To make it easier to get around in Ubud, we rented a scooter for a very reasonable price of about $4usd/day. We kept it a few extra days to explore the Northern and Eastern parts of the island and experience a different side of Bali.
Our first destination was Munduk, a small village to the North, on the edge of what seems to be a collapsed crater. Before leaving, we identified two possible hotels and plotted them on the iPhone. When we "arrived", we were in the middle of nowhere.. there were no hotels or villages, and the supposed "road" seemed to be an extremely narrow dirt path going down. Not knowing any better, we attempted to take the bike down the narrow footpath, but doubled back after 10 minutes figuring it can't be right. Lucky for us, we must have looked really lost at the main road, some friendly locals driving by in a truck stopped and asked us what we were looking for. They kindly pointed us in the right direction and we quickly found our way to Munduk and the proper location of the hotel… moral of the story: GPS coordinates are not always right! ;)
From Munduk, we explored the rice fields and scenery in the area. We let ourselves get lost and (again) ended up on another super narrow path. This path was beautiful though as it went through the rice fields and had a trickling stream on the side.
On the way to Muduk, we also stopped in Bedugul to see the local temple on the lake.
The next day we continued North to the coast, then veered East toward Tulamben. We had only planned to stay a night or two here, but enjoyed it so much that we stayed 5 nights. This gave us plenty of time to scuba and snorkel around the USS Liberty shipwreck, and learn to freedive (more pics/details to come, in future posts).
After Tulamben, we originally intended to do a 2 hour hike of Mount Batur (a volcano with a nice view of Bali and Lombok). Unfortunately, a bit of research revealed several accounts of horror stories where tourists attempting to hike it on their own were getting hurt. These were not typical hiking-related injuries - in recent months, tourists have actually been beat up by aggressive locals who have created a monopolistic Mount-Batur-Tour-Guides Gang in the area. They won't allow any tourist to pass without paying (around $20/person) and, from the stories we've read, they've repeatedly resorted to agressive verbal abuse, shoving, punching, and kicking until the tourists give up and leave the area. Turned off by these stories, we didn't want to support this behaviour in any way, so we bypassed the volcano and went directly back to Ubud. Hopefully they will put a stop to this soon as it's a bit of a shame - the pictures of the hike look amazing.
Our short scooter loop was great and definitely one of our Bali highlights! We saw a lot of rice fields, passed through small villages, and saw locals in their daily routines. Here are a few more random pics from the trip :)
