Doha - Amed

We have arrived in Bali. At 8 in the morning local time we are standing in Denpasar. It is slightly cloudy and 30 degrees. The airport is called I Gusti Ngurah Rai. From the street we see its reddish-brown facade and the curved white roof, with a grey car driving past in front.

Strictly speaking, the airport is not in the city but south of it, in Tuban. It is named after I Gusti Ngurah Rai, a Balinese lieutenant colonel who fought the Dutch for Indonesia’s independence. On 20 November 1946 he fell together with his men in the Battle of Margarana.

With our suitcases a scooter is out of the question, so for the ride from the airport to the accommodation we have booked a car with a driver. We are heading to the east of the island, to Amed. On the way we see rice fields with small corrugated-iron huts in between, and palm trees and a forested hill behind them.

We hold a 100,000 rupiah note in our hands. It is red and shows Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, the first president and the first vice president of Indonesia. On 17 August 1945 the two of them proclaimed the country’s independence in Jakarta. The 100,000 note is the largest rupiah banknote. We come across their names once more at the end of the trip, because the airport in Jakarta, where we change planes on the way home, is called Soekarno-Hatta.

At noon local time we arrive at our first hotel in Amed. The pool is amazing and the food is good. The water glows turquoise, the edge of the pool is curved natural stone, and there is a shallow step in the water. Four loungers stand along the edge, and all around there are palm trees and huts with thatched roofs. Between the palms a mountain stands out against the blue sky.

Amed lies in Karangasem Regency in the north-east of Bali. The name actually belongs to a single village, but today it stands for a string of small villages along almost 14 kilometres of coast, from west to east Amed, Jemeluk, Bunutan, Lipah and on to Aas. People dive and snorkel off the coast, and on the beaches salt farmers have made sea salt for generations in troughs of split coconut trunks. Many of the salt fields have since given way to hotels and guesthouses.

We stay in Amed for four nights. On 17 September we move on to Ubud.