7 Days in Bali

Frangipani and a 2am check-in

The flight landed close to midnight. By the time the driver from Sai Shishir found us under the Ngurah Rai arrivals sign — a little laminated “AARAV & MEGHNA” held over his head — it was nearly one in the morning, and neither of us could stop grinning.

Our room in Seminyak smelled of frangipani. There was a hand-written note on the bed and two young coconuts sweating on the desk. We slept with the doors open to the garden and woke up to roosters and the call of a gecko we'd come to recognise all week.

The rain that cleared at Uluwatu

It rained all afternoon. Fat, warm, tropical rain that came sideways off the Indian Ocean and turned the temple paths to little rivers. We were sure the Kecak fire dance would be called off, and we'd half made peace with it over kelapa muda in a warung above the cliffs.

Then, maybe twenty minutes before six, it just… stopped. The clouds tore open over the sea and the whole amphitheatre lit up amber. Sixty men in checked sarongs began the chant — kecak-kecak-kecak — and the fire went up against a sky doing something we still don't have words for. A monkey stole a man's sunglasses two rows down. Nobody minded.

“Twenty minutes before six, it just stopped. The whole amphitheatre lit up amber.”

The 8am boat and the T-Rex cliff

We caught the Maruti Express fast boat out of Sanur at eight. Forty-five minutes of slapping across a choppy channel, holding our bags on our laps and laughing at how green the water turned the closer we got.

Kelingking Beach is the one everyone photographs — the headland shaped like a sleeping dinosaur, white sand impossibly far below. The climb down is no joke: forty minutes of knee-shaking bamboo handrails and red dust. We made it halfway, to the lip where the cliff falls away, and decided that was exactly far enough. We ate the packed nasi from the warung with our feet hanging over the most ridiculous view of our lives.

Babi guling, holy water, and a swing over the jungle

Ubud was the soft heart of the week. We started before sunrise on the Campuhan Ridge walk, just us and a few joggers and the mist coming off the valley. Breakfast was babi guling at Ibu Oka — suckling pig, crackling, a scoop of fierce sambal — eaten cross-legged and reverent.

At Tirta Empul a priest pressed wet frangipani to our foreheads and we waded into the holy spring, ducking our heads under each of the eleven spouts the way the family ahead of us showed us how. Later, because you have to, we did the absurd jungle swing over the Tegallalang rice terraces and screamed like children.

“A priest pressed wet frangipani to our foreheads and we waded in under each of the eleven spouts.”

The valley nobody told us about

Sidemen was the surprise. An hour east of Ubud and a world quieter — terraced rice fields running up to Mount Agung, weavers at wooden looms, a single warung that made us cheese-and-tomato jaffles and the best kopi of the trip.

We didn't do anything. That was the point. We sat on the veranda and watched a farmer and his two ducks work a paddy until the light went gold and then pink and then gone.