New horizons: Go island hopping in Indonesia

When the US author George Saunders won the inaugural Folio Prize earlier this year, he thanked the judges, his publisher, his wife and a troop of Indonesian monkeys. He’d fallen ill after swimming in a monkey-infested pool while working in the Sumatran oil fields, had to quit his job and returned home to start a writing career.

The unusual dedication struck a chord. After my ten-day trip to Indonesia, I also wanted to thank the mad macaques I’d met — not for cutting my time there short, but for the monkey business we encountered: from cheeky attempts to burgle our room to displays of jungle acrobatics.

In a country made up of more than 17,000 islands, spanning 3,000 miles along the Equator (roughly comparable to the distance from New York to San Francisco), where over 300 languages are spoken and several religions practised, it’s hard to know where to start. For me and my friends our first stop was the Muslim island of Lombok. More conservative and far less developed than its superstar neighbour Bali, which is Hindu, Lombok has long been touted as Indonesia’s next hot destination; with its deserted palm-fringed beaches, tropical islands and the mighty Gunung Rinjani volcano, it’s not hard to see why.

We were staying at Sempiak Villas, a boutique hillside resort on the south coast. Our open-plan bungalow, made out of coconut wood, overlooked the sugar-white sands of Selong Belanak beach, one of the island’s most picturesque. It wasn’t long before we’d taken up residency, ensconced in our bean-bag thrones, a herd of water buffalo occasionally plodding past en route to the paddy fields. We swam out to see the fishermen at work on their brightly painted boats and that evening sampled their fresh catch with a hearty barracuda stew at the beachside Laut Biru Café.

Luckily, fearsome barracudas were absent on our snorkelling trip the next day. We’d ventured to Gili Asahan, off Lombok’s south-west coast, also known as the first of the Secret Gili islands — the more famous Gilis, such as the party island of Gili Trawangan are to the north and have become tourist hotspots. In contrast, there’s only one place to stay on Asahan: Pearl Beach’s cute bamboo cottages with open-air showers and private hammocks perfectly complement the unspoiled surroundings. We snorkelled just off the beach, seeing an all-star Finding Nemo cast, minus the sharks. That night we waded into the water again, stirring the coral algae which emitted a magical phosphorescence across the water.

The waters aren’t always so idyllic, which can make crossings between islands tricky, especially if you want to get from Lombok to Bali in the rainy season, as we did. The popular fast boat can take under an hour on a good day — but after eight hours on a lurching ferry we docked at the port of Padangbai and had no choice other than to commit a terrible cliché and follow Eat, Pray, Love’s Elizabeth Gilbert to Ubud, Bali’s ‘spiritual centre’, in search of some much-needed balance.

We found what we were looking for at a power yoga class at Yoga Barn, which is dramatically situated in a jungle ravine. Thanks to Gilbert’s book, and the subsequent film starring Julia Roberts, Ubud has become a spiritual Mecca for many a ‘lost’ westerner, but the city copes well with the hordes of linen-clad yogis, absorbing them into the frequent Hindu processions that take over the streets. It has also become one of the best places for food in Bali. We ate a traditional lunch of babi guling — roast suckling pig served with fried intestines, crispy crackling and rice — at Ibu Oka, an Ubud institution. The meat was extraordinarily succulent and there was no doubting its freshness: the pig farm is ten feet below the restaurant.

Dinner that night was in the slightly more salubrious surroundings of the Alila hotel, just outside Ubud in the Ayung river valley. The hotel is surrounded by pistachio-coloured paddy fields and wild jungle, home to troops of monkeys. After prawn soup, fresh seared tuna and mango and chilli martinis at the hotel’s Plantation restaurant, we retreated to our Terrace Tree Villa, overlooking the verdant valley. The best seat in the house is in the pool-sized bathtub, from where I watched the monkeys swing athletically from branch to branch only metres away as I soaked.

It would be easy never to want to leave the hotel, which has its own spa and an infinity pool that cascades down to the valley, but we had an early-morning appointment with the hotel’s chef, Dewa, at Ubud’s public market in preparation for an outdoor cookery class. The market was an explosion of colour and we ate as much as we bought as Dewa taught us how to identify exotic fruits such as red lychee-esque rambutans and bright olive-shaped tamarillos.

Back beneath the palm trees in the hotel’s gardens, the ingredients for the class were immaculately laid out, each one encased in its own banana leaf tray. We attempted local delicacies including bumbu bali, a spice paste that the Balinese make in large quantities to accompany most meals, and nasi goreng, a classic dish of fried rice and chicken. We must have been doing something right as the fragrant smells soon attracted the local monkeys to the nearby palms.

It was the perfect setting, and company, for our last supper. As difficult as it is knowing where to start in Indonesia, after just ten days it’s even harder to come to terms with having to leave. I left with the taste of Ubud fresh in my mouth, and an appetite to return to sample more of the country’s many flavours.