Our next Bali stop was the town of Toya Bungkah, nestled at the base of Bali's most active volcano, Batur. This is the view from up on the rim of a more ancient caldera, where the town of Batur moved to when it was repeatedly destroyed by the lava flows that you can see down in the valley.
Toya Bungkah is on the other side of Batur, which has (so far at least) been spared from lava flow during eruptions. It sits on a small lake (also called Batur). We made our home for three days at a simple guesthouse with this fantastic view and an equally fantastic name: Under the Volcano III.
Let me tell you, this was a blissful place to be. Maybe due to the higher elevation, it felt markedly cooler and less humid up here than down on the coasts, and the nights were cool enough that I (gasp) could put on long sleeves for the first time in a few weeks. It's kind of shocking how fast days can pass when you just eat breakfast (banana pancakes with honey and local coffee), play some Yahtzee (SR has invented "metaYahtzee," our new obsession), eat some lunch at Volcano I (owned by another branch of the Volcano III family; you wouldn't think that Hershey's syrup in avocado puree would be tasty, but you'd be wrong)...
...wander around the town, where there was a soccer game every single evening...
...and then have some fried rice for dinner before a solid nine hours of sleep. What more could one ask for?
The highlight of the visit, and the impetus for choosing this particular town as a base for a few days, was the pre-dawn, two-hour climb from the village to the top of Batur volcano to watch the sun rise. That's the neighboring island of Lombok (and its own, incredibly massive volcano) that you can see on the horizon, there.
Once light, along with a good hundred other people (mostly Balinese, which surprised me in a good way), we enjoyed the views of the crater rim and, on the other side of the lake, Abung mountain and (the larger shadow behind it) another volcano called Agung.
After our guide cooked us breakfast (a hard-boiled egg and cooked banana between two pieces of white bread--that was a new one for me) over a vent of the volcano, we set off on the very narrow rim of Batur to check out the caldera from a different angle.
We descended on the opposite, less steep side, where you can see the secondary and tertiary calderas of Batur, as well as the lava flows over where Batur village used to be. (The rim at the top of the picture is where I was standing when I took the first shot in this post.)
There's even a colony of macaque monkeys living right up there in the danger zone.
The end of our walk took us down through local gardens...
...and rice paddies...
...back to Toya Bungkah and our days of leisure there. If I ever withdraw my life savings from the bank and seemingly disappear off the face of the planet, this village is probably one of the places you should check for me.
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