Ujung & Amed

After buying an underwater case for our camera we hade to take it a bit slow for a couple of weeks. Eating at the cheapest warungs and no beers it is easy to save money around here. We also didn’t do anything special last weekend. But this weekend we had planned a weekend in Amed on the east coast to test our underwater case. In Amed the underwater life is right of shore and supposed to be one of the most beautiful snorkelling spots of Bali. We didn’t explore anything yet of the east of Bali, so from now on we will spend some weekends on traveling the east and east coast of Bali :-)

We knew the drive to Amed was going to be around 3 hours, so on Saturday morning we left early. After one and half hour we had a stop at Goa Lawah, one of the nine directional and important temples of Bali. The temple is at a cave which is supposed to lead all the way to the mother temple of Bali, Pura Besakih 25 km away, but of course you’re not allowed to try that trip. It’s not something we would have wanted either because the cave is full of bats (see pictures in the slide show beneath).
The weather was perfect until now. But after Candidasa we had to drive through some mountain area and it was getting darker and darker. When it started raining we hoped it would stay in the mountains and still decided to take the long road to Amed, which is supposed to be especially beautiful according to our bible ‘The Lonely Planet’. Unfortunately the rain became worse and we found the very last ‘Homestay’, restaurant on this route before the long drive to Amed actually started witch is not touristic at all. We decided to take a break and lunch at this place before continuing to Amed. A lucky and really nice coincidence was that this homestay & restaurant was a very beautiful and idyllic place with friendly staff. It had a beautiful swimming pool overlooking the ocean and an almost private black sand beach.

After lunch we played cards, read and waited for the rain to stop, witch it didn’t do. We decided maybe it was smart to stay the night and we had fallen for this idyllic place. The owner explained to us that the route we wanted to take would be floating anyway because of all the rain and at some points be dangerous and the view of the underwater life in Amed would be bad as well due to all the dirt in the water coming from the mountains. We knocked down the price to Rp 250.000 (± €21 or Kr 175) a bit above our budget but what the heck. It was by far the most beautiful room we had until now and during the day we had some nice and interesting conversations with a Dutch couple travelling through Indonesia with their 10-months old baby. Due to the long rain on that day it was not that warm and after Munduk we finally slept underneath a ‘real’ blanked again, which maybe is the number 1 thing we miss the most here on Bali, having a blanket with some weight on you when you go to bed. ;-)
(see here our review on TripAdvisor)

In the morning it was al dried up and the sun was shining. We had a morning swim in the beautiful swimming pool and dive in the ocean. Our breakfast we enjoyed overlooking the ocean, a place to recommend for sure.

Around 10am we continued our journey around the east coast of Bali and followed the beautiful track from the Lonely Planet towards Amed. Well, what an experience! Not only is the road taking you through one of Bali’s most beautiful areas, we as white people were greeted like we were famous pop stars by all the children and sometimes even by the adults, or maybe like we were aliens from another planet…very funny anyway. When we arrived in Amed we went to a bar rented snorkelling gear and installed our camera in our underwater casing. The underwater life was indeed beautiful and our camera worked perfectly. The second slide show beneath shows some evidence.

When coming out of the water is started raining again and we hoped that it would stop after we had taken lunch. Unfortunately this was not the case and we had to drive through the rain again. Now we took the normal route, which also brought us through beautiful rice fields and nature, but this we will explore more during another weekend :-)

Back home after a tiring 3 hour drive we ended the weekend relaxing with a half an hour shoulder, neck and head massages, just perfect.

Even though we had a lot of rain, the weekend was a success and we saw the beauty of east Bali and we will plan some more trips to this area as there is a lot more to explore.