After almost two and a half weeks at sea, we finally reached Bali. As we approached the island and passed Nusa Dua, it was obvious even from a distance that we had left behind the Pacific we had grown used to over the previous months. Speedboats were racing in every direction, jet skis were cutting between boats, parasails were flying behind motorboats, and there was constant movement on the water. After Vanuatu, Erromango, and places where you could stare at the sea for half a day without seeing anything happen, it felt as if someone had suddenly switched the whole world back on.
Nusa Dua is exactly that kind of place — a purpose-built tourist zone in the south of Bali, known for large hotels, manicured beaches, resorts, and everything that comes with serious international tourism. It is not the old, traditional Bali, but a carefully packaged version designed for people who want a tropical island with as few unpleasant surprises as possible. For us, the approach alone was enough to make it clear that this was going to be very different from everything we had seen over the previous months.
We settled into the marina at Port Benoa. Benoa is first and foremost a serious working harbour, with terminals, commercial ships, warehouses, fuel, and constant traffic, so the first view from the boat was not exactly the famous postcard version of Bali with a palm tree hanging over an empty white beach. If you expected to step straight out of the cockpit into rice fields and temples, you had to wait a little longer.
The marina was far enough from the city that walking was not particularly practical. Luckily, we quickly discovered Grab, Southeast Asia’s version of Uber. Tap the app, a car or motorbike appears, and the transport problem is solved.
We had a few days before Damjan’s brother Stefan and his wife Duška arrived to visit us, so we used the time to explore Denpasar and deal with everything that usually piles up after a long passage.
DENPASAR – BACK TO THE NOISE
The first time we entered Denpasar felt almost like a physical impact. It was not only the traffic, but the feeling that there was some kind of restlessness everywhere around us. Motorbikes, scooters, cars, horns, music from shops, street vendors, advertisements, construction sites, people rushing somewhere, and dust hanging over all of it.
We had become completely unused to that sort of world. For months, the loudest things around us had often been the wind, waves, or the boat engine, and now it felt as if someone had turned the whole world up to maximum volume overnight.
And yet, at the same time, Denpasar almost felt like paradise.
Everything existed again: phones, electronics, internet, shops, shopping malls, air-conditioned restaurants, KFC, Pizza Hut, cinemas. After almost eight months of living in a world where shopping often meant buying whatever happened to be available rather than what you actually wanted, an ordinary shopping mall suddenly starts to look like one of civilisation’s great achievements.
Naturally, we had to stop at Pizza Hut. I ordered a small pizza and expected something roughly in line with what “small” means in Europe. When it arrived, I just stared at the plate for a few seconds.
The pizza was smaller in diameter than my hand.
I thought: Asia really knows how to surprise you.
Denpasar became much more interesting once you stepped outside the air-conditioned malls. Historically, the city was closely tied to the Kingdom of Badung, and in the early twentieth century it became the site of one of the most dramatic events in Bali’s history. During the Dutch conquest in 1906, the famous puputan took place, when the royal family and their followers chose death rather than surrender to Dutch forces.
Later, Denpasar grew into the administrative, political, and economic centre of the island, but the older Bali never disappeared beneath the modern noise. Between shops, cables, scooters, and advertisements, you would suddenly come across a huge red-brick gateway, a stone guardian, a small family shrine, or a house that looked more like a temple than somewhere people actually lived.
The architecture was one of the things I found most fascinating about the island. Red brick, dark stone, richly carved gates, walls full of openings, small statues, and figures of deities were everywhere. A traditional Balinese home is often not a single enclosed building, but a whole collection of pavilions arranged around an inner courtyard.
We also noticed that the roofs and walls were often not completely sealed, leaving enough space for air to circulate constantly. In a climate with that much heat and humidity, this is not just decorative but extremely practical. Seal everything up like a European house and mould will very quickly become a full member of the family.
Everything looked as though someone had spent an endless amount of time working by hand. Brick, stone, gates, reliefs, figures. On one corner stands an ancient-looking Hindu deity, and then fifty scooters rush past it and remind you that you are not in a museum but in the middle of a living city.
Traffic was a world of its own. Tiny vehicles squeezed through gaps that would never occur to us as actual gaps, while the horn was clearly considered a perfectly legitimate means of communication. It was constant chaos, but somehow everything worked.
There was plenty of dust as well. This was definitely not the Bali from perfectly edited tourist photographs. It was rougher, louder, and dirtier, but precisely because of that, much more interesting.
MUSEUM BALI – A LITTLE DEEPER THAN THE POSTCARD
In Denpasar we visited Museum Bali, one of the island’s main museums dedicated to Balinese history and culture. The museum opened in 1932 and was created specifically to preserve Balinese art, customs, and traditional objects at a time when the island had already begun to change rapidly.
The building itself is almost as interesting as the collection inside. The complex was designed as a blend of a traditional Balinese temple and an old royal palace, with courtyards, pavilions, large gateways, red brick, and carved stone ornamentation. It does not feel like entering a conventional European museum; it feels more like walking into an old compound where the exhibits are simply a continuation of the architecture around them.
Inside were traditional textiles, masks, ceramics, religious objects, dance costumes, old weapons, manuscripts, and various items from everyday life. It is only in a place like that that you begin to understand that what looks on the street like an abundance of decoration actually belongs to a very old system of customs, religion, and symbolism.
I was especially drawn to the keris, traditional daggers with straight or wavy blades. At first glance they look like weapons designed for some fantasy film, but in Bali they carry a much broader meaning. A keris can be a family heirloom, a status symbol, a ritual object, and even something traditionally believed to possess certain spiritual qualities.
In one room you are looking at a wavy blade that seems almost imaginary, and a few metres away there are traditional masks used in ceremonies. Only then do you gradually begin to understand just how far Balinese culture is from the simple “beach, palm tree, cocktail” formula in which the island is usually sold to tourists.
The moment you leave the museum, you quickly encounter another part of local culture.
Bargaining.
The seller asks:
“Want it?”
“No.”
The price immediately drops.
“No, really, I don’t need it.”
An even lower price.
If you remain uninterested for long enough, the same thing that cost one hundred half a minute ago can suddenly cost ten. We quickly understood that the first price here is not really a price.
It is the beginning of a conversation.
We also visited a large shopping mall, which for us felt almost exotic because we had not seen anything like it for nearly eight months. We even went into a cinema, more out of curiosity than necessity, and I have to admit it was excellent. Air conditioning, comfortable seats, a huge screen — everything you would expect from a serious cinema anywhere in Europe.
LIFE IN THE MARINA
While we were waiting for our guests, we met several Indonesians in the marina who practically lived on and around the boats. We arranged with one of them to help us clean the catamaran for a daily wage. He was quiet and unobtrusive, and he simply started working without much discussion.
His cleaning system was fascinating. He would start in the morning at one end of the deck and then simply clean everything that appeared in his path. He reached a pair of shoes — washed the shoes. Continued forward, found dishes left on the table — washed the dishes. Found a box — lifted it, wiped it, cleaned underneath it, and kept going.
He made no distinction between “this is the deck,” “these are shoes,” or “this belongs in the kitchen.” That day, the entire boat was his territory, and apparently everything on it had the potential to be dirty.
The first day we watched him with a certain amount of confusion, and then realised that the man was incredibly hardworking and thorough. By evening the boat looked far better than we had expected, so we arranged for him to keep coming for the next few days until our guests arrived.
After so many months at sea, you develop fairly flexible standards when it comes to tidiness. It is only when someone else cleans things you did not even realise needed cleaning that you understand just how relaxed you have become.
In the marina we also met two very interesting sailors, an American named John and an Austrian named Franz. John worked in film production, and both of them sailed yachts of around forty feet that had been specially set up so that virtually everything could be handled by one person.
Those boats followed a completely different philosophy from our catamaran. Lines, winches, sails, and controls were arranged so that one person could reef, change sails, steer, and deal with problems without constantly running around the entire boat. From what we understood from their stories, both had serious experience in solo sailing and long-distance racing, including round-the-world passages.
It was interesting to look closely at their boats. When you know that a single person may have to deal with everything that happens for days or weeks at a time, every rope and every control suddenly makes much more sense.
John soon had to return to America, while Franz stayed for a few more days to finish some work on his boat before returning to Austria. By pure chance, several completely different routes crossed for a few days in the same marina in Bali.
GUESTS AND THE BEST TRANSPORT IN BALI
Outside the entrance to the marina there was always a group of taxi drivers with small, old Suzuki vans. The vehicles were probably twenty-five or thirty years old and all seemed to be in roughly the same stage of collapse. Rust, torn seats, almost no interior trim, and an interior that had clearly given up on life years earlier.
The main thing separating them was colour.
We agreed on a perfectly reasonable price with one of the drivers to take us to the airport to pick up Stefan and Duška. We were very pleased with the arrangement.
They were slightly less impressed when they saw what we had come to collect them in.
I still do not know how all of us managed to fit inside together with the luggage. Damjan looked larger than the entire van, and the thing reminded me most of some Asian version of a tiny Yugoslav van from the 1970s.
But the engine ran, the wheels turned, and somehow we made it back to the boat.
Over the next few days we decided to explore the island more seriously. Through Grab, it was possible to hire a car with a driver for the whole day, which sounded like a perfect solution on paper.
Then we discovered Bali traffic.
There were times when fifteen kilometres took almost three hours. Cars sat still while thousands of scooters squeezed between them from the left, from the right, and apparently from some kind of space I had not even known existed. After a few trips like that, we seriously began to wonder whether walking might have been faster.
ULUWATU – A TEMPLE ON THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN
At the far southern end of the island we visited Uluwatu, one of those parts of Bali where the landscape finally becomes as dramatic as the travel photographs suggest. High limestone cliffs drop almost vertically into the Indian Ocean, and right at the edge stands Pura Luhur Uluwatu, one of Bali’s most important temples.
The temple belongs to a group of sacred sites that, in traditional Balinese belief, serve a protective role for the island. Its location at the very edge of the land is no accident. In Balinese Hindu tradition, the sea is at once a source of life, a powerful force, and something that must be respected, so the whole place carries a deeper meaning than simply “a temple with a good view.”
From the path beside the temple, the ocean lies around seventy metres below. Waves crash into the cliffs, the wind blows constantly, and the entire place feels far larger than it can ever appear in a photograph.
Uluwatu is also famous for its evening Kecak dance, a distinctive Balinese performance traditionally staged at sunset. Even without seeing the performance, standing on the edge of that cliff is enough to understand why this has become one of the iconic places of southern Bali.
After Denpasar, it was a relief to have wind, sea, and an open horizon again.
PADANG PADANG – SMALL BEACH, BIG WAVES
Not far from Uluwatu lies Labuan Sait, now much better known as Padang Padang Beach. You reach the beach through a narrow passage between limestone walls, so narrow that it feels more like the route to a hidden cave than a path to the sea.
Then the rock suddenly opens and a small bay appears in front of you, with pale sand and blue water. Padang Padang is especially famous among surfers because the reef offshore produces serious waves, and this part of Bali has long been one of the island’s best-known surf spots.
Closer to shore, the water can look completely harmless, while only a short distance farther out people sit on boards waiting for waves that have very little to do with casual swimming. That contrast between a small hidden beach and a powerful ocean is exactly what made Padang Padang one of the symbols of southern Bali.
This was finally one of those scenes that matched the picture people build in their heads before travelling to Bali: a small tropical bay, cliffs, surfers, and the Indian Ocean.
The only difference was that several hundred other people had apparently imagined exactly the same thing.
GARUDA WISNU KENCANA
We also visited Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park, a completely different kind of place. The complex is dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu and his mythical mount, Garuda. Garuda is not important only in Balinese religious tradition; it is also one of Indonesia’s national symbols and appears on the country’s coat of arms.
Everything in the complex is built on a monumental scale. Huge stone spaces, towering walls, and enormous sculptures create an almost theatrical setting, dominated by the giant figure of Vishnu riding Garuda.
Unlike sacred sites such as Uluwatu or Goa Gajah, this is not an ancient complex but a modern attempt to present Hindu mythology and Indonesian national symbolism on an enormous scale. That is exactly why it is interesting to see immediately after the small family shrines scattered throughout the city.
In one place, the gods live in a tiny shrine between the house and the garage.
Here, they are several dozen metres tall.
UBUD – THE CULTURAL HEART OF BALI
Further inland we reached Ubud, a town long considered the cultural heart of Bali. Unlike the coastal areas that grew mainly around beaches and tourism, Ubud is much more closely connected to art, traditional dance, painting, crafts, temples, and former royal life.
During the twentieth century, it became a meeting place for Balinese and foreign artists, which strongly shaped its modern identity. Galleries, workshops, small craft shops, and shrines appear almost everywhere.
Of course, Ubud did not remain hidden from tourism either. Today it is one of the most visited places on the island, but unlike Kuta, tourism here is still much more closely tied to culture, nature, and traditional architecture.
The best-known place we visited there was the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary.
MONKEY FOREST – A FOREST WHERE THE MONKEYS HAVE PRIORITY
Monkey Forest is not simply a zoo where someone happened to release a few monkeys. It is a sacred forest belonging to the village of Padangtegal, with old Hindu temples, stone bridges, sculptures, and dense tropical vegetation.
The site is closely connected to the Balinese concept of Tri Hita Karana, the idea that a harmonious life depends on balance between people, nature, and the spiritual world. Because of that, the forest, temples, and animals are not treated as three separate things, but as parts of the same space.
The sign at the time said that 749 macaques lived in the sanctuary, divided into six groups.
And it quickly becomes obvious who owns the forest.
The monkeys.
They sat on walls, branches, steps, and temples, moved between people, and watched very carefully what everyone was holding. They have the facial expression of creatures who could not care less about you while simultaneously calculating exactly how many seconds it would take to steal your sunglasses.
We were only visitors with cameras.
GOA GAJAH – ELEPHANT CAVE
One of the most interesting places we visited was Goa Gajah, known as the Elephant Cave, near Ubud. It is not simply a small cave with an unusual entrance, but one of Bali’s more important archaeological and religious sites.
The complex dates roughly from the eleventh century and for centuries served as a place of prayer, meditation, and ritual purification. Its most famous feature is the cave entrance, carved as an enormous demonic face with an open mouth through which you literally walk inside.
The name “Elephant Cave” is slightly confusing because elephants never lived naturally on Bali. One explanation links the name to the Hindu god Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity whose figure can be found inside the cave.
What makes the complex particularly interesting is the presence of both Hindu and Buddhist elements. It shows how closely different religious traditions interacted and overlapped in Bali’s history, long before the neat divisions we tend to imagine today.
In front of the cave are ritual bathing pools with stone figures pouring water, connected to traditions of physical and spiritual purification. Once you walk down the steps into the green valley surrounding the sanctuary, the tourist noise fades surprisingly quickly.
There, Bali once again begins to feel like a place that had existed for centuries before anyone invented resorts, beach clubs, or Instagram.
TEGALLALANG – RICE, WATER, AND CENTURIES OF ORGANISATION
We also visited the Tegallalang rice terraces, one of the most recognisable landscapes in all of Bali. From above, the hillside looks as if someone has carefully carved it into perfect green steps, following every natural curve of the terrain.
But there is much more behind that landscape than a beautiful view. For centuries, the Balinese have used a traditional irrigation system known as subak, through which water is distributed among rice fields using canals, small dams, and agreements between entire communities.
Subak is not merely an agricultural technique. It links water, temples, farmers, and the traditional Balinese idea of balance between humans, nature, and the spiritual world.
That is why the rice terraces are not just scenery created for photographs, but the result of centuries of labour and organisation. The system works precisely because people upstream and downstream cannot behave as though the water belongs only to them.
From the viewpoint everything looks perfect.
Then you walk down among the terraces and see a man carrying enormous baskets along a narrow muddy path, and suddenly you understand how much physical work lies behind that perfect green photograph.
For us, an attraction.
For him, Tuesday.
RELIGION THAT DOES NOT LIVE ONLY IN TEMPLES
One of the things that stayed with me most from all those days of exploring was how present religion is in everyday life on Bali. It is not confined behind the walls of large temples; it spills directly onto the streets.
Small baskets made from palm leaves, filled with flowers, rice, food, and incense, were placed outside houses, shops, restaurants, workshops, and on pavements. Women in traditional clothing walked through the streets carrying large offerings on their heads while scooters rushed past only centimetres away.
Ceremony and traffic chaos existed at the same time, and nobody except us seemed to find that strange.
This is one of the key ways Bali differs from much of the rest of Indonesia. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, while Bali is predominantly Hindu.
As a result, within a relatively short distance the architecture, rituals, food, and even the appearance of public space can change completely.
LORENC AND THE PIG
While we were in Bali, Lorenc, a childhood friend of Damjan’s, came to visit. Damjan had spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, so the two of them shared a history that went back long before our journey.
Lorenc lived in Bandung and stayed with us for a few days.
And Lorenc loved pork.
Seriously.
He took us around to different places to try local food, and one of them was Warung Babi Guling Pak Malen in Seminyak.
Babi guling is one of Bali’s best-known dishes. Traditionally, a whole pig is stuffed with a mixture of spices and aromatic herbs and roasted until the skin becomes crisp. In a country where most of the population is Muslim, Bali is one of the places where pork has remained a perfectly normal and important part of local cuisine.
Lorenc claimed that Pak Malen served the best and fattiest pig on the island.
After months of tuna, mahi-mahi, and sailfish, I had very little reason to argue.
So far from home, and somehow we still ended up eating roast pig.
KUTA – THE OTHER BALI
We spent several evenings in Kuta.
Kuta was once a small fishing village, but during the second half of the twentieth century surfers and backpackers began to discover it. Then came hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and eventually mass tourism.
Today, Kuta is perhaps one of the clearest examples of how tourism can completely transform the character of a place. The beach is huge, famous for surfing and sunsets, but once darkness falls the entire area takes on a completely different personality.
It was the part of Bali we liked least. Drunk people in the streets, someone sleeping on the pavement, someone vomiting nearby, music blasting from ten different bars at once, and everything feeling like one endless party that never really stopped.
After Erromango and Epi, it seemed almost absurd.
And that was where Bali became perhaps the most contradictory place of the journey so far.
In the morning you can stand in a sanctuary almost a thousand years old. In the afternoon you can walk through rice terraces. In the evening you can watch someone throw up outside a nightclub.
All of it is Bali.
NUSA LEMBONGAN – A SMALL ESCAPE
We set aside one full day for Nusa Lembongan, a small island southeast of Bali. It is much smaller and quieter than the main island, and traditional life there long depended on fishing and seaweed farming.
Tourism had already arrived in a serious way, but the rhythm was still completely different from Denpasar, Kuta, or Nusa Dua. Less traffic, less noise, and the sense that you could finally breathe normally again.
We went there by boat, spent the day on the beach, swam, and simply enjoyed ourselves without any complicated plan. After several days of Balinese traffic, the fact that we were not spending half the day staring at the rear bumper of the car in front of us was enough of an attraction.
Lembongan felt much closer to what I had imagined whenever I used to hear the word Bali.
A small island.
The sea.
Much less tension.
Then we returned toward Port Benoa and Bali immediately reminded us that paradise never lasts for long.
One engine started losing power and we barely managed to get into the marina. Damjan later had to get into the water to see what had happened.
A large plastic sack had wrapped itself around the propeller.
PARADISE WITH PLASTIC
The amount of rubbish was one of the things I had not expected.
Indonesia generally struck us as quite dirty, but in Bali the contrast between reality and its advertised image of paradise was particularly brutal. In Port Benoa, the water was often full of plastic, bags, bottles, and anything else capable of floating.
It looked most absurd early in the morning. The sea completely flat, the rising sun turning the surface orange, the sky spectacular, and for a moment you had a perfect postcard.
Then you looked a little more closely.
Those little black dots on the water were not birds.
Mostly, they were rubbish.
On some beaches there were piles of seaweed mixed with plastic and everything else the sea had thrown back onto the shore. After the crystal-clear water of Epi and some of the other Pacific islands, the contrast was enormous.
You would think that paradise, if it really exists, might at least get cleaned occasionally.
THE GOLDEN REEL
During our time in Bali we also continued our new obsession with fishing equipment.
During our first days in Denpasar we found a fishing shop and asked the owner whether he had a serious reel for larger fish. The man disappeared somewhere into the back, climbed up into an attic, and returned with a box covered in such a thick layer of dust that it was obvious the contents had not seen daylight for a very long time.
Inside was an enormous golden trolling reel, around size 90. Chinese-made, but the moment you picked it up you understood that it was no toy. Heavy, solid, with serious gears and a mechanism clearly designed for far larger fish than anything we had been using up to that point.
The problem was the price.
We tried to negotiate, but the owner refused to come down very much. He claimed he was already selling it for less than he had paid for it about ten years earlier.
I looked at the layer of dust on the box.
At least the ten-year part sounded completely believable.
We left.
Then came back.
Then negotiated again.
Eventually we found a number everyone could live with. He finally sold something he had probably already accepted as a permanent part of the attic, and I got a new reel.
Only when we brought it back to the boat and placed it next to our existing equipment did we realise just how enormous it really was.
Almost twice the size of our biggest reel.
Now we only needed a rod.
In another shop we found a serious trolling rod, just over two metres long, made somewhere in Asia. Online, we found people using similar gear to land sharks weighing several hundred kilograms.
It was obvious that we had gone too far.
Complete overkill.
Now we only needed to catch some kind of sea monster to justify the purchase.
LEAVING BALI
Eventually the time came for Stefan and Duška to head home. Their flight was from Surabaya, so we decided to take them there by boat and continue our own journey west at the same time.
We left Port Benoa and headed toward the strait between Bali and Java. Ahead of us were roughly 270 nautical miles to Surabaya, about two days of sailing if everything went according to plan.
After we passed through the Bali Strait, the next morning looked completely different. The sea was grey, the air full of mist, and the land almost invisible. Above the layer of low cloud, only the peaks of volcanic cones were visible.
You could not see their bases.
No slopes.
Nothing.
They looked like mountains floating above the clouds.
Indonesia is one of the most volcanically active countries on the planet. Java and Sumatra lie along an enormous zone where the Indo-Australian tectonic plate is being pushed beneath the Sunda Plate, creating a chain of volcanoes that stretches across the archipelago.
Here, a volcano is not some exotic mountain you have to search for on a map.
Volcanoes are simply part of the landscape.
Merapi. Semeru. Bromo. Ijen. Tambora. Toba.
And of course — Krakatau.
Krakatau had been in my head long before I ever knew that one day I would sail through these waters. I still remembered geography class in the fifth grade, when we first heard the story of the 1883 eruption.
An island exploding.
A sound heard thousands of kilometres away.
Huge waves striking the coasts of Java and Sumatra.
Back then, it was just one of those stories from a school textbook that stays in your head because it sounds completely unreal.
And now I was here.
On a boat in Indonesia, only a few hundred nautical miles from Krakatau, moving directly in its direction.
At the same time, I happened to be reading Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester. Winchester has written several excellent books, and he has a remarkable ability to combine history, science, and individual human stories so that after a few chapters you no longer feel as though you are reading about geology, but about people who happened to find themselves in the middle of something far bigger than they were.
The 1883 eruption of Krakatau remains one of the most famous volcanic disasters of the modern era. Much of the original island disappeared in the explosions and collapse of the caldera, while the resulting tsunamis devastated the surrounding coasts and killed tens of thousands of people. Decades later, a new volcanic cone emerged from the sea — Anak Krakatau, the Child of Krakatau.
I remembered that story from the fifth grade.
And now I was looking at the volcanic peaks of Java rising above the mist, thinking how much I would like to reach Krakatau itself one day.
What had once been somewhere near the back of a geography textbook was now only a few hundred miles ahead of us.
But first, we had to reach Surabaya.
And the weather was already beginning to change.