Old Friends & Volcanoes
A few days ago my friend Nik Wood and I decided to meet and drive to the North of the island to the Batur Volcano lookout. I woke up around 7 and drove 20km to Ubud, a little jungle town in the middle of Bali where I lived for on and off for over a year when I first came to island. Bali has been under border lockdown for weeks, with no flights coming onto the island and the roads were virtually empty. What can usually amount to being a 1hr long trip took just 38 minutes. Ubud was a ghost town, like I’ve never seen it before. I drove through town and stopped by for breakfast my favourite raw vegan restaurant, Seeds of Life. It was hard to keep myself from ordering everything on the menu as I haven’t been to there for months.
After a phenomenally delicious and filling breakfast (if you’re ever in town order the SOL bowl), I drove to Sayan and met Nik. Our meeting was particularly special because 8 months ago Nik, a respected life coach and host of the Life Athletics Podcast, was involved in an accident that severely fractured his skull and his friends and family were left praying that he would make it and recover with his motor skills and personality in tact. I hid the tears in my eyes as we hugged. Not only did my superhero friend manage to recover, he was exactly as I remembered him, happy, clever, funny and kind, now sporting a warrior’s scar across his head which made him look even more handsome than ever. I initially thought we were going to drag race our two bikes to the volcano (kidding .. well, maybe half kidding) .. but we realised that if we rode on separate bikes we couldn’t talk, so I jumped on Nik’s Yamaha and rode jetpack with him for 30 km while we caught up on the past year of our lives. None of my stories of course could hold a candle to Nik’s life changing experience. Once we left the smothering heart of Ubud and entered the villages, the air quickly cooled and even got a bit chilly, a coveted sensation when you’re living in the tropics. Before we knew it we drove out to the Batur lookout. It couldn’t have been a clearer, more beautiful day for the trip. The landscape looked almost surreal, sprawling green fields and plantations laid out for miles below us. Towering above them and overlooking the turquoise blue waters of Danau lake was the Batur Volcano. Batur is the ’smaller' of Bali’s two active volcanos. I climbed it in March of 2017, a month and half after the death of my fiance to place a memorial inside the crater before sunrise. Looking out on it now, three years later I smiled knowing that a memory of the one I loved was still out there, up on top of that glorious mountain.
Nik and I decided to drive a perimeter around the valley crater and explore the surrounding area. We ended up descending into the valley and settling at Danau Lake. Danau is considered sacred by the Balinese and forms a crescent around the base of Mount Batur. We stayed down there for about an hour, chatting and watching in wonder as the little grass islands on the lake danced around the water in tandem with the wind.
Adventures to be continued …
