When in Rome, visit Buddhist temples. Our group of friends rented a big van with a driver and set off with big plans for a day of sightseeing around Bali. Taman Ayun was our first stop, not too far away through the morning traffic. It’s a beautiful place, full of gardens and surrounded by moats which are all part of the Balinese subak system (the waterways of the rice paddies). It’s almost 400 years old, and is the second largest in Bali, though you wouldn’t know it based on the small amount of visitors while we were there. We’d find the rest of the tourists later on in the afternoon.

While I do enjoy a stroll around an old temple, I am much more enthusiastic about stumbling across a random assortment of vintage Vespa’s in the gift shop. No idea what these were doing here, but I’d say it’s a great addition.

Further across the island we’d heard about a rice paddy that you could float through on inner tubes. We couldn’t find much to confirm this online but we set off anyway.

When we reached the turnoff where we thought it was the road/driveway climbed nearly vertically. Our driver took one look at it and shook his head no. So off we went on foot.

After about a kilometer without any sign of the place, we were starting to question our decision.

The driveway became a sidewalk and eventually just a dirt path. We soldiered on.

A mile in, success. We only saw a handful of others, all Indonesian locals/tourists, and all riding scooters all the way in. Smart. We rented our $1 tubes and hopped in.

The lady that rented us the tubes hopped right in to make sure we didn’t dump over on the first drop.

The water was clear, and cold. It felt amazing after the long hot hike up there. We all chose to ignore the fact that we’d watched a plucked chicken carcass floating past us ten minutes earlier on the walk.

Floating along an irrigation canal high up in the Balinese rice paddies—how can you not be loving life in that moment?

We weren’t exactly sure where we were supposed to get out of the water. We came to a very low, dark tunnel, which the kids were somehow enthusiastic about continuing through. We jumped out and watched them. They came through okay, then accelerated away quickly when a second canal joined in. We adults went back, jumped on our tubes and followed. When we hit that acceleration point, and the sides of the canal rose straight up around us into a sort of canyon, we started to think we’d made a very big mistake, and the kids were probably lost to us.

Our worries were unfounded, and soon we ran into a low lying wooden crossbeam which was obviously meant as the “Get Out of the Water” spot. We wandered back with our tubes to gather up our clothes and make the long slog back down the mountain to our waiting/sleeping driver.

Back down at the road was one of the many chicken farms we had seen throughout the day. Their location directly above the river left little to the imagination.

Next stop, Ubud. The Monkey Forest. The tourist hoards weren’t going to come to us, so we had to bring ourselves to them. It wasn’t just the Monkey Forest, though, it was all of Ubud. The traffic was absolutely insane. If you weren’t on a scooter you weren’t moving.

Aren’t they cuddly looking?

Our driver warned us repeatedly not to have any loose belongings, hold your phones/cameras tight, and never, ever look a monkey in the eye. They might look friendly (like a mafia family photo), but underneath the veneer they are thieves and thugs. During the course of our visit we’d witness a purse theft and an earring ripped out of a lady’s ear (snitches get stitches).

Look out!!!

Two hands on the phone and empty pockets. This guy went looking for an easier mark.

We left the monkeys around five and started for home. It’s a 30 mile drive, so you’d expect like an hour drive—ninety minutes at most, right? Three hours later we still weren’t really close. We hadn’t eaten much all day so we picked a restaurant at random off of google and had the driver head there. We figured we’d send him home (he was now on overtime), eat and then grab an Uber (Grab) the last few miles home. So we finally pull up in front of where the restaurant was supposed to be. We piled out of the van, stomachs rumbling, and looked around. We didn’t see the restaurant where it should have been. How could this be? The last review was only a week old. The driver asked a local lady who was walking past and she told him the news as she pointed across the street at a blackened hulk of a building—”Oh, that place burned down a couple of days ago.”

Four hours after setting off from Ubud we stumbled home to eat peanut butter toast and crawl into bed. It’d been a really fun day, but a really crap night. That drive alone soured us on Bali as a whole. The Australian budget airlines and backpackers can keep it.