August 20, 2025
Yesterday, we arrived in Munduk in Western Bali, the third and final stop on our Bali writer’s tour. This hotel is my favorite. Puri Lumbung, Palace of the Rice Barns, is built on rice fields and the sound of running water is everywhere. It is a peaceful haven for writing and heaven for a photographer. The staff is incredibly kind and generous. Everything feels soft and welcoming. The earth embraces us here.
We eat family style every night. Judy and Surya request special food for our group, each night a feast on beautiful Balinese food not on the menu.
It is the perfect place to end our retreat—and we have the luxury of five nights here. Come take a little look around with me:
These are the steps between my room and the Sunset Bar, where they cook and hand out free Balinese sweets between 4:00 and 6:00 every afternoon. You can order cocktails, with alcohol or without, and just sit and watch the sun set over the Bali Sea. The Sunset Bar is where Surya gives talks each day before dinner on various aspects of Balinese spirituality and practice, the theme of this retreat.
These are the steps down to the spa:
And this is the view from the sitting porch outside my room:
And this is my writing classroom, open-air, of course.
We started our day today with a hike to the waterfall, one of my favorite activities on our tour. The group didn’t know it yet, but they were going to experience our final purification by water—for those who wanted to enter the pounding, rushing waters.
Before our hike, we met in the herbal medicine garden opposite Room #10. We had two wonderful guides, Ketut and Putu. They have been guiding us on hikes in Munduk ever since the first time I brought a group here thirteen years ago.
I remember the first time I met Ketut. He was leading us on a trek through coffee growing plantations and lots of local villages (the hike we’re doing tomorrow). He was explaining something complex about ancient Balinese traditions, completely foreign to our Western ears, and while in the middle of a rice field telling us about his culture, his cell phone went off and the ring tone was the song Hotel California. A perfect juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern here in Bali.
As we gathered, Ketut handed out hand carved walking sticks for anyone who wanted to use them during our trek. He’d carved them out of coffee trees. They were smooth and beautiful.
Once we entered the herb garden, Ketut (in the front) and Putu (bringing up the rear) explained Balinese medicinal herbs in great detail: how they’re prepared (made into a tincture, a tea, a poultice, ingested, or combined, etc) and what they can be used to treat. In the herb garden, and later all along our walk, he showed us plants that could treat dysfunction of the brain and bowel, a smelly body, diabetes, eye problems, insect bites, hemorrhoids, constipation, insect bites and itchiness, malaria, high blood pressure, blood thinners, and heart attack prevention. Coleus, he told us, can be made into a tea that can help open clogged arteries. Bitters can help digestion. He said so few women with breast cancer have mastectomies in Bali because of an herbal poultice and tea combination they make from two different plants mixed together. He told us how to make natural insect repellent.
It was a fascinating and extensive pharmacopoeia.
Then it was time to start our hike to the waterfall.
There was irrigation flowing by the side of the path we were on. The pathway was largely cement with a few dirt sections. And we had to get out of the way half a dozen times when an occasional motor scooter drove by—the narrow path we were walking on was the clearly the roadway for locals.
We had several bridges to cross like this one.
At a couple of places, we stopped to take a rest.
Once we started up again, Ketut stopped every ten or twenty yards to point out something else that was growing: jackfruit, mangosteen, banana trees, cassava, snake fruit, cinnamon, nutmeg, and taro. When we pointed out a guava tree, he said, “Good for dengue fever, Bali belly, and diarrhea.”
This is what nutmeg looks like. Putu and Ketut picked it right off the tree. Ketut said the yellow one wasn’t ripe. When it’s ripe, nutmeg is bright red inside.
Lying on the path or next to it, were tarps full of drying cloves. Clove flowers, best picked right before they bloom, are used for spice.
Ketut commented, “This is why the Dutch came.”
The leftover sticks are used to make clove oil and are pounded into a flour and mixed with tobacco to make clove cigarettes.
This is one of the terribly frightening, very tall bamboo ladders used by clove pickers who climb high in to the trees to pick cloves, with no safety equipment at all.
As we walked, many amazing plants, flowers, and herbs were passed around and we were asked to smell them. I held them all up to my nose, but I couldn’t smell anything. I told Ketut about losing my sense of smell to Covid three years ago. He stopped on the trail and started pressing some acupressure points on my face, then told me the Balinese treated Covid by taking a spoonful of concentrated Arak juice two days in a row.
We passed another waterfall sign and I knew we were getting closer.
But first we had to cross this bridge:
It was actually a piece of cake:
The first time I took this hike to the waterfall, 13 years ago, the path was mostly dirt. A lone local woman sat on the side of the trail with a blanket, selling spices in tiny packets.
This time, there were several warungs, small stores, selling spices along our pathway. Last summer, there had been one such booth. This time there were four or five—and they were far more fancy than anything I’d seen before.
There were also more people hiking the trail than I’d ever seen before—dozens. In past years, when I brought groups to Munduk, we were usually the only ones trekking to the waterfall. The new warungs and the number of people on the trail seemed like a huge change in just one year. When I asked Ketut about it, he said that this waterfall had gotten listed in Lonely Planet and now word was out.
I found myself resenting the increased traffic and the changes. But then I thought about how silly that was. Here I am, a tourist, resenting the other tourists that are “spoiling” things for me. Do all tourists feel this way?
In any case, my students loved buying spices—nutmeg, vanilla, cloves, and more. All grown right here.
Just before we reached the waterfall, we came upon this HUGE spider:
Finally we turned the bend and reached Red Coral waterfall.
We had to walk past this stone man to get to the water.
I was the first one in. I’d done this many times before.
Then some of my braver students started to join me:
Then there was a whole group of us:
Everyone helped the oldest member of our group, Phyllis, who proudly proclaims that she is 82, navigate the churning water. She dipped her head under the water, proclaiming it was her third mikvah—a Jewish ritual bath. When she emerged dripping, she threw her fist up in the air and said, “That was fucking fantastic!”
More than one person said to me afterwards, “That was amazing. I didn’t know we were going to have another water purification!”
On the hike back to the hotel, we were a pretty jubilant crew.
When we got back to Puri Lumbung, people rested, got massages, had lunch—and in the middle of the afternoon, we gathered for a two-hour writing class on the theme of love.
After teaching, I returned to my room to compose this blog post before dinner.
Finally, my very long day as leader of this amazing Bali excursion was over. And I got to relax.
