Kate and I booked ourselves a holidventure in Indonesia to see a thing or two as part of our trip to Nusa Lembongan for our good friends, Ice and Ryan's, wedding. We flew into Bali Denpasar and from there visited destinations in the following order:
- Sanur
- Nusa Penida
- Nusa Lembongan
- Nusa Ceningan
- Denpansar
Arrival:
We had arranged for our accommodation to provide airport pickup. It felt like a bit of a luxury that we wouldn't normally opt for, but for 200,000 Rupiah (about $15USD) for a 30 minute transfer when arriving late, we thought we would save ourselves the hassle. It was a good decision. Upon arrival there is a mass of confusion with hundreds of drivers looking for their pickup (as it seems to be the go to thing to do) and quite a lot of monkey business. Our friends we were meeting up with in Bali opted for drivers at the airport, most were overcharged and one was charged double what she was told she would be paying before the driver opened the door to let her out. Please make arrangements in advance!
Sanur:
We were staying at a nicely located hotel called '
Sanur House' which is in good walking distance of some of the best restaurants (i.e. Lilla Pantai) and bars (i.e. Casablanca) as well as the main strip along the beach which again features more of the same as well as a great pampering option of '
The Nest'. We experienced all of those examples mentioned during our stay, notably taking advantage of the latter's 'Lost in Paradise' 4+ hours Spa experience 900,000 Rupiah ($64 USD) per person. Not my usual thing personally, and it required us to book 24 hours in advance with help from our friend Eef who lives locally, but my god was it worth it! It consisted of a Balinese full body massage, a 60 minute facial, an amazing 'Hair Cream Bath' which was basically a creamy head massage and finally a manicure and pedicure. There is also a pit stop which includes a glass of white wine accompanied by some excellent sushi, because with all that pampering you need a break right?
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| Girls at 'The Nest' - Sanur |
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| Still big kids more than 10 years after starting the blog! |
Sanur in general felt like a nice place to relax, it was a decent option to start our 2 week trip but it did feel a little more geared to retirees and the older expat community rather than an exciting, backpacker destination. But there are some nice places to visit and a decent place to spend a couple of nights if you need to recover from jetlag, get used to the currency and culture and plan your next steps from the poolside of your hotel or a beachfront bar.
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| Fish Soup Bali Style |
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| Views at Sanur are none too shabby |
Nusa Penida:
We arranged to travel from Sanur to Nusa Penida with the assistance of Pippin from our next hotel, Kompyang Cottage. Using a company called IDOLA, Pippin booked our tickets on our behalf at more of a local price of 150,000 Rupiah ($11 USD) per person. The trip took just around 30 minutes via this fast-boat service and the crossing was painless.
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| Kate in front of the IDOLA 'office' |
Penida is somewhat regarded as the fat, lower-achieving big brother of Lembongan. Whilst much more substantial in size, it's infrastructure is trailing somewhat behind. However, what you lose in the way of convenience in many ways this is made up for by its rough edges and untapped charm. We made sure that our hotel was in walking distance to our accommodation so that we didn't need to navigate too many unkempt roads by bike. We were pleasantly surprised in that most of the roads were renovated around a year ago, so it wasn't as difficult to get around as we had previously thought.
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| The Pizza at Artrolling Bistro Penida... |
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| ...washed down with a Bintang beer |
Because our time was limited (3 nights), we had decided to book a day tour to visit a few of the key sights on the island from the comfort of a nice air conditioned vehicle, owing to the fact that it had either been scorching hot during the day with the possibility of heavy downpours at any given moment. We also decided to dive with the hope of visiting the Manta Rays that are synonymous with Nusa Penida diving. Other than that, we were happy to take advantage of our hotel pool and soak up the local goings on.
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| Our accommodation at newly built Kompyang Cottage |
Before mentioning the tour and the diving, it's worth noting that of all the travel we have done over the past 10 years we were taken aback by the spirituality of Bali and Indonesia. Never had we seen such a prevalence of temples and it even seemed that many more were being built. There were various celebrations or festivals going on around these temples with locals flocking towards them in traditional dress and every room we have stayed in, every shop, hotel and business we visited had a small pallet of plaited palm leaves constructed daily as a form of offering to ward off evil spirits.
We were very lucky on our first night to have come across a local, annual ceremony called '
Calon Arang' where it seemed half the island had come out dressed in white with the smell of incense rife in the air. People flocked to the temple where music was being played and there were various 'barong' dancing displays, one was quite a sensual number featuring island girls, one seemed somewhat comical involving a child dressed as a monkey and another involved a hairy elaborate scary costume portraying the witch of 'Calon Arang' who would scream now and again. The gist is that the local villagers are not trying to banish evil spirits, but create mutual understanding by reiterating that they provide offerings and they both have their different ways, and they should all go about them without disturbing the other.
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| Calon Arang - Nusa Penida |
For the 'private' day tour (our guide brought a friend along so it didn't turn out to quite be private!) we paid 400,000 Rupiah ($30 USD) for a driver to take us to three or four spots on the island in the comfort of a weather proof car with AC!
Goa Giri Putri cave Temple was the first stop on our adventures. After a short but steepish set of stairs we reached what looked like another temple with a couple of people dressed in white at the top, one of whom blessed us by splashing water over our heads as we reached the top and the other offered water. If you didn't know there was a cave there you would think that was about it. However, after being instructed to pay the 20,000 Rupiah donation to enter you then squeeze yourself through a smallish hole to get into the main cave area where there are 5 different temples in a large expanse. It's pretty amazing and definitely worth a visit. You may also see and hear prayers taking place which gives the whole thing quite a spooky vibe!
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| Entrance to Giri Putri Cave |
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| Giri Putri Cave Temple |
Pura Paluang Temple was our next destination, and a rather unique one in that it's
potentially one of the only temples in the world that features cars... According to our guide, these stone cars appeared in the temple long before actual cars made their way to Nusa Penida and nobody knows who built them! Even more bizarrely, it's believed that you can sometimes hear the car engines at night. Spooky! There are some reviews of locals not allowing tourists to enter, as well as there being a good chance of sharing the experience with cheeky monkeys. We encountered neither, and whilst it was a first of a kind visit, I don't think Pura Paluang will be finding its way onto many bucket lists anytime soon.
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| Local man helps Kate with a sarong |
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| Pura Paluang Temple Cars |
The iconic
Kelingking Beach Viewpoint was our final stop. This was the spot that instagrammers around the world flock to and there were many a pose taking place and selfiestick present to capture the moment. You can see why, a steep drop from the top overlooking a T-Rex shaped peninsula makes for an incredible vista. Getting down to the beach is supposedly tricky, and we saw a few fatigued soldiers making their way back up to the top. We wouldn't have really had time to chill at the bottom, so that was our
excuse reason for not making it all the way down (and having to traverse all the way back up again)!
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| T-Rex of Kelingking (actually means 'pinky') |
We stopped at a restaurant to have lunch and drinks followed by a brief stop to get kitted up at
Blue Corner Dive for our dive the following day before being dropped off at our hotel at around 3pm. It had been a pretty fun day and would definitely recommend using a vehicle with AC to see some of these sights.
Diving Nusa Penida with
Mola Mola (or Sunfish) had to be the highlight of our trip (aside from our good friends Ryan and Ice getting married of course!). We had booked ourselves in for 3 dives to give ourselves the best change, though we hadn't needed them as we were lucky to have seen them during the very first dive at Karang Sari! This was more than enough to compensate for the fact that the weather had denied us the chance to visit the manta sites that we had originally hoped to visit. The 3 meter dark shadow appeared at around 28 meter down from the depths and remained until a second shadow began to appear. The size and scale were like nothing we had ever seen, it was incredible when the animals turned for this giant circle to suddenly become a super slender ellipse. There wasn't much that could top that but the diving in general was pretty great with some good sightings including turtles, lionfish, puffers, leaf fish, morays and more over this and the following two dives of Sental and Sekolah Dasar to PED drift dive.
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| It's not such a bad life |
Jason from Blue Corner Dive Peninda, who had also helped us source the previous day's guide, had also kindly agreed to drop us off at the hop-on point for boats to Nusa Lembongan. We bought tickets for the fast boat at 50,000 Rupiah per head and waited at a nearby cafe for 30 mins or so before we were called to board a rather small but nippy speedboat for the 10 minute or so journey to Lembongan where our driver Deko, also recommended by Jason, was waiting for us.
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| Jason the superstar from Blue Corner Dive Penida |
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| The speedboat from Penida to Lembongan |
We were looking forward to experiencing the more 'tourist-ready', sophisticated little brother of Nusa Lembongan, where we would also have the pleasure of witnessing the marriage of our good friends from China, Ryan and Ice.
