/or exciting fish. Opposites attract?] On our second dive, we went through a field of sunken objects (people had placed them on the sea bottom on purpose to create artificial reefs), which were surprisingly awesome! There were piles of old tires covered in coral and fish life, though the highlight was the handful of stone carvings that formed an underwater “temple”. I’d had no idea this existed and I was really happy we got to go there. [Editor’s note: This was one of my favorite dives I’ve ever done. The place was just teeming with fish and it was cool to see all the different structures on the ocean floor that were covered with coral. Also, we saw a school of fish that were yellow with horizontal lines of black dots across their bodies – very beautiful! When we got back and asked our guide what they were called, we learned their exceptional name (which has now become one of Jess’s (many) nicknames): Oriental Sweetlips. Fantastic name for fish (and fiancés)!]
Rorie doing some sort of superhero pose underwater near the wall.
Our group looking at fish in the sunken tire pile.
Rorie with a sunken statue in the underwater temple
So cool to see these structures underwater!
The purpose of the trip, though, was the third dive – the Liberty Shipwreck. Normally shipwrecks are naturally in very deep water, and so usually an advanced scuba certification is needed to see them. However, the USS Liberty was a huge cargo ship that was sunk in incredibly shallow water during WWII, and in fact the shallowest section is only a few meters underwater! We knew we had to see it, since I’m not sure the next time we’ll be qualified to dive a shipwreck with our basic Open Water certification level and beginner status. The shipwreck did not disappoint. It took just a few minutes of swimming from where we entered the water before we saw the tip of it, which we followed down past the old ship’s wheel and into a huge open cavern area. It was breathtaking, as the entire thing is completely covered in marine life. I felt like I was in an aquarium with the number of fish swimming all around me. We even got to swim through a small opening before following the wreck up the other side. It was a stunning experience and was by far the best dive I’ve ever done. [Editor’s note: We can’t emphasize enough how awesome this was. Easily my favorite dive ever. The “small opening” that Jess mentioned was a door of the ship that was propped ajar. We swam through it! Unreal. Also, to my eternal disgust, there was a nearby patch of sea floor with a ton of thin, vertical items sticking up from the ground. I thought at first that it was seaweed, so not a big deal. Then I looked closer and saw that they had heads, were slithering and were going in/out of the ground – they were sea snakes. Are you [BEEPING] kidding me?!? My greatest nightmare also follows me underwater?! Uncool.]
One of our first views of the Liberty shipwreck – stunning.
Scuba selfie in a shipwreck!!
Eerie and gorgeous at the same time
Rorie swimming through the doorway
Look closely – yep, those are sea snakes! Hello.
Another amazing fish photo because you can’t end on sea snakes, right?
On our last full day in Ubud, we went to one of the main tourist attractions, the Ubud Monkey Forest. It’s pretty much what it sounds like – a beautiful forest park with stone carvings and walkways that also happens to be inhabited by tons and tons of friendly monkeys. By “friendly,” of course I mean “totally unafraid and trying to get anything you might have on you that’s shiny and/or edible,” so we’d heard plenty of stories of sunglasses, hats, water bottles, and even wallets getting stolen off of people as they walk around. [Editor’s note: In fact, while we were there we heard an English woman shrieking in panic and asking for help. We all rushed in her direction as we were worried a monkey had attacked her, only to learn that it had actually stolen her wallet (containing all of her cash/credit cards).] With all of our belongings firmly locked inside our daypack, we set off through this wildlife photographer’s (i.e. my) dream land. We declined to purchase bananas to feed the monkeys (if you hold one above your head the monkeys will jump on you to climb up and grab it – we’ve gotten rabies shots but that just seems like tempting fate), though at one point while I was sitting on a stone railing to get a picture with some carvings, several monkeys jumped up to sit right next to me without a care in the world. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, though I think Rorie wasn’t quite so entranced. He was very tolerant however and let me get as many pictures as my heart desired before we headed for the exit.
Within five seconds of entering the park we saw this monkey, which reinforced our decision to keep everything securely locked away.
A monkey surveys his next targets… aka humans.
Momma and two little babies!
This is when I picked up an already-consumed banana peel from the ground and gave it to this monkey. I don’t think he was too happy with me.
This monkey was posing perfectly with the stone monkey statue.
There was plenty more we could have done in and around Ubud, but we didn’t have time to fit it all in. We did manage to do some shopping and I even got Rorie to join me for a very warm, sweaty yoga class! (Instructor: “Do you want me to help you try a headstand?” Rorie: “Nope, I’m just gonna do child’s pose for a while.”) [Editor’s note: For those who are unfamiliar with yoga terms, child’s pose is basically the laziest thing you can do. It’s my favorite move. Don’t judge my life. Also, note that my participation in this yoga was for a similar reason as for SUP which was described above. Recurring theme?] After a full few days, we headed to the airport for our last and most death-defying stop in Indonesia: Flores and Komodo National Park, home of the Komodo dragons!
Bonus pictures:
More monkeys sitting on statues.
In our scuba gear between dives
Looking at one edge of the shipwreck, with more divers on the lower right. Those are all fish!
The offerings that locals leave on every doorstep and entranceway every single day. We learned that these offerings are for the spirits.
