Today, we woke up to see this view of our room with swimming pool and paddy field view 🙂

Both of us are very excited to go around Ubud today. We started on our journey to Kintamani Volcano. We expected it to take 2-3 hrs, but we reached the mountain in an hour or so and roads are very good. Didn’t even feel like we climbed up a hill. Before our trip, I have seen several reviews and forums talking about congested roads in Bali, but the roads are too good, way beyond my expectations. It appeared like a developed country road for me. We reached a point from where we could see the volcano and it was amazing, the cloudy climate made the feeling even more better.

It is an active volcano, with last eruption around 1960s. I expected Volcanic region to be barren, without any plants around due to the heat from the volcano. But to my surprise, we found a lake (Batur Lake) and lot of plantation around. There are volcano hiking tours every day morning around  4am and people reach the top to watch the sunrise. I wanted to do that, but we didn’t have time next day and waking up in the morning is little tough too, so gave up the idea 😛

I couldn’t take my eyes off it for sometime. There are couple of natural hot springs around the volcano.

From there, we went to Coffee plantations on the way where they showed us how they make the world famous “Luwak coffee”. They have provided us samples to taste there. It was okay.

We went to Tegallalang Rice terraces from there, it looked like an easy hike, but it took so long and was very tiring by the time we walked all around the rice terrace. There were couple of houses in between the terrace and we are asked to donate some minimum amount when we pass by the houses during the hike.

It was a great experience walking around the paddy fields and we could witness farmers extracting grains. Absolutely loved the experience of being there.

We reached our hotel by evening after lunch. This is how a typical house of Balinese which looks like a temple.

Had a great day and it rained in the evening once we reached the hotel. There are umbrellas all around the hotel and looks like rain is very common there.

We got a complimentary foot massage from our hotel for 30mins and it felt so relaxing to get it done. Great day overall 🙂