East Bali: A taste of paradise that is far from lost

By Craig Tansley
February 25 2017 - 12:15am
Mt Agung, Bali's tallest mountain, casts its  shadow over most of East Bali
Mt Agung, Bali's tallest mountain, casts its shadow over most of East Bali
East Bali is that image you had of Bali – all mountains, rice paddies and forest. Photo: supplied
East Bali is that image you had of Bali – all mountains, rice paddies and forest. Photo: supplied
Silhouette of palm trees on the lake. Photo: iStock
Silhouette of palm trees on the lake. Photo: iStock

Niluh Sriasil looks across her property, through her flame trees of blazing red and frangipanis of fairytale pink; past her fast-ripening mangoes out onto a crescent-shaped bay where the sea glints like a hundred camera flashes exploding at the same moment in the morning sunshine. She apologises quietly: "I'm sorry," she says. "We have no money for a swimming pool." Beneath us – where her front yard pitches into Lombok Strait – there's scarcely room for the three tiny bungalows she's built above a black-sand beach where jukung (traditional fishing boats) fill every spare centimetre of space, but she's embarrassed all the same she can't provide me with the fancy horizon pools that are the standard of every accommodation provider in Seminyak, Canggu or Uluwatu in Bali today. "I don't want a horizon swimming pool," I'd like to tell her. "I want what you have here: a beach with no-one on it."

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