Batur Detour

I’m not really a beach guy. I fry to lobster hue in minutes, and sand sucks - it does, and you know it. However, I do really like surfing, which made the 2+ weeks we spent on the Bukit Peninsula very tolerable. I’ve taken some ribbing for this dichotomy (hypocrite, my teenage son mutters), but at some point, as I sat on my board, lolling on the waves between sets, I realized that I love surfing for the exact reason I love fly fishing: you have to hunt for the big one, position yourself correctly and when the moment comes, you have to apply your skill to catch it. The very best kind of intermittent reward plus a bit of skill to addict the mind.

A map of the Bukit breaks with the old names (Padang Padang is now Thomas, while Labuan is now called Padang Padang). We explored beaches from Suluban to Balangan and I surfed at Balangan, Dreamland, Impossibles, Baby Padang (not labeled, but it’s the A-frame next to Impossibles), Thomas, Racetracks, and Peaks (aka Uluwatu).

Thus framed I was able to enjoy the perfect Indo swell nearly every day and I improved my surfing enough to paddle out to the famous Uluwatu break on my last day there. This setting is extraordinary, with the Uluwatu cliffs towering above the lineup, crowned with the eponymous (or vice versa) temple. Below the waterline, the fish swim about your feet, and when you’re riding, the coral reef races only 2-3’ beneath the surface, dangerous but exhilarating. I went out with an Indo guy named Didi (not to be confused with Dodo who waved from the next warung) who coached me on technique and channeled all the Bali chill:

“You don’t need to be a robot, feel the wave with your shoulders.”

Or: “When I was a kid, there was nothing on those cliffs. Now there are so many hotels. In ten years, I won’t recognize it. But for now, I’ll surf and enjoy every moment I can.”

Or: “I have to remember to hold things tight in my hand, not tight in my heart. Then if they’re gone, I can still be happy.”

Or: “We have the beeeeest ‘shrooms in Bali. Prepare your mind and you never have a bad trip.”

And: his WhatsApp name comes up as The Color of Life.

A kindly reminder along Labuansait Road

Also, he hangs out at Thomas Beach, which is a 1.5 mile round trip paddle to the Ulu break. “We can just go from Thomas,” he said. “It’s good for your arms.” Cool.

The last day swell wasn’t huge (6-7’), but the wind was light, the water was crystal clear, and I picked up a dozen waves including two stellar lefts and only two embarrassing wipeouts. An awesome end to my time in one of the best surf locations in the world.

This is nasi campur: rice (nasi) plus whatever the chef decided to make today. Perfect for after surfing.

The Detour

But, I promised ‘Batur’ didn’t I? In the midst of our Bukit days, we figured it would be foolish to miss out on seeing the more mountainous areas of the island and so we took a hiatus to points inland. First on this detour were a few days in Ubud, which is a confusing destination since there’s nothing there but some tourist shops in town and some rice fields surrounding. As we rolled into town behind a horrible Bali traffic jam, we puzzled over the posters we had seen at the astonishingly beautiful Padang Padang beach that just said, “I mean, it’s no Ubud.” False. Advertising.

We did have a nice day trip outside of Ubud to Tupad Cepung waterfall.

The Ubud rice field in front of our house in the morning.

Tupad Cepung canyon

Joe practices his Insta game

Joe Naruto runs through a waterfall

Following Ubud, we drove further north to the most prominent geographic feature (thanks Google terrain layer) on the Balinese map: Mount Batur. Mount Batur is an active volcano that has collapsed, resulting in a semi-circular lake around a central cone. Numerous recent eruptions, the last occurring in 2000, have created lava fields of varying age around much of the cone that allow you to clearly see the evolution of vegetation growth on fresh lava. The mountain at the center is listed as an UNESCO site and is commonly climbed very early in the morning (4 am!) so revelers can see the sunrise from the top. We’ve seen plenty of mountain sunrises, so decided to start climbing at a more humane 7 am – plenty late to feel rested but not so late as to be hot. We met the early risers coming down the mountain (sometimes literally falling) and at least four of the guides asked if we were going up for the sunset. Nyuck, nyuck, guys.

At the top of this mountain, part of the shtick is that your guide brings eggs and bananas to be cooked in the mountaintop steam vents for breakfast. However, after we placed our steam-vent-breakfast and walked away to enjoy the views, a hidden band of monkeys broke into the cooking chamber and stole all but one of the bananas. Now, I’ve had four experiences with monkeys on Bali: (1) Em’s stolen glasses, (2) they opened and drank all my water while I was surfing, (3) they chased, teeth barred, a man with a baby in his arms who tried to get his coconut back, knocking him over and nearly causing him to drop the baby, and (4) the afore mentioned banana theft. In each case, the Balinese were like, yep, those monkeys, what’ya gonna do? And I was like, let’s rig a hidden shock mechanism to train them not to steal stuff. Or laser them in the eyes. Perhaps I have not properly internalized Didi’s Bali chill.

Lake Batur

Walking the caldera rim

Eggs in the steam vent

After placing the eggs and bananas we walked away so trustingly.

This jerk

Signage at the top

The trail looking backwards around the rim

A teenage moment

A pretty OK view. The most recent lava flow is visible in the distance on the right.

Pano!

The caldera

At the top

This is a Golden Orb-weaver. It’s span is as big as my hand and they were everywhere in town, thousands of them. If you look closely, you can see the male just chillin’ on the female’s abdomen. Also, you can see that the web really is golden (from whence the name).

Naturally heated hot tub at the villa

Trail Difficulty Rating

When we started this year, one of the first hikes we did was the Wonderland Trail in Washington, just Em and I. While on the trail we met four guys going the opposite direction who were about to start a very steep climb. I commented on the steepness, but they replied that it was intentional, the Wonderland is a loop and they much preferred climbing steeply than descending steeply and that the direction they were going had more gradual descents than our direction. That got me wondering (on the Wonderland) if (a) this was really true and (b) how to quantify the difficulty of a trail. While I was in Bali, I wrote some Python code to plot the histogram of trail gradients and to quantify a trail’s mean difficulty per mile based on trail GPS and altitude data plus user preferences for various gradients. As usual, I’m not the first to this party. Although I didn’t find anyone else using perceived difficulty per unit distance to rank trails, there is plenty of literature devoted to estimating/quantifying trail difficulty, such as this paper (from a Swiss group, of course): Calbimonte, Jean-Paul, et al. "Semantic data models for hiking trail difficulty assessment." Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2020. Springer, Cham, 2020. 295-306. Question answered.

From this, it’s not at all obvious that there’s a difference between CW and CCW. Recall from road engineering school gradients or grade are defined as the distance up divided by the distance travelled (multiplied by 100 to covert to percent). Comfortable walking is usually less than 5%, while steep stairs are 50-100% grade.

But from the histogram of gradient (this is for the traditional CCW direction), you can see that, in fact, the counter-clockwise direction does have the climbing clustered at 10%, while CW has more ascents spread into the 15-20% range.

Gradient histogram for the easiest (Kerry Way) vs. the hardest (Table Mountain) hikes we’ve done this year. Both x axes have a range of (-120, 120). Big difference.

However, it turns out that even when you strongly prefer to walk steep uphill vs downhill, the difficulty per mile of the Wonderland Trail going clockwise (our way) vs counter clockwise (the other guys’ way) is very small compared to broader variation in trails. Peak climbs like Mount Bisoke and Mount Batur tend to be very difficult; short but straight up. I’m writing this on the plane to France to hike the GR-10 and another finding was that, even though we’ve hiked about 400 miles this year, the long trails we’ve done are generally very easy, and the GR-10 is…not.

Setting for adjusting perceived difficulty by gradient. These settings have a strong preference for flat and moderate climbs. Vertical scale (not labeled) is perceived difficulty rating (0-1).

Gradient adjusted difficulty for some of the hikes we’ve taken this year. You can see that the Wonderland difficulty is very similar in both directions. Also, not so encouraging that the two longest hikes we’ve done (Kerry and Congo-Nile) are two of the three easiest.

Here is the code hosted on Colab: TrailDifficulty.ipynb