Weekend Candidasa & Tenganan

Last weekend we decided to discover the east part of Bali the next following weekends, so this weekend we jumped on our scooter and headed to Candidasa. This is a small coast village that suits perfect as a basis for exploring the east of Bali. This time we chose to afford 2 nights away, this way the weekend feels longer for the hard working Rino.

The sun wanted to be nice to us this weekend compared to last, we had perfect weather for almost 48 hours, which is a record since maybe 3 months. We left Friday with the last few raindrops and arrived in Candidasa before dark hoping to find a good and cheap accommodation or were willing to pay a bit extra for a hotel with swimming pool. We couldn’t find any hotel that suited our wishes and ended up paying a bit more than we wanted, but had a beautiful hotel with a restaurant and swimming pool area complete with view over the ocean. Read here our review on TripAdvisor.

Tenganan
On Saturday we planned to visit the small traditional village with the Bali Aga people, descendants from the original Balinese people. The people are known for their conservatism and resistance to change.
We arrived early in the morning and were the only tourists in the village. It is clearly that the village is adjusted to tourism, but you also see that they are very traditional en conservative indeed. The funny thing is when we came we saw people taking place at their tables and spots to do different kinds of art work and handicraft. Of course this is authentic and what they do and live of, but when we are walking through the village it’s also clearly a show-off. We saw beautiful paintings on banana leaves, ikat weaving and playing -and making of gamelan instruments.

At the end of the inner village we got to talk with a local, who wanted to show his Balinese honey production garden. He introduced us to his family and explained his family work. We saw that he also guides hiking trips and asked for his rates. After a bargain we paid Rp 100.000 (± €8 or Kr 65) for a trip of longer than 2 hours. We walked through his families’ garden with pineapples and we looked at the village temple. We soon started the climbing up to the top of the hills through the jungle. Tenganan means something like “surrounded by” and it’s totally surrounded by hills (small mountains). We started the hike a little late in the morning and it became a sweaty walk, which we also enjoyed, we cannot say we are doing too much of sports and exercise here during the weeks.

On the top we were rewarded with a fantastic view over Tenganan, Candidasa and the ocean on the background. We kept on walking and came through a tiny village called Tenganan 3, besides the original village there are two more located in the area. Soon we arrived at the stunning rice terraces of the Tenganan area, we must say that we were just as impressed by these rice fields as we were in Jatiluwih (the UNESCO world heritage). It was well worth the hike and Wayan Durpa was a friendly guide to walk with. About the rice fields he could tell us that the farmers families produce and harvest the rice and that they split the rice 50/50 with the owner. The owner is Tenganan village, this sounds like a good system to us. This villages and community are really independent and helping each other. In Bali we see this in many places, but here it was really clear.

After the long hike we had a well earned Aussie burger by Ari Homestay & Hotdog (see here our review on TripAdvisor), with great view of all locals being stopped by the police, we were cleared :-)



Pantai pasir Putih (white sand beach)
After the exhausting day on Saturday we decided to take it easier on Sunday. Only a few km north of Candidasa is Pantai pasir Putih, which is better known as the white sand beach (all other beaches on East-Bali are volcano black sand). We already had read that the road would be bumpy, well parts of it were hardly ride able, but it was worth it. The beach might not have been as white as the picture, probably due to the rain season, but it was still stunning. There are several warungs in a row, which offer their sunbeds for free if you take lunch at their place :-) The snorkelling should be good at this spot as well, but our money for the week was almost finished and Iris was totally caught up in here book, finishing the second Stieg Larsson book. The water had a great cooling temperature at this beach and the view was fantastic, we could even see Lombok :-)

Around 3pm we decided to go home again and at the very last moment we caught a view drops of rain, in between the sun had been shinning the whole weekend:-)



Our review of Warung Astawa, were we have eaten the first evening