#bigtreefarms

As some of you will know, my jet setting friend Laura came to stay with me for a week in May.  This meant it was definitely time to tick off a typical European fantasy destination... Bali!  

Firstly, lets get this out of the way.  Yes, I went to Bali.  No, I didn’t see a single beach.

By chance our trip coincided with the Ubud Food Festival, a small grassroots festival and already a huge success in just it’s second year.  After a bit of research, we decided to spend our 3 nights in Ubud, at the Alaya Resort which turned out to be a pretty damn good choice!

On our first morning we explored Ubud on foot.  We came across monkeys, paddy fields and the Ubud palace in the bustling centre.

We then walked up to the Food Festival site, just outside of the main centre to take our tour to an organic farm.  At the farm, we filled our plates with cocoa, cashew and coconut samples and sat down to listen to Ben Ripple, one of the co-founders of Big Tree Farms.  He told us his story from starting as a curious backpacker to acquiring some land and the series of surprises and good luck which enabled him to start his ethical business.

We had the opportunity to sample some raw cocoa beans, roasted beans, nibs and the finished product.  All of which were divine and it was the first time I’d seen all the products from start to finish (you don’t see Cadbury World dishing out fresh cocoa pods!). 

We then got to don some sexy but hygienic hats to tour the factory!

After the tour we headed back to the festival site for some dinner and then called it a night, as we had a VERY early start the next morning...

Now, I believe this was my idea (egged on by Lonely Planet and far too many online blogs), but we decided that a 2am wake up call and then a hike up an active volcano in the dark seemed like A. Good. Idea.

We were picked up from our hotel at 2:30am and driven to a hotel near the base of Mount Batur for a rather eclectic breakfast of fruit, chocolate cake and coffee (I’ve had worse) at 4am in the morning.  By this point we were buzzing and couldn’t wait to get cracking.  This was the first time we saw who was in our tour group, and to our surprise they were all young, fit, twenty-thirty somethings.  The trip was starting to look more hardcore!

Armed with torches and drinking water we started our ascent with a local guide, who looked far more chilled about it than we did and apparently didn’t need a torch or proper footwear.  Initially you walk up through a forested area, with some gentle and not-so-gentle slopes.  Once you clear the top of the trees, the real work starts as the trek becomes a gravelly, rocky climb - ideally you need all four hands and feet to get you up!  On a particularly steep part, I lost my footing and afraid of losing the torch down the slope broke my fall with my fore arm, which stung quite a bit for a while.  However as the sun started to rise and we neared the top, the reason for our trip became clear.

Although it was cloudy, so we didn’t get a “proper” sunrise, to be above the clouds with such beautiful scenery was pretty awesome. There were a few novelty tricks at the top, including the guide baking some eggs and bananas in the steam from one of the craters, but mostly it was about taking a break to enjoy the view and recover from the hike up!

After an hour or so we started to make our way down, which was almost as difficult as the trek up and resulted in me sliding down the path on the side of me I hadn’t bashed up earlier, so at least that evened things up a bit.

At the bottom we said goodbye to the guide and were led to a hot springs resort, with geothermal waters.  This was a relaxing way to end the hike and also included a foot massage.  And again, the view wasn’t too shabby either!

After that we took our transfer back to the hotel and were all done by 1pm!  Having been up for 11 hours already at the point, we decided to indulge in some well deserved pool time!

On our final night we went out to The Elephant, a vegetarian restaurant in Ubud, with a friend we had made on the cocoa farm tour.  The food was great (the kind where you forget it’s vegetarian) and was a nice end to a long day.

The next morning we were pretty sad to be having our final breakfast, and spent the last few hours wandering around Ubud before spending a further couple in the hotel’s spa.  We both got a Balinese massage and a mini facial for a bargain price (one of the things I love about Asia!).