Day 57 - Gede, our driver, was waiting for us when we got to our front door. Today we'd requested a day for another road trip. We were heading across the island again, but this time we stayed closer to the eastern edge.
Getting through Denpasar, the capital, takes a bit of time, even though traffic wasn't bad at nine in the morning. Other than a rest stop, our first real stop for the trip was to visit Tenganan village. Near the resort town of Candi Dasa, Tenganan Pegringsingan is as close to an original Balinese village as possible. It predates the arrival of Hinduism on the island. The layout of the village, its ceremonies, and crafts today are a reminder that before the 1970s this was a society little affected by the outside world.
Strolling around the live community was pleasurable on a hot sunny day.
We continued with a brief stop in Candi Dasa. As the hotel strip is sandwiched between the road and the sea, we went into a little resort hotel saying we were interested in a future visit. It would take an hour and a half from the airport to get here, but for some reason, we liked the area. We can't quite remember if we stayed in this town during our jeep journey in 1992.
We do remember the vista point which Jay was able to see during online research. In 1992 we explored this bit of Indonesia on a summer trip. I have a picture in a blog post added years ago, in fact more than a decade ago, which shows an old scanned photo. I wondered whether we could locate the spot after nearly 27 years.
We did! In fact, the Jemeluk viewpoint looks down at Amed's volcanic-sand beach. The fishing village had grown modestly. The hilltop location now has a restaurant at which we had lunch.
We wound back on the same mountaineous highway and were home by 4:30 pm. The scenery was 'pure Bali' and it was nice to see there's still much more to the island than some visitors get to see from Kuta beach.