Blissful Bali, and scaling its beastly volcano, Agung

I'd never fancied visiting Bali, as I'd got the impression it was an Ibiza for teen Aussie backpackers. With its vivid culture, spectacular scenery and temples, and enormous conical volcanoes, that ignorant opinion couldn't be any further from the truth.

I arrived in Bali into a late night torrential rain storm, and raced to the nearest tourist resort for an easy hotel search. Kuta-Legian is the town hit by the Bali bombs that killed 202 nightclubbers and locals, and left the tourist industry today absolutely decimated. Walking through the next morning's downpour in search of a poncho, the only men standing on the street pestered me with, “Transport transport? Cheap price” and did not abate until my responses turned to necessary rude. The place was a ghost town: the McDonaldses, cafes, bars with Happy Hour billboards, big hotels and resort complexes all devoid of custom. Local workers sat idle, miserably looking out across the rainy street or down at their hands permanently holding a cigarette. The only courteous Balinese chap I met stood at a big hotel's palm-tree lined driveway entrance, with a mirror on a pole and checking for explosives under each arriving vehicle. I decided to flee for somewhere with a bit of life. I had to pay my day's budget to hire a private minibus to Ubud village, as the local shuttlebus had been cancelled due to a lack of passengers. It was well worth it.

There are some places that each of us holds as personal world heritage sites: the Mancunian footie stadium we got our first bar job; the beach in the quaint uni town where we played cricket on Wednesday afternoons; Prague. Bali's Ubud belongs to that list. Even in the driving rain, Ubud was visually stunning with its picture postcard terraced paddy fields, Monkey Forest Road lined with craft shops and cafes that are too cool for anywhere else I can think of, and incredibly ornate and colourful Hindu temple as every other building. At each corner of most houses, were shrines with carved statues and clouds of incense smoke and baskets of fresh fruit and flowers.


Typical cultivated landscape of paddy fields and tropical fruit trees



Typical temple (seemingly every other building in a Balinese town)



Typical Balinese artwork

For 2 quid I got a brick and bamboo bungalow with tropical garden creeping towards the balcony and free local coffee. At dusk the noise of birds, frogs in the fountain and chiming of bamboo gockenspiels sent me and the woman harvesting the adjacent paddy field drowsy.

The 2 quid a day bungalow

After another drenching looking for a cafe dinner, I was invited to a restaurant table by a group of Banda Aceh tsunami volunteers and their friends. French and drunk Vincent was thrilled to hear I was from England, and keen to share with me his song for the English, "You... can... go... f**k yourself, you can go.................... repeat until bored" However, what I thought was going to be a long evening turned out to be a cracker of banter and rum, especially as it culminated with me having to pull the legless Vincent out of the knee-deep-in-porridgey-mud rice field that he'd impressively, though unintentionally, back somersaulted into.

As a perfectly compatible group, we spent the next few days cycling by the most beautiful cultivation landscapes and most intricate religious buildings I've ever seen, and chatted with the carvers of most expertly worked sculptures. Eva and I visited caves inhabited by bats that fluttered in our faces and around us. Wearing compulsory orange sashes (no Glasgow Rangers connotations I'm sure), we hiked to 1000-year-old temples perced precariously on deep gorge edges, through dense tropical forest hosting the delicious combination of red coffee beans, fat cocoa pods and sweet mangoes growing within the same armreach. I learned from these Pharmaciens Sans Frontieres volunteers of the immorality of Western and Chinese pharmaceutical companies who'd sent hundreds of tons of out-of-date medicinal 'aid' to the tsunami-destroyed areas of Banda Aceh. Their twisted incentives included gaining tax breaks as a result of their 'charity' and, by shipping it to poor Indonesia, be desposing of their unsaleable drugs more cheaply than they'd be able to in the West.

With village names including Gitgit, Gobleg, Bone and Ringdikit, we had to explore more of Bali. The best option was by motorbike, though not my favoured one after 2 motorbike falls out of 2 motorbike rides in Thailand. Whilst hiring our guest house owner's motorbike for a quid a day, he didn't help my nerves when warning us of motorbike parts thieves at the tourist spots we planned to visit. Of even more concern was our lack of a motorbike/international driver's license (if I'd known I'd need one when I was passing the fake documents stalls on Bangkok's Ko San Rd...) and prediction by our hostel man that we'd be stopped by transport police. I'm not usually one for supporting public sector corruption, but I had no choice but keep a 50,000 rupiah license absence waiver in my top pocket. Thankfully, I didn't need to donate it to any bent traffic coppers.

First stop was the royal Balinese palace at Klungkung, with wall murals within its court room depicting horrific punishments. Farmers being whipped into doing the work of the oxen they'd mistreated and people who'd farted in public places having hot pokers thrust somewhere they wouldn't pass wind from again, stand out.

Mean Balinese farmers paying for their cruelty to animals

After a fried noodle lunch in Gelgel village, we took a dirt track through paddy fields to the middle of nowhere. By a tiny shrine with adjacent graves, we watched people doing laundry in the river. The only sound was the chanting of a male choir somewhere in the direction of the mighty volcano Rinjani on Lombok island, filling the horizon from a couple of hours sailing away across the sea. Near Besakih temple, we stopped to watch a religious ceremony and were mobbed by children dressed in the traditional Balinese garb. At the ceremony's end, we watched mesmerised as hundreds of women exited to take fresh fruit to a shrine, balancing many-kilo fruit baskets on their head as they walked down the road.

Traditional Bali dress

Ceremonial procession of women carrying offerings for the gods to the shrine

Our final destination for the day was the base of the beast Gunung Agung ('Biggest Mountain') that towers 3041 metres above Bali (reduced from 3142m by its 1963 eruption), with the obvious intention of climbing it. After collecting friends Frank and Maude and our guide, Gung, we started the ascent at midnight, from 900m altitude.

Gunung Agung volcano punching through clouds. Photo taken from 25km away on Lombok.

The first 4 hours of ascent were through thick and humid jungle. It was pitch dark beyond our torch beams and eerily quiet. I never imagined that the place most naturally smelling like a florist or cosmetic shop would be the side of an island arc volcano in the middle of the night. The sweet floral fragrance was sleep-inducingly intense. Also unexpected was the absence of scary animals and insects. Except the leech I found on my arm and gorging on my blood that put me on red leach alert thereafter. An odd animal story Gung told was that once a year a cow or goat is dragged up Agung, to be sacrificed to the Hindu god of fire. I struggled to imagine how humans could get a cow up here. The gradient had become a continuous 45 degrees and we slipped and slid in mud and loose gravel, and used tree roots (projecting out where the path had been washed away) like ladder rungs. Thankfully, cattle are led up a shallower gradient path that we weren't taking as an important ceremony was taking place there this evening. Well not thankfully for the animal, as at the summit it is shoved into the volcano's crater to tumble to its deathly fate with Brahma.

At 2500m high the vegetation quite abruptly changed from jungley to Alpine shrubs, pines and long grasses. The hot breeze changed to a cold northerly and fleece, hat, scarf and gloves were hurriedly donned only minutes after leaving the jungle. The path morphed from eroded gravelly gully to crusty lava: like walking on a giant, stale, meat pie lid. From a sheltered resting place (4am) I watched sweeping torchlights belonging to local people as they foraged for vegetables to sell at the local market at 7am. The sharp edge of the flickering lights of Dempasar city marked the Bali Strait washing the shore a couple of kilometres below us.

Only Eva and I contined to the summit, scrambling the steep slope and often sliding 2 steps back for 1 step forward, only halting a slide by digging fingers into the pumice piles we were trying to climb. The volcanic rocks alternated between fall and flow deposits, with rhyolitic dribbles preserving their fluid flow structures before rapidly decomposing to shingle and sand.
Under pink sunrise clouds at the summit, Gung made an incense offering to the gods while we ate Top wafer bars sat on the top of the crater rim feeling top. As the sun climbed above the horizon, the perfectly pyramidal shadow of Agung shrank back from by the volcanoes of Java, to maybe only twenty miles long across the outwash-cut gorges and rainforest 3km below us. It also crept around towards the active volcano Batur, sat inside a giant caldera that clouds poured like cappuccino froth over the rim of. To the north the back arc sea was shallow and light blue, whilst south of Bali the fore arc Indian Ocean was a deeper blue.

Descending into the many-miles-long shadow of Gunung Agung, cast across Bali 3km below towards the volcanoes of Java

Eva and our guide, and the 1717m high volcano Batur (below us) at sunrise

Descending, the only sound was of the wind, and my remains of my trainers (shredded by the sharp volcanic rocks) crunching the pumice gravel. Back at 2500m we thawed with hot tea and noodles, before trudging, exhausted, down through the heat and humidity of the rainforest. We arrived back at Besakih Temple at 1pm, totalling 4200m of tropical and freezing ascent and descent in 13 hours.

To the heavenly coral reef atolls of the Gili islands next, for a well-earned rest...