Jives experienced his first earthquake, it was only a 3.8 magnitude, but it shook the doors of the balcony on our room, and sloshed our coffees about. I had experienced two earthquakes as a kid, I’m not sure where Jives was during those (maybe less observant of them haaa).

We drank our remaining coffee on the balcony of our hotel and then headed down to breakfast. I got the eggs benedict and Jives got the Indonesian fried noodles. We then set out on our daily adventure!

We had seen a cool staircase on our daily walks to Ubud, and decided that today we would climb that staircase and see where it led to. We climbed the 40 or so steps, each side of the stairway was covered in greenery and moss covered statues. We saw a carving of a triforce (from Zelda) on a bridge along the way, and what looked like hindu prayer flags.

Once we arrived at the top of the steps where the walkway made a gradual decline, past shops, small restaurants and home stays. We walked along this roadway for about 10 minutes when the road ended.

We then had the option to go to the left or the right. We chose right. This roadway was barely wide enough for a scooter and skirted a gully with a sheer drop down to a river some 30 metres below.

We weaved our way along the top of this drop off for about 10 minutes, barely diving out of the way of zooming scooters. I noticed on Maps.me (the app we use for data free map navigation) that there was a bridge to our left, but I could not see it anywhere. We finally noticed a small set of steps in the mud that led down to the bottom of the narrow gully. We decided to be explorers and climbed down the muddy steps and into a magical temple carved into the cliff sides.