thatbrowngirlinblackboots

There are two kinds of people who go to Bali.

The first are chasing “the” Bali – the one Instagram has carefully curated over the years. Floating breakfasts. Flower baths. Jungle swings. Dresses with dramatic trains that somehow never get muddy.
The second are busy telling you why you shouldn’t – “It’s overhyped.” “It’s become too touristy.” “It has lost its soul.” (And honestly, it most likely is true.)

After hearing both sides for years, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Was Bali genuinely beautiful or had social media simply done a phenomenal job of overselling a dream? Well, I might have my own notion of it now.. read on to know what.

Bali – the trip I didn’t know I needed

Bali is a Hindu island in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. It’s scooters carrying entire families while luxury SUVs patiently wait behind them. It’s centuries-old rituals happening a few metres away from cafés selling smoothie bowls that cost more than a local meal. It’s noisy, chaotic, deeply spiritual, commercial, peaceful and occasionally exhausting—all at once.

And over this trip in the summer of 2026 – we were very sure that we weren’t here to tick off every “must-do”. Bali was simply the first chapter of a much larger Indonesian adventure that would eventually take us chasing waterfalls, climbing volcanoes in the middle of the night and diving back into the underwater world after fourteen years.

But before all of that, there was Bali. Which so far, had always felt super cliched to me, but turned out to be a trip I didn’t know, I really needed.

The Opening Scene of our Indonesian holiday

You know there’s a peculiar stage of every long-haul journey. The one where you’ve landed, your phone has finally found a network, you’ve texted your family the obligatory “Reached!”, and yet… you haven’t really reached. Coz, you’re stuck in an immigration queue!

The Immigration Process at Bali

Yes, this definitely requires it’s own subheading.

After almost eighteen hours of travelling from Bangalore, with a layover at Malaysia, airport food that I can’t even remember, and just enough sleep to function – we thought the hard part was over. It wasn’t. We’d read enough about how long the immigration queues at Bali are, and we still found ourselves overwhelmingly underprepared – It moved at the pace of a reluctant snail ! Every few minutes we’d crane our necks, trying to estimate how many more people stood between us and that reassuring thud of an immigration stamp, but the immigration counter was nowhere in sight !

And then there are the e-gates – oddly confounding to majority of the travellers. Basically, if you have an e-passport, you scan your e-passport data page at the gate barrier and stand directly in front of the facial recognition camera. The system instantly matches your face against your passport image and pre-approved digital visa, opening the gate automatically in under 30 seconds. Sweet and simple.
To my sorrow, even though I have an e-passport, my husband doesn’t – so I made the very conscious decision to trade efficiency for marital harmony.

And then there were whispers of a paid fast-track service. The details seemed to emerge through collective detective work from travellers in the queue, rather than any obvious signboard. Every now and then someone would disappear from the queue after learning it was an option. Whether the price was worth saving an hour or two is a question only you and perhaps your patience can answer. Official Fast Track services at Bali Airport are available if booked, but they don’t exactly advertise themselves to weary travellers standing in line.

About an hour and half later, our passports finally bore the coveted Indonesian stamp. We followed the familiar airport choreography – walked to the baggage belt, only to discover that our suitcases had long since completed their rounds and were patiently waiting in a neat little corner.

Within minutes, we were in a taxi weaving through Bali’s traffic towards our hotel in Seminyak. I wish I could tell you what that drive was like. I remember settling into the seat, the comforting hum of the air conditioner, and thinking I’d finally get my first proper glimpse of Bali. Instead, somewhere between leaving the airport and reaching the hotel, I drifted off into deep slumber.

The rest of the evening was delightfully uneventful. We showered, ordered dinner and drinks to the room, ate in bed, random conversation interrupted by the occasional yawn with the television just on like background noise.

I used to think every evening on a holiday needed an agenda. A sunset to catch. A market to wander through. But, I think, with age, I find myself appreciating evenings like this just as much. You’re somewhere completely different, but there’s no pressure to constantly be doing something.
Sometimes, the novelty lies in the ordinary — ordering room service in a new country, watching local television you don’t understand, and falling asleep knowing the exploring can begin tomorrow.

Day 2 – Finding the Rhythm

We woke up when our bodies decided they had recovered from the previous day’s marathon, but thankfully with enough remaining time for breakfast (^grin^grin^)

I’ve always had a soft spot for a good hotel breakfast buffet. Fresh local fruits, eggs made to order, dishes I sometimes can’t pronounce, the croissants and pastries I definitely don’t need, and an overload of coffee !
Just a leisurely breakfast on the restaurant balcony overlooking rows of coconut trees swaying in the morning breeze, and us enjoying every morsel of it.

The rest of the morning drifted by without much happening – we wandered around the hotel for a bit, but it was hot. Proper tropical hot – enough for us Indians to feel scorched ! So we slept, read a little, lazed around some more, and only headed out once the sun had begun to soften.

The Kecak experience

By the time we headed out, the worst of the afternoon heat had passed. We had tickets for the Kecak dance at Melasti Beach, which meant a drive from Seminyak to the southern coast of Bali. And it was then that I realised that I hadn’t missed a thing on our way from the airport to the hotel, coz it would’ve been just traffic.
If you’ve been to Indian cities – the likes of Bangalore and Pune – the Bali traffic won’t surprise you. Scooters everywhere. Cars inching forward, crawling barely. People somehow squeezing into gaps that don’t really exist. The same but slower.

As we got further away from Seminyak, the crowds began to thin out. Villages became more frequent, and every now and then we’d pass neat little offerings placed outside homes and shops – something we’d see over and over again during our time in Bali. And then there was the Garuda Wisnu Kencana statue, visible from afar, but not clear enough due to the sun.

The last few kilometeres to Melasti were beautiful. Towering limestone cliffs began to flank either side of the road, and the final stretch was smooth roads carved through massive walls of white rock.

We barely spent any time on the beach. A quick look at the water, a couple of photographs, and then we made a beeline for the amphitheatre. We’d read enough to know that good seats fill up quickly, and neither of us fancied watching the performance from the back, with heads bobbing in front.

The stage sits on an open cliffside overlooking the Indian Ocean. Rows of stone benches curve around a circular performance area. Beyond it, the horizon stretches endlessly until it meets the sky. The backdrop was very much part of the performance.

The Performance

The evening’s performance was titled “Titi Situbanda”, meaning the bridge. It followed the familiar story from the Ramayana, but through a distinctly Balinese interpretation.

There were eight scenes starting from Rama asking Hanuman (Anoman, in Balinese) to search for Sita, to his meeting with her in Ashoka Vatika, the destruction of Ravana’s garden, the building of the legendary bridge across the sea by the monkey army, and finally the battle between Rama and Ravana that reunites Rama and Sita.

There were no musical instruments. No orchestra hidden away backstage. Instead, the soundtrack was created entirely by a large group of bare-chested men seated in concentric circles around the performers. Their rhythmic “cak… cak… cak…” chants rising and falling in unison, building an almost hypnotic rhythm that carried the performance from beginning to end. It’s from this repeated chant that the dance gets its name.

It was strange, yet familiar. We knew exactly what was going to happen next in the story, but had never seen it narrated this way.

Interestingly, Kecak isn’t an ancient dance in the way many people assume. The chanting draws from an older Balinese ritual known as Sanghyang, a sacred trance ceremony performed to seek protection from evil spirits and restore balance within the community. In the 1930s, Balinese artists, together with the German painter Walter Spies, adapted elements of this ritual into a theatrical performance by weaving in the Ramayana. What visitors watch today is therefore both a cultural performance and a reflection of Bali’s unique Hindu identity.

For the Balinese, it’s more than something put on for tourists. (Almost everybody who learned we’d watched it was wowed). The Ramayana has been part of the island’s cultural fabric for centuries, and performances like Kecak help keep these stories alive across generations. While you’ll find nightly shows at places like Melasti and Uluwatu, Kecak is also performed during temple festivals and community celebrations, where its significance extends well beyond entertainment.

Day 3 – Into Bali’s Green Heart, Ubud

Type Ubud, and the internet sends you into an imagination spree of endless shades of green, temples hidden between forests, rice terraces cascading down hillsides and yoga retreats promising to change your life in three days. Now I don’t know about the yoga bit, but the rest is def true. And yes, monkeys !

The drive from Seminyak to Ubud took about an hour and half. The souvenir shops gradually disappeared. The roads became narrower. Scooters continued to dominate traffic, tourists and locals alike. Every few hundred metres we’d pass a family temple, its entrance wrapped in the familiar black-and-white chequered cloth that seemed to appear everywhere in Bali. Small woven offerings lay outside homes, shops, petrol pumps, ATMs… eventually I stopped noticing where they were placed and started noticing the rare places where they weren’t and why.

Our first stop was Tegenungan Waterfall. It required climbing down enough number of stairs to get to it but the heat was again a detractor. Thankfully, the waterfall comes into view, after just a few stairs later, albeit from a distance. No surprise it’s quite a busy attraction.

We admired it for a while, (but from the top), took the obligatory photographs, and then continued towards what was probably Ubud’s most famous residents – the monkeys.

The Monkey Forest

The Sacred Monkey Forest isn’t really a zoo, nor is it just another tourist attraction. It’s an active temple complex surrounded by dense forest and home to over a thousand long-tailed macaques that seem completely unfazed by the thousands of humans wandering through their territory every day.

The first thing our guide told us was simple – “Don’t make eye contact if one comes too close.” – But hey, we’re Indians and we obviously knew that. But it’s tough to follow such instructions, when the monkeys are literally everywhere, and so playful (not naughty and snatching belongings) at that. Mothers carrying babies, youngsters chasing each other through the trees, older monkeys lounging around with an air of complete indifference to the hundreds of tourists trying to photograph them.

And then the temple complex dating back to the 14th century. Hidden within the forest are three temples, each serving a different purpose in Balinese Hinduism.

Pura Dalem Agung Padangtegal is the largest and most prominent. Dating back to the 14th century, it’s dedicated to Shiva and is closely associated with Goddess Durga, representing transformation and the natural cycle of life and death.
A little deeper into the forest lies Pura Beji, the temple of purification. Built beside a sacred spring, it’s where priests and worshippers traditionally undergo ritual cleansing before religious ceremonies.
The third temple, Pura Prajapati, which sits close to the village cemetery and is dedicated to Prajapati, the deity associated with creation. In Balinese tradition, it plays an important role in funeral rites before cremation ceremonies take place.

We couldn’t enter the temple itself—it remains reserved for worshippers—but even from outside, the moss-covered stone carvings, guardian statues wrapped in their black-and-white checkered cloth, and towering banyan trees gave the place a sense of age that no amount of restoration could replicate.

Now, monkeys and temples in the same vicinity isn’t a rarity really, but reading about it, I figured that the monkeys aren’t there because someone decided to build a sanctuary around them. The forest came first. For centuries, the people of Padangtegal regarded this patch of woodland as Wenara Wana—a sacred forest where nature, worship and community existed as one. The temples were built within it because this was already a place of spiritual significance, and the macaques, long considered guardians of the forest, simply belonged there. It wasn’t until 1982 that the village formally designated it as the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, not to create a tourist attraction, but to ensure the protection of the forest, the temples and the monkeys as one interconnected landscape. And well, that makes sense !
Perhaps that’s why the place doesn’t feel staged. Nothing seems to exist for the benefit of visitors. The temples continue to host ceremonies whether tourists are present or not. The monkeys go about their day with complete indifference to cameras. And the forest carries on doing what it has done for centuries—holding all of it together.

Ubud Palace

Our next stop was Ubud Palace, or Puri Saren Agung. Compared to the sprawling palaces we’re used to in India, this one is remarkably modest. Intricately carved sandstone gateways, traditional Balinese architecture and beautifully maintained courtyards make it less of a grand royal residence and more of a window into how Bali’s royal families lived. Even today, descendants of the royal family continue to reside in parts of the palace.

Post the palace, we took a quick break to just walk around Ubud’s main street around the palace, window shopping and well, just, taking in the chaos, before we headed to the rice terraces.

Tegalalang Rice Terraces.

If you’ve spent more than five minutes looking up Ubud online, you’ve already seen Tegalalang. Not the name perhaps, but certainly the photograph – a person suspended on a giant swing, soaring over impossibly green rice terraces with a flowing red dress billowing behind them. It has become one of Bali’s defining images, appearing everywhere from Instagram reels to honeymoon brochures.

My expectations weren’t that high really – it’s a rice field after all! But I was so wrong.

The terraces were a brilliant shade of green, every level carpeted with young rice plants that seemed almost fluorescent under the tropical sun. From the roadside viewpoint, the valley unfolded like a giant staircase, each terrace following the contours of the hillside with a precision that could only have come from centuries of practice rather than modern engineering.

The History – Long before tourists arrived with drones and selfie sticks, generations of farming families had been cultivating these slopes using Subak, Bali’s traditional cooperative irrigation system. Believed to date back to the 8th or 9th century, Subak is a community-led way of sharing water fairly among farmers, guided as much by religious tradition as by agriculture. So significant is this centuries-old system that UNESCO recognised Bali’s Cultural Landscape, including the Subak network, as a World Heritage Site in 2012.

Something we also learned from our guide – there isn’t one single owner of Tegalalang. The terraces are divided into several privately owned plots, tended by different farming families, many of whom have cultivated the same land for generations. And then of course, tourism has become another source of livelihood, but thankfully, supplementing farming rather than replacing it.

Of course, the swings have become part of that story too. Originally just a simple rope swing overlooking the valley, the idea snowballed with the rise of Instagram. Today there are several swings, giant bird nests, bamboo platforms and carefully designed photo spots, all built to frame the landscape in the most dramatic way possible. It’s easy to dismiss them as social media gimmicks, but standing there, I could also understand why they exist. When millions of people arrive wanting that photograph, someone is eventually going to build the perfect place to take it.

I was pleasantly surprised though, that despite all the commercialisation I’d read about, the terraces never felt overshadowed by it.

The vivid green of freshly growing rice was a sight to behold , and I do suspect the landscape tells a very different story after harvest, when the fields turn golden—or even temporarily bare—as they await the next planting cycle. That’s the nature of a working farm, its beauty changes with the seasons.

Sometimes the internet oversells a place. Thankfully, this wasn’t one of those times. And no, I did not sit on the swing.

Pura Tirta Empul

Our final stop for the day was Pura Tirta Empul, and if there was one place in Bali that stayed with me long after we left, it was this.

Founded in 962 AD during the Warmadewa dynasty, Tirta Empul has stood here for over a thousand years, built around a natural spring that still flows today. In fact, the temple owes both its existence and its name to it—tirta meaning holy water and empul meaning a spring that emerges from the earth. To the Balinese, these waters are believed to be amerta, the water of life, and they remain central to the temple’s identity.

Right at the entrance stands a banyan tree – ancient and impossibly wide, its thick aerial roots cascading towards the ground and its enormous canopy casting the entire courtyard in shade. About the entrance – something that I had noticed by then was that almost every temple in Bali seemed to begin with what most of us know as the ‘Gates of Heaven.’
I’d first associated them with the famous photographs from Lempuyang Temple, but by our third day I realised they were everywhere. Every temple, every royal palace and even many traditional homes seemed to have some version of these beautifully carved split gateways.

It turns out they aren’t simply an architectural style. Known as Candi Bentar, the two halves are said to represent the sacred Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain in Hindu cosmology. Crossing between them represents leaving the everyday world behind and stepping into a space that is considered more sacred than the one you’ve just left. There are no doors to open or close. The threshold itself is the transition. Such a beautiful concept !

Going further in, we walked across open courtyards dotted with shrines and pavilions, and eventually arrive at the heart of the complex, where crystal-clear spring water bubbles up from beneath the earth before flowing into a series of purification pools. Rows of stone spouts pour fresh spring water into waist-deep bathing pools, where devotees, dressed in sarongs, hands folded in prayer take a dip. The ritual is known as melukat, a ceremony of purification intended not simply to cleanse the body, but to wash away negative thoughts, burdens and spiritual impurities before beginning anew. According to Balinese legend, these sacred waters were created by Lord Indra, who struck the earth with his staff to produce a life-giving spring after the evil king Mayadenawa poisoned existing water sources. (Further out, towards the exit, there’s also the main spring, the source, with water visibly welling up through the sandy bed below, feeding the pools continuously before disappearing through a network of channels that have sustained this temple—and nearby communities—for centuries.)

Beyond the bathing pools lies the jeroan, the innermost courtyard and the most sacred part of the complex. This is where beautifully tiered meru shrines, lotus-shaped altars and intricately carved sanctuaries stand beneath towering banyan trees. Unlike many Indian temples where a single deity often dominates the complex, Tirta Empul reflects the layered nature of Balinese Hinduism. The temple is dedicated to Vishnu, the preserver and deity associated with water, but the inner courtyards also contain shrines dedicated to Shiva, Brahma, Indra—whose legendary spring gives the temple its sacred waters—and even Mount Batur, revered as a living manifestation of the divine. Rather than feeling like separate places of worship, they coexist as different expressions of the same philosophy.

Well, I won’t pretend to understand Balinese Hinduism after spending just 3 few days on the island. But I have to say, something stirred within me. It is, after all, quite distinct from the Hinduism I grew up around in India. (Major thanks to our guide who explained everything so patiently).
The familiar gods are all here—Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Ganesha, Saraswati—but they exist within a philosophy that has evolved over centuries alongside indigenous Balinese beliefs and a deep reverence for ancestors and the natural world. At its centre is Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the one supreme divine reality, while the many gods are understood as different manifestations of that single source. Daily life revolves around maintaining harmony, a philosophy known as Tri Hita Karana—the balance between people and God, people and nature, and people with one another.

Religion, in Bali, seemed less about obligation and more about rhythm. Offerings weren’t reserved for festivals or special occasions – they sat outside homes, cafés, petrol stations, shops and street corners. Temples weren’t separated from everyday life—they were woven into it. The same philosophy that honours mountains, forests and rivers also reveres springs like the one at Tirta Empul, seeing nature not as something apart from the divine but as one of its purest expressions, and honestly for a person like me, barely religious, I was floored!

Somewhere between the sound of flowing water, the scent of incense drifting through the courtyards, and watching people practise their faith without spectacle, I found myself seeing Hinduism differently. Or perhaps, more accurately, I found myself falling in love with the Balinese interpretation of it.

And with that, we bid goodbye to Ubud.

The drive back to Seminyak was quieter than the one that had brought us there. Partly because we were tired, but mostly because I had a lot to think about. Somewhere between the monkey forest, the rice terraces and the thousand-year-old springs of Tirta Empul, I had started forming my own opinion of Bali, or maybe changing it.
When I’d first arrived, it had felt familiar—almost too familiar at times. But Ubud had shown me a side of the island that was unmistakably its own. One that couldn’t be reduced to beach clubs, infinity pools or perfectly curated Instagram reels.

By the time we reached Seminyak, I realised I was overwhelmingly happy. We ended the evening exactly the way it deserved to be ended—with dinner and a couple of drinks by Seminyak Beach

Tomorrow, Indonesia would reveal an entirely different side of itself. The beaches and temples would be behind us. Ahead lay volcanic landscapes, midnight alarms, long hikes and some of the most surreal scenery we’d ever experience.

Bali had been gentle. East Java, as we’d soon discover, had other plans.

Stay tuned for more posts from this trip.