Bali highs in the terraced valleys of Ubud

Bali’s vivid green hills offer a sensory overload of culture, temples and rainforest – not to mention sublime restaurants and hotels

Just outside Ubud, in the uplands of Bali, a new tented camp has opened. You dip down into a valley to find a world of cistern-shaped pools, spas with trees growing through them and tents that unzip to reveal copper baths and batik-covered walls.

For no discernible reason, one of the restaurants is designed to look like a laundry. Staying at the Capella Ubud tented camp comes at eye-watering cost – but you can visit for the 10-course tasting menu at its Api Jiwa restaurant (£65 a head) and be surrounded by washing machines and artful displays of irons and washboards.


At Capella Ubud’s heart is a fire pit where you toast marshmallows while a screen shows vintage film of Bali, including Charlie Chaplin’s 1932 visit to the island, a black-and-white montage of full-on jerky, flickering nostalgia. Chaplin came here to be re-energised after a bruising reception for his 1931 film, City Lights.

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I leave Teslin after three days.

It is early June. Out on Teslin Lake it is hot, too hot to paddle, too hot to think. I float and drift and loaf. A loon is out there somewhere, warbling through its crazy cries. I sing dumb songs. I scare the ducks for something to do, like a small boy.

Trucks rumble far off, out along the highway. All along the shore are the remains of families’ fishing camps, old bits of metal glinting in the sun. Through binoculars, I watch two kids on a quad-bike scrounging one for firewood. I watch my paddle, the line and vortex of each stroke drifting away behind me like footprints across the water. I stop and swim and carry on, I stop and swim and camp.

One evening I catch a grayling, and fry it up beside potatoes in my skillet on the fire. The sun turns circles in the sky overhead. I have already forgotten darkness.

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