Pemuteran, Bali

Back when I [Adam] was planning this trip, I looked for a way to escape the crowds of south Bali and go somewhere a little off-the-grid and a little off-the-beaten-path. In Bali, I narrowed the options between Amed, on the eastern shore, and Pemuteran, on the north shore. I knew they weren't close to the airport, but I didn't know just how far they were.

We met a driver at the Denpasar airport for a five-hour drive over windy mountain roads. Lonely Planet promised a three-to-four hour drive. Their author also did a very perfunctory survey of Pemuteran, giving recommendations for zero restaurants.

Our villa in Pemuteran was set back quite a way from the main road. The villa owner advertised it online as 700 meters from the house to the beach, and her instruction manual at the house read 900 meters. We decided that it was a full kilometer. We were the last left before the mountain, at the end of small community of houses, in which lived families, their dogs [anjing], their cats, and some chickens [ayam]. Oh, and cows. They farmed corn and coconuts, as far as well could tell.

So each morning (or noon, or evening), we ventured forth through a one-kilometer stretch of "hello!" "how are you?" "where are you going?" "where are you from?" from both children and parents. We replied in a mixture of English and Indonesian. Once we were followed by a small entourage of children, who all chorused "selamat jalan!" when we wished them goodbye. The exchanges grew less frequent as the days passed; the novelty of two white people from America always walking probably wore off. [Most people got up and down the road on motorcycles or scooters or bicycles. It may have seemed odd to them that the Americans always walked.]

The walk might have been pleasant if the humidity and heat were lower. We did enjoy arriving at our destination, and once took a restaurant owner's offer of a ride home.

The restaurants were all at the beach, far from our house. To satisfy some curiosity, here are some shots of nasi goreng [fried rice], nasi campur [mixed rice], and gado-gado ["mix-mix"]. Gado-gado is the picture that is in fact least mixed.

Yes, Indonesian food is delicious.

If we felt lazy, our housekeeper would prepare us dinner from a list of items, to be served on our porch with candlelight.

We were pampered by a staff of five: a housekeeper, a groundskeeper, the poolboy, the night security guard, and the supervisor. We mostly just interacted with our housekeeper, who made our breakfast and three of our five dinners. Her name is Iluh and she's a very good cook (better than the cooks in many of the hotel restaurants). We guess her age to be somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two, and she'll no doubt one day run a string of famous Balinese restaurants somewhere.

The other staff people we met only one or twice daily, upon awakening or on our walks. They all lived somewhere nearby on the road.

Here are some pictures of the villa. It's a two-bedroom, two-bath, but we only used half of it. One walks up a stone path with the pool on the right and the house entrance on the left, then turns left to enter the house. Breakfast and dinner were eaten on the porch near the koi pond. From the porch, downstairs, and upstairs, one can see over the pool and to the mountains behind. Over the course of the day, and as clouds came and went, the mountains turned multiple shades of green.

On Friday morning, Adam went running and stopped to pick up a price list from a dive operator out at the beach. The dive operation had been founded in 1991, run by an Australian who hatches and raises juvenile sea turtles and who works to revitalize damaged offshore reefs. (The entire town of Pemuteran had been founded only in the 1960s when the Indonesian government resettled small communities adversely affected by a volcano eruption from one side of the island to the northwestern tip.) After lunch, we both stopped by the shop and signed up for a Discover Scuba course for the next day. The staff person who signed us up was Amanda, a very friendly ex-pat Brit. She found that we were on a honeymoon and related how she and her husband married only shortly before they moved to Indonesia (with a stop in Cambodia) to start second careers as dive instructors.

So for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday we went scuba diving. It was fantastic; very much like swimming around one's own tropical fish aquarium. Our trips were led by Adrian, Amanda's husband who resembled Mick Jagger, and Amanda herself. We dove at Bio-Wreck and at Close Encounters (after an introductory shore dive), and spent time underwater meeting fish of difficult-to-imagine color combinations. Each turn around the coral (which has rehabilitated with the help of very low electrical current and sunk metal objects), you spotted a new fish and thought, "That's the most colorful/odd-looking/beautiful fish I've ever seen!" Your opinion then held until you spotted the next fish.

Unfortunately, we don't have an underwater camera. If we go get scuba-certified, we'll have to price them.

Living in quiet, rural Bali did leave us with a number of bug bites (and heat rash), but it was otherwise very enjoyable.

We did have to leave, unfortunately. About one dozen more coral gardens in the bay (and more out at Menjangan Island) will have to be explored another time.

We had arrived during a Hindu holiday during which families left colorful flags and offerings in front of their homes.

We left on Tuesday, a non-holiday, for the four-hour drive to Ubud (made longer by traffic). On the way out, we stopped for monkeys bathing in the ocean. Our driver, from Pemuteran, claimed it was only the second time he'd ever seen that.

We also stopped to try durian, the famously smelly Southeast Asian fruit. It tastes like a mix of onion and vanilla, with yellow flesh that is the consistency of yogurt. We probably won't try it again.