The drive was rejuvenating and made me feel the excitement of travel after the last few weeks of big cities and the same old town/market scene. Eastern Bali accomplished the long sought after rainy rice field view I had been dreaming about every time I thought about traveling to SE Asia. Maybe the main image that I think of when thinking of SE Asia is the flooded terraced rice field and on this 3 hour Uber ride I saw everything I had been dreaming of. Bali finally got its full day of rain (after a very low average rain for the "rainy season") and it happened to be the time we are swerving through the slolem (as our driver called it) switchbacks heading to the coast. The beauty of the fields was only amplified by the downpour of rain with the view being completed by the volcano peeking though the clouds in the background. This was the first drive since Thailand that had me childlike with my face pressed against the window and recording the entire scene in short snapchat videos.
Pai! - Herbie and the Cave of Wonders
We took a minibus up the famous "762 turns" to Pai (pronounced bye). We zig-zagged our way through some pretty incredible mountains on our way to the small town. Our first night we took a nice easy stroll through the town and stopped to eat some falafels with friends we made on the mini-bus ride up the mountain. They were an energetic and fun couple from Canada who took two years off to travel around. We chatted with them for a while and talked about how incredible it would be to have jobs that allowed us to travel forever. After day dreaming eating tasty food we said goodbye and headed our separate ways.
Roy and I wandered through the town and walked the short 5 minutes to our hostel The Rainbow House on the edge of town. We actually booked The Rainbow House because of an older American gentleman that we met in the Taipei airport two and a half weeks earlier.