Mini-Travelogue: Walking Along an Unnamed Stream in Bali

A lazy quarter-mile jaunt before breakfast

This handmade bamboo bridge lies up downstream from the hostel where I’m staying, and I’ve been wanting to go back to get a photo, but it’s been raining every night and the hillsides have been muddy, so I couldn’t get down the short slope to the walkway along the stream. Last night was clear, so today’s the day!

As I clambered down the still-damp hill, I was serenaded by roosters and a few songbirds. The neighbor’s cow mooed along with them.

Here’s the view east, looking downstream from my starting point:

Just above the curve, I could hear two pigs squealing and one pig grunting.

Around the curve, here’s the telecom tower above and cattle below. At lower left, you can see a little smoke from someone’s burning rubbish pile.

Here’s a close-up of that wonderful bamboo bridge. I was tempted to step out onto it, but do not trust my balance in flip-flops on a surface like that.

Swifts were dodging back and forth under the bridge, and a four-foot-long lizard (maybe a big gecko?) was swimming below. Steps lead down to a big rock, and someone had gone down and placed flower offerings on the rock.

Just up from the bridge, the path ends, so I turned back. A couple of dragonflies flew through the sunbeam.

Across from my hostel, cleaned bamboo is drying. Each pole is about 30 feet long. The fellows who were trimming it yelled, “Hallo, swimming lady!” and smiled and waved while I was doing my laps a few days ago.

Passing the hostel to go upstream to the west … oh, no! the walkway has fallen down. It’s not solid dirt beneath, but four feet of empty air, so I can’t get past it. I wonder if the flagstones were undercut by the nearby mini-rapids.

Oh, well. Things are much the same upstream, except there’s a place where the flagstones were humped up like tents, maybe because of the earthquakes last month, and there’s a place where lots of bamboo has fallen across the path, so I had to clamber over and under to get through it. Lots of fun to scramble through, but probably not an interesting photo.

Here’s a last look upstream to the west, as the overgrown walkway disappears into shadow. Across the stream, you can see how high the water gets sometimes by the blue rag caught on a rock half-way up the wall — almost as high as the top of the retaining wall I was walking on.

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