It’s been just under a week in Bali, though time here behaves strangely. A single afternoon can feel like a month, particularly when spent half-submerged in a pool with a warm Bintang in hand while absolutely nothing of importance happens around you.
Ubud was the first stop. We stayed in an Airbnb just outside town, down a narrow little road lined with rice fields so green they looked chemically enhanced. Every afternoon, kids would appear with kites the size of small aircraft, flying them over the paddies while old men smoked cigarettes and stared into the middle distance like retired philosophers.
At the end of our driveway sat a tiny warung selling three-dollar Bintang longnecks. This quickly became an important cultural landmark for us. Nothing says “international traveller” quite like drinking cheap beer in thongs while pointing at menu items you cannot pronounce.
Further down the road was a cocktail bar called Pinstripe. It looked like someone had attempted to recreate a 1920s speakeasy after only hearing jazz described second-hand. Dark wood, tiny lamps, and bartenders in suspenders taking whisky very seriously. The staff were impossibly polite, as are most people in Bali. Australians could learn a thing or two from them, though we’d probably ruin it by trying.
For my birthday, I ordered a 30ml pour of 25-year-old whisky for roughly 2 million rupiah. Financially irresponsible, yes, but so is buying a jet ski, and at least this decision only lasted twenty minutes.
We hired a driver for a day and completed what I now understand to be the Official Bali Tourist Pilgrimage: Monkey Forest, waterfalls, temples, and a coffee plantation where they politely encourage you to drink beverages made from beans processed inside an animal’s digestive tract. The beauty of Ubud is that everything sits fairly close together, so you spend more time wandering around temples and less time trapped in traffic, wondering whether spiritual enlightenment might actually just be air-conditioning.
The food has been excellent, consisting mostly of local dishes, all carrying varying levels of chilli-induced punishment. Unfortunately, my stomach has reacted like a Victorian child exposed to foreign spices for the first time. Let’s just say the bathroom and I have developed a close working relationship this week. Still, one must persevere in the name of cultural immersion.
We’re now in Canggu for the remainder of the trip, which feels less like Bali and more like someone accidentally dropped Bondi into the tropics. Ubud was rice fields, incense, and silence. Canggu is smoothie bowls, shirtless influencers, and Australians named Brayden riding scooters without shirts or survival instincts.
Both have their charm, though perhaps for very different reasons.
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