Extending my tourist visa in Singaraja…
In order to extend my thirty day visa to sixty days I needed to head to one of the immigration centres to give my fingerprints and to have my photo taken.
You can do the entire visa process yourself, but it means being available for three days to visit the immigration office on three separate occasions over the course of a week or two. No thanks! Instead like most tourists I paid an agent to handle two of the trips, but I had to visit immigration once for the fingerprints and photo- no getting out of that unfortunately.
I opted to go to the office at Singaraja up in North Bali, a two hour journey from Amed, and decided I may as well explore the area around while I was there….
Don’t go to Lovina
Lovina my first destination was a flop. The main reason people go to Lovina to see the dolphins on boat trips as they pass through, but I’d been warned off doing that by the dive manager at Amed as apparently there’s about 50 boats all chasing a few dolphins, in his words “don’t you dare go and see the fucking dolphins”. I took heed of his advice/warning. Lovina had plenty of shops, bars and restaurants but they were totally empty. It was all a bit depressing.
I had been after a bottle opener for a while – finding one in Bali is so bloody hard for some reason, I wanted one maybe on a keyring, so that I could open my lemon bintangs on the beach and so I approached some of the many souvenir shops. However, another fail.. the only ones they sold were attached to giant wooden penises or beer bottles. I asked the sellers if they had anything smaller and more appropriate, but received blank looks in response. I was ready to move on from Lovina after a night. I recommend my hostel Funky hostel if you have to stay overnight. They have decent live music each night and it’s a pretty cool place with a bar and cafe.
About an hour inland from Lovina were the villages of Munduk and Bedugul, I decide to check both out as I fancied some greenery after my beach time. First stop was Munduk high in the hills- getting there is certainly an experience up the steep and winding roads. I booked the only hostel I could find online – Ekcommunity, if you’re after some chill time amongst nature I highly rate it. A highlight was the bar which served cocktails overlooking the trees.
Amazing, another highlight was breakfast- you get to chose from three options- a fruit smoothie bowl, pancakes or eggs and coffee. Both times I opted for the smoothie bowl to get in some vitamins! Usually I’d go for pancakes but I’ve had them at every hostel so far.
From Ekcommunity hostel, you can access a waterfall walk which over the course of about three hours leads to four seperate waterfalls.
Some of the waterfalls were down hundreds maybe even thousands of steps, by the end of the day after traipsing up and down steps and hills I was absolutely exhausted and that’s an understatement!
Lupak coffee is very famous and expensive, the process involves collecting wild cat shit. Yep really. However, a lot of coffee places capture the cats making it quite unethical and cruel. However, the cats are native to this area and so there’s a few eco cafes by the waterfalls which collect coffee from the wild cat shit in the area instead. So I had a cup of that, as well as a local dish- Dadar- green pancakes filled with a mix of palm sugar and coconut and accompanied by melted chocolate- yum! Perfect for my sweet tooth and to take away from the fact I was drinking something that has passed through a cats bowels.
I met quite a few nice and interesting Swiss and German travellers at this hostel. One of the Swiss guys was treading a fine line between endearing eccentric and annoying, but he was certainly a character!! I do enjoy meeting characters when travelling.
My next stop Bedugul was rather dull, not much to see here and the hostel was dead too. To be honest I wouldn’t have missed anything by not coming here. Ah well you live and learn. I headed to the huge Botanical gardens which are nice to spend a few hours and relax. I suggest taking a picnic which most people did as there’s only one small cafe inside. There’s also a zip lining adventure park although I didn’t participate in that but it looked fun for kids.
I then wandered down to the lake and was deep in thought when I was approached by a woman wearing a hijab- most seem to be Muslim in this area gesturing if she could have her photo taken with me. Err yeah sure, I stood next to her and smiled, while a guy I presume her husband snapped away.. oh no that wasn’t enough for her- she then stood in front of me and wrapped my arms tightly around her waist and started posing like we were on the cover of a Mills and Boon novel. I felt pretty uncomfortable and then burst out laughing and ran away as soon as physically possible! What she was going to do with that photo and why she wanted it I had no idea and I wasn’t about to hang around and find out!
In Bedugul, I think its best to rent a scooter and explore the surrounding areas but I was too much of a wimp to do that- my diving instructor in Amed had a close call with a truck on his scooter and ended up with some very nasty wounds and bruises, he was lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. I also witnessed a minor accident in Ubud, plus many close calls as well as seeing people walking around with bandaged legs and what not. Plus the medical facilities in Bali, particularly away from Denpasar… not great!! Overall I recommend Munduk for the greenery and chill but I wouldn’t say go out your way to see Bedugul, especially if you’re limited on time.
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