We left Candidasa at 9.00am and travelled inland through local villages, windy steep roads, rice terraces until we reached the heights of Kintamani, the roof of Bali. We stopped here to admire the views of the active volcano, Mt Batur and its crater lake of the same name. The Batur caldera is one of the largest in the world with a diameter of 13km.

Whilst there we also visited yet another temple, Batur temple, which is the second most significant mountain temple in Bali. It has 9 temples in the complex and over 200 shrines and honours the goddess of Lake Batur. With the usual sarongs needed to visit, we spent half an hour walking around. It was again beautiful, be we are not sure how many more temples we need to visit in Bali …….

The 2nd half of the journey was now slowly going downhill towards the north coast town of Lovina. The clouds were coming in and the weather was changing quickly, no longer the sunny weather we had become accustomed too. However, it was wet season so we classed ourselves as being lucky so far. We joined the coast road and drove through the former colonial capital, Singaraja, before arriving in the small coastal resort of Lovina.

We came here for 2 reasons - it's on the way to the ferry port to Java and is famous for its dolphins. It is interesting how Lovina got its name as there is no "v" in the local alphabet. It was the founder's play on the words, 'love' and 'Indonesia'. Sunsets are also meant to be a highlight here but with the changing weather it wasn't to be.

After checking in to our accommodation we had a walk along the black volcanic sand beach watching a storm roll in. It started raining just as we were passing a beach bar which was quite fortuitous. So, a couple of beers were in order, watching the rain before going back to our accommodation for dinner.

The next morning, we were up at 5.00am ready to meet on the beach for our boat tour to hopefully see dolphins. After a coffee we boarded our small outrigger boat in search of the dolphins. We were lucky and saw a number of pods but they breached so quickly, it was really difficult to get photographs - still wonderful to see though. We had also hoped for a sunrise, but this eluded us.

That afternoon we explored the small town of Lovina along with being hassled a little by street vendors, had a coffee in a German Bakery café and spent the afternoon relaxing with a view to using the free canoes, but once again the heavens opened and it rained the rest of the day.