Viki’s daughter is getting married tomorrow (it’s kind of the whole reason we are here) and she has been summoned to do “pre wedding” activities and rehearsals today so it’s just my dad, Luke & I exploring Bali today and first on our list is of course – White Water Rafting!

Viki was lovely enough to cook breakfast for us this morning, another bacon & egg extravaganza (a family favourite!) before we were picked up at 8am by our driver’s friend. Unfortunately late yesterday as we were heading back to our villa, Komang our driver received a phone call that his wife had been in a scooter accident and was in Hospital. Thankfully she is okay, just in shock and a bit sore but Komang has decided to stay at home with her just to be safe. Even so, Komang didn’t want us to miss out so had organised for his friend, another driver to spend the day with us which was lovely of him to do.

We drove about an hour and half to the White Water Rafting place, this one was different to the one I went to on my last trip to Bali which is great. The other rafting was awesome but I was also very keen to check this one out too! We invited our driver to come and raft with us (fully paid for of course) but he opted to sit out, he definitely wasn’t a fan of the old river rafting. We met with our Rafting instructor Johnny where he fitted us with life jackets and walked down to the river with us. We were soon set up in our raft and away we went! It was so much fun, my dad was seated up front, Luke & I sharing the middle and old Johnny up the back steering the raft as best he could. For a small, old man he sure knew how to drive the boat with all of our weight in it – it was actually pretty impressive!

It didn’t take long for us to find the rapids and for the water to start splashing in at us, we were already enjoying it so much and had over an hour of rafting left to enjoy! We ended up hitting a massive dip and dad got launched up ass over head in the boat. It was hilarious, Luke & I couldn’t stop laughing and as dad was wearing the GoPro on his head, we couldn’t wait to see the footage of him becoming air borne!

We soon arrived at a slight drop that wasn’t safe for us to go down in our raft (although I’m sure it would’ve been a thrill!) so we had to let our raft go down on its own and walk around the river to meet it on the other side. As we were walking, my brother Luke really needed to Poo. It was hilarious to see him squirm as he ran away into the bush looking for the tiniest bit of privacy to take an emergency dump in and of course, as his sister I gave him so much shit about it (excuse the pun!).

After waiting for what felt like forever for Luke to finish his poo, we finally seen him running down the hill ready to start our rafting adventure again. After rafting for a little while longer we stopped off at a little pit stop for a break, a drink refreshment and some chips before jumping back into the raft for some more fun. We were all wearing thongs and both Luke & I had taken our thongs off before climbing back into the raft & suggested for my dad to do the same to avoid losing them in the stream. As always, dad knows better though and after a couple of steps into the water one of his thongs slip off and away it went down the river. Again, Luke & I were just in fits of laughter in a massive “I told you so” moment & dad had all but realised his mistake, cutting his losses of the thong.

This was until Johnny realised what had happened and made a mad dash through the water (barefoot mind you!) chasing the thong downstream. We didn’t think he would be able to catch it but within a couple of seconds, Johnny pounced into the water, grabbed the thong and was bringing it back to our raft with a cheeky grin on his face. My dad, brother and I could not believe what we had just witnessed and still to this day, have no fucking idea how he managed to get the thong back – it was crazy and thankfully, good ol’ dad had the GoPro on and managed to capture the whole event on footage!

The fun with our rafting didn’t stop there, after a little while longer of rafting we made another pit stop to use the toilet and have another quick drink before the remainder of our trip. None of us needed to use the toilet (something I will regret later, let me tell you!) so after a quick chat and some laughs with Johnny about the thong catch we pushed the raft back out into the water. As Luke & I were loading into the raft, we realised that the middle section had developed a hole in it, potentially from sitting in the sun for a bit too long while we were stopped. This meant, that the whole middle part of our raft had deflated without a hope of inflating it again for the rest of the journey.
After some quick contemplation about whether we needed a new raft or not, Johnny decided he could make it work & after shifting our seating positions around a bit to balance out the overall weight we were off again.

Not 10 minutes into our trip from the last rest spot, Johnny’s paddle snapped (Oops!) and as we only had 4 paddles (1x paddle each) Johnny needed to use my paddle to steer and kept my brother and dad with their paddles as muscle to help guide the slightly deflated boat as needed. This suited me fine, it meant I could sit back and relax for the rest of the adventure ha.

Very shortly after the paddle snapping incident and not 20 minutes after our “toilet stop”, I suddenly desperately need to poo! I have no idea what came over me (similarly to my brother’s earlier sudden urge to poo) but as the raft was bouncing over the waves I was in the raft desperately trying not to shit myself lol. I had to ask Johnny to pull over as soon as possible and as we were in an area of the trip where there really wasn’t anywhere to pull over, it made it quite difficult to do, but thankfully Johnny made it work as best he could.
Johnny stopped the raft on one of the corners, as much out of the way as he could, calling out to the other raft boats to be careful as they passed by. I’m not entirely sure what the messaging was but as each raft passed, the instructors started laughing, so I’m almost certain they were all made aware of my emergency poo situation as I sat barely hidden with no pants on in the bush doing the business. Of course, it was only fair that Luke repaid the favour and continued to give me shit for literally having the shits! Haha.

After our rafting adventure, that was nothing short of exciting with everything that did and didn’t go wrong we had a nice lunch before heading across to visit a volcano. Unfortunately I was still feeling quite sick in the tummy and worried I may have contracted Bali belly, I managed to take some travel sickness tablets to calm my tummy down but didn’t want to risk eating any of the food just in case I wasn’t able to hold it down.

There was a semi active Volcano close by that had a small eruption only days prior to us flying in and our driver was able to take us as close as possible without being in danger to view it. This was something that was particularly fascinating as my dad has always been interested in seeing volcanoes and had never seen one for himself before (in fact none of us had!). We ended up being able to view the volcano from a distance and managed to find somewhere close enough, with a decent view for dad to set up his drone and fly it out across and over the top of the volcano – it was pretty cool and hopefully we have managed to get some good footage from it too!

After that, we made our way over to a nearby restaurant for some lunch. I was feeling much better by this stage and was well and truly ready for a yummy feed. Unfortunately, almost everything on the menu that we asked for was sold out and left us with very little choice. In the end we settled for some pizza and a refreshing drink or two, with a lovely mountaintop volcano view.

We were discussing over lunch what we should do next when our driver received a call from Komang saying that he would love to welcome us over to his house if we wanted to stop by. Komang has a farm about an hour and a half from Seminyak and had been talking to us quite a bit about his home life, and had kindly offered for us to fly the drone around his paddock if we had time. Of course we took him up on his offer and started the journey out to his home.

Komang lived in what looked like a lovely area and was busily working away in his paddock when we arrived. He took us out to his farmhouse and let dad fly his drone around before darkness settled in. Dad was really loving it as well as Komang and his workers, they were all so mesmerized by the drone and how it worked – it was pretty cool to see.

Komang showed us his tanks of fishes that seemed to be his pride and joy before taking us down to the back of the paddock to check out his cows and to taste some real coconuts. Komang had organised for a local elder to climb his coconut tree and chop down some coconuts for us to try, it definitely wasn’t my cup of tea but I tried some none the less and it was nice to just sit on the grass and chill out listening to stories from the locals.

Not long after that we flew the drone some more before being invited back over to Komang’s house, he lived just down the street from his farm and had his whole family there to welcome us. They were really lovely and offered us some of their local food, tea and friendly discussion whilst we were there. The language barrier was a little hard to get through with some of them but it was lovely to meet Komang’s wife, Jois and to see that she was okay from her accident the day prior. It was also pretty funny to laugh at each other about the different words between the two cultures.

We stayed at Komang’s for about 1.5-2 hours before heading back to Seminyak. It was well and truly night time by this stage and we were quite exhausted after an early start. We said our goodbye’s to the family and started our long journey back to our villa. I had been craving street corn since my last trip here so made sure to ask our driver to stop by a local roadside stand so I can fill that void. I grabbed one for myself and one for my dad to try (Luke & our driver weren’t keen to have any) but unfortunately he didn’t like it. Luckily for me though, it meant I had two cobs of delicious corn for the trip home, yummy!