Once Chris had fully recovered, we could finally explore all the delicious restaurants and the beach of Canggu.
We found a new place to stay that came with a yoga shala. So we had some space again to brush up on our beloved acro yoga training.
On a day when Chris did an off-road dirt bike day tour, I even had time for myself and my training and could dance a little and go jogging on the beach. I ran past cows grazing freely by the roadside on the way to the beach. Indonesian cows, by the way, are a beautiful light brown and smaller than the dairy cows we know. On the way back, with the sea at my side, I ran past rice farmers who were drying their harvest in the early-morning sun and waved at me in a friendly way.
The perfect jogging-and-photo route, then.
In the evenings we became part of the traditional scooter chaos again and tried out restaurants or went for walks on the beach.
Here in Indonesia, flying kites on the beach or in the park seems to be a big tradition, and on one of the days we even witnessed a landing as teenagers reeled in their oversized kite on the beach in the evening.
We stayed a little further north and further away from the centre, so it was nice and quiet and we had a great view of the rice fields we lived among.
We also made two more trips.
One to Tanah Lot, a nearby temple right on the beach. I received my Hindu blessing there, with oil and rice marks on my face and a lotus flower behind my ear. We deliberately went in the evening because we'd read that the sunset there was supposed to be especially beautiful. And indeed: I can confirm that the sunset we got to experience there was, no lie, the most beautiful I had ever seen. It's amazing that such a consistently recurring daily event can turn out so differently, and how many factors influence the result each time. You can't think too long about how many different sunsets the sky is capable of producing and has already produced. In any case, our evening sky glowed in shades of yellow that still let the blue shimmer through in places, changing through reds to pinks, until finally, towards the end of the spectacle, the sea looked like a pot of purple paint. And suddenly the sky was dotted with black spots. At first we thought they were swallows, until it turned out that below our viewpoint there was a bat cave, from which a stream of thousands of bats was now swarming out to search for food. This was another indescribably beautiful natural spectacle that we hadn't expected.
A hugely successful evening and another great experience.
Canggu also offered great walk-in venues and hotels. For a minimum spend you could use the outdoor facilities of hotels or hostels. We found a surf hotel that had a diving tower over a 5 m deep pool and an outdoor gym on the roof. Reason enough to settle in there for an afternoon and use the pool and the roof. The 3 m tower wasn't high enough for Chris. The adrenaline level of the usual jumps was too low for him and he looked for a bigger challenge. He climbed over the barrier on the 3rd floor (we estimate it at 12 m) to jump from there into the small pool. With activities like that, my adrenaline level rises just from holding the camera.
On the roof gym we then squeezed in a short acro yoga session, rounding off a great sporty afternoon.
Towards the end of our stay in Canggu we decided to ride all the way up to the north of Bali – but that's a story of its own. (AlingAling post, coming soon)
Since Indonesia has really cast its spell on us, we extended our tourist visa by another month through an agency in Canggu. On an Instagram profile I saw a few great video stories about an Indonesian island called Sumba and convinced Chris that we absolutely had to go there. According to our research, it's an island of wild horses with dream beaches that hasn't been opened up much to tourism, where the old Indonesian Marapu faith is widespread, the local population chews betel nuts, some still live in traditional villages in bamboo huts with pointed roofs, and buffalo and pig sacrifices are still part of the festive calendar.
So Canggu was the perfect base from which to set off on our next exciting adventure.
Here's a short video summary: