Week 2 cont.: through the mountains

After leaving Pemuteran we headed up the western end of the central mountain range, driving along a string of dormant volcanoes, several of them now filled with breathtaking lakes.

We passed Lake Tamblingan, Lake Buyan and Lake Bratan, before stopping around lunch time at Bedugul. Bedugul is famous as Bali's garden capital, and is the source of many of the flowers, fresh fruit and vegetables that you find in the tourist resorts. We went to a little restaurant called the Strawberry Stop and had an absolutely wonderful vegetable dish called Chap Chay. We then walked up to the Botanical Gardens, which were a lot further away than the map suggested and almost all of it up the side of a steep mountain. It is a lot less formal than some of the gardens I've been to, with enclaves of a particular type of plant scattered in amongst the natural forest of the area. The flowers were very nice, but it was actually some of the Balinese statues that really stick in my mind even now.