Ubud is a pretty place. I stayed in a gorgeous little hotel with a swimming pool. There were nice restaurants and cafes nearby and the rice fields in the countryside a short walk away. One evening I went to see the remarkable traditional kecak dance - the performers are apparently in a trance while acting out stories with music, dance, chanting, impressive costumes and fire - part of it involved dancing over red hot coals! I spent time in Ubud's large markets...

Tirta Gangga is a village in the Balinese countryside. We went for a walk through the rice fields, where we saw lots of little Hindu temples set up in the fields. We saw some farmers ploughing fields manually using a plough pulled by cows and we saw some people planting rice in the flooded terraces. We passed one man who was washing his cows in stream - quite strange! And we had a laugh with some farm labourers who were sheltering from the rain and pretending to ...

Leaving behind the caterwauling of the mosques in Java for predominantly Hindu Bali, it was a very long day's travelling to catch the ferry across the water and then on to the small town of Lovina. Bali has more nightlife and bars in which wine and cocktails are sold (unlike Java, which only sells beer). It was also a relief not to have to cover my shoulders and knees the whole time, which was proving a challenge for my limited wardrobe as well as pretty impracti...

We stayed in a little hotel halfway up a mountain that was decorated like an old-fashioned ski chalet in the Alps - quite unlike anything else I've seen in Java (apparently one of the owners is German). We set off from there at 3:45am for a nerve-wracking journey up the mountain in a jeep to watch the stunning sunrise with a view of the volcanoes - Semeru and Bromo (and some others that I don't remember the names of). We were above the clouds that engulfed the b...

We spent a night at an Environmental Education Centre out in the countryside - it had cute little bungalows with bathrooms that had only three walls and one side open out onto the surroundings! They had gardens of organic vegetables and medicinal herbs as well as a few animals. We went for a walk around the area, through rice paddies and across streams - it was very pretty. The centre runs a program of helping local farmers to produce organic crops and the resta...