Namaste

By the time I travelled to Bali, my life had already taken me from studying yoga to becoming a pastry chef. They may seem like two completely different worlds, but Bali had a rather beautiful way of bringing them back together - through food, yoga, ingredients, people, gratitude and a deeper curiosity about the island itself. There are places that seem particularly suited to the person you are when you arrive. Bali was that for me.

Long before I became a pastry chef, I had studied and trained as a yoga instructor. My life eventually took me in a very different direction, but my interest in yoga had never been limited to learning poses. It was the philosophy that fascinated me: awareness, gratitude, nourishment and a more conscious relationship with the way we live.

By the time I arrived in Bali, food had become my profession. That changed the way I travelled too. I wanted to taste things. I wanted to know what was growing around us. I wanted to understand ingredients at their source and experience what other people were doing with food.

Bali gave me both. It gave me a place to reconnect with something I had studied years before, a spiritual dynamic, as well as further explore the things what I chose to dedicate my life to. Food. Pastry. Ingredients. Their source. And thankfully, it also gave us plenty of opportunities to forget about both and simply LIVE.

A hotel for two

The first half of our stay was at Puri Kasih Gottlieb, an exceptionally beautiful boutique hotel perched on the edge of a cliff and surrounded by dense tropical forest.

We had come to Bali to celebrate my 38th birthday, but somehow we arrived to discover something neither of us could quite believe... We were the only guests!

Not the only guests by the pool. Not one of two couples staying there. We literally had the entire hotel to ourselves. Who gets to say that in their lifetime?

On our first evening, I was drawn to the furthest edge of the property, where the land dropped away into the forest below. The cicadas were so extraordinarily loud that Nico and I could barely hear one another speak. Most incredible. That sound became part of Puri Kasih Gottlieb for me. We heard it while lying beside the pool, during massages in the open-air pavilion, and while doing very little at all - which, after travelling all the way to Bali, was exactly what we needed.

The service was exceptional, made even more surreal by the fact that every bit of attention seemed to belong to just the two of us. It was also here that I had my first proper smoothie bowl, I've been addicted since.

And then came the morning of my birthday.

I woke while it was still dark and happened to peer outside. Members of staff creeping around the hotel at an ungodly hour. As it turns out, they were preparing for me.

By morning there were balloons, breakfast, a birthday cake and the kind of fuss that will stay with me forever.

Thirty-eight. In Bali. Standing barefoot with my husband in a hotel that, for a few extraordinary days, felt as though someone had closed it to the rest of the world and handed us the keys.

Not a bad way to start a birthday.

Beyond the main roads

One of the best decisions we made was exploring Bali by scooter.

We weaved through rice paddies and followed narrow roads and tracks into areas that simply wouldn't have been accessible by car. It gave us a completely different perspective of the island - not from a viewpoint looking across the paddies, but actually travelling through them.

I became fascinated by the waterways running through the landscape. Water is channeled through an intricate system to irrigate the rice paddies, shaping enormous areas of land around the needs of agriculture.

It was extraordinary to see, but I remember feeling conflicted by it too.

There is undeniable beauty in those intensely green rice terraces, and enormous ingenuity in the way water has been managed to sustain them. But I couldn't look at a landscape so extensively shaped for human use without thinking about what had been there before us - and the wildlife that had lost habitat as our own needs took priority.

Where vanilla begins

One of my favourite experiences of the trip was visiting a vanilla farm. For us, vanilla wasn't simply another exotic crop to see while travelling. Nico has a vanilla business and I was already working as a pastry chef, so it was an ingredient deeply connected to both of our lives. Seeing it growing was completely different from knowing it as the fragrant, cured pod we use.

We spent time among the vines learning about the plants and how vanilla has to be hand polinated. We learned the process and saboured every moment of this rare opportunity. But what made the visit memorable had very little to do with what we learnt about vanilla.

The hospitality and warmth of the farmer was something we spoke of, long after we left Bali. He invited us into his home,

To sit with him, talk, eat fruit and be friends.

There was no elaborate tourist experience attached to it. It was simply the warmest gesture from someone we had only just met.

He cut open mangosteens for us and we sat together enjoying this unusual food. There was something so humbling about being welcomed so easily into somebody else's world.

For two people whose lives are so connected to vanilla, seeing it growing at its source was fascinating. But years later, it is the generosity of the man growing it that I remember most.

Nourishment

For the second half of our trip we stayed at Adiwana Resort Jembawan in Ubud, and Herb Library became part of our daily ritual. The food was fresh, colourful and nourishing without being austere — exactly the sort of food that heals. Long before I became a pastry chef, I had studied and trained as a yoga instructor. What interested me then was never only the physical practice. I had immersed myself in the philosophy behind it, and Bali gave me an opportunity to return to yoga in a place where it felt particularly at home.

I went to the Yoga studio I had always dreamed of one day attending, ironically Yoga Barn was just a few steps away from Adiwana! Srange how life can happen that way...

It was painful to the core. But somewhere within that physical discomfort I experienced an incredibly profound sense of gratitude.

Gratitude for my body and what it was capable of. For my life. For being there. For the person i had become and for the person I was sharing this life with. It wasn't an intellectual exercise in gratitude or something I was telling myself I ought to feel. I felt it in my bones.

That experience mattered to me because it reminded me of something I had understood through yoga years before but that is very easy to lose in the noise and demands of ordinary life. Some afternoons required considerably less introspection. We lay beside the pool at Adiwana, drank fresh coconut water and fell asleep to the almost deafening chorus of cicadas in the trees around us.

When I think of Bali, i'm taken right back to that sound.

Coffee at its source

We drank it over breakfast, found cool little cafés, and sometimes simply sat with a coffee and watched the world go by. But being somewhere that actually grows coffee made me want to understand what happened before it reached the cup.

Bali's volcanic highlands around Kintamani are known particularly for Arabica coffee. We learnt about the coffee plants and cherries, where they grow, and the harvesting and processing that eventually turn the seed of a fruit into something most of us consume every day without giving its origin much thought.And then we encountered kopi luwak.

This was considerably harder to forget.

The luwak, or Asian palm civet, eats ripe coffee cherries. The flesh of the cherry is digested, while the coffee seeds pass through the animal's digestive system and are excreted. They are then collected, thoroughly cleaned, processed and roasted to produce kopi luwak, which became internationally famous for its rarity and extraordinary price. So yes, Nico is examining animal droppings in this photograph. Travel is educational.

We also learnt that there is a much less charming side to its fame. Commercial demand for kopi luwak has led to civets being kept in captivity for production, creating serious animal-welfare concerns. The story behind the famous coffee turned out to be considerably more complicated than the novelty presented to tourists.

What stayed with me more broadly was the coffee itself - the plant, where it grows and everything involved in producing it.

So much so that when I returned home, I bought my own Arabica coffee tree.

It grows in my garden today.

Of all the souvenirs I could have brought home from Bali, I rather love that this was one of them.

Before sunrise

One of the most extraordinary experiences of the trip began in complete darkness.

We woke in the early hours of the morning to climb Mount Batur.

For much of the ascent we couldn't see the landscape around us. We climbed by torchlight, concentrating on the ground immediately ahead, knowing that somewhere above us was the summit.

By the time we reached it, we were cold, wet and exhausted.

Then the sun began to rise.

The darkness gradually revealed the landscape we had just climbed through.

Standing above the clouds watching the first light appear was magnificent, but part of what made it so extraordinary was the effort required to get there.

We had climbed a volcano in darkness to see that view.

Afterwards, we went for Starbucks.

There was something wonderfully ridiculous about sitting with a completely ordinary cup of coffee while looking back at the volcano we had just climbed.

I took the photograph.

Obviously.

We did the touristy stuff too

Not everything in Bali needs to become deep reflection or meditation on life.

We went to the monkey sanctuaries. We visited the places everyone visits. We ate at trendy restaurants, found beautiful cafés, wandered around Ubud and did plenty of things simply because they looked like fun.

And Wanagiri Hidden Hill was exactly that

The setting was spectacular, but there was absolutely nothing profound about our motivation for climbing onto giant structures suspended above it.

We wanted the photographs.

Oh but the Bali swings... I can still hear Nico's laugh echoing across the valley as he was thrust into the air

Watching Nico fly out over the hillside with his arms stretched into the air remains one of my favourite images from the trip.

Sometimes something can exist in a story simply because it was enormous fun.

Oh, and it was.

When food becomes an experience

As a pastry chef, I find it almost impossible to travel without food becoming part of the way I understand a place.

I notice ingredients. I notice technique. I notice presentation. And when somebody approaches food differently, I want to understand the thinking behind it.

That made Room4Dessert one of the culinary highlights of Bali.

What interested me wasn't complexity for the sake of appearing clever. It was the thought behind the experience - the journey. The story they were sharing with you. The relationship between ingredients, technique, presentation and environment.

Food that inspire. Food that makes you feel something.

I was already a pastry chef, so I wasn't experiencing it only as a guest. I was analysing what I was eating: why something worked, why it had been presented in a particular way, how flavour and texture had been constructed and how the entire experience had been considered beyond the plate. I left deeply inspired.

Not because Room4Dessert suddenly made me want to become something different, but because seeing someone push the boundaries of your own craft reminds you how much possibility still exists within it.

That is one of the things I love most about pastry. There is always more to learn.

Namaste

When I think about Bali now, I don't remember it as one grand revelation.

I remember moments, interlinked somehow as if i've come full circle. Climbing Mount Batur in darkness and watching the sun rise above the clouds. Riding through rice paddies. Monkeys sitting on my head.

A vanilla farmer who met two strangers and decided they should sit together, eat fruit and become friends. Nico examining civet droppings because somewhere along the way we had become fascinated by coffee. A yoga class that left my body aching and my mind filled with gratitude. Coconut water beside the pool and the deafening sound of cicadas. Great restaurants. Coffee. Ridiculous swings. Extraordinary food.

And Nico beside me through all of it.

Long before I became a pastry chef, yoga taught me a great deal about gratitude. Years later, in Bali, I experienced it again without having to search for it. For the privilege of seeing the world.

For being curious enough to look beyond its surface. For the people who open their world to you, even briefly. For a profession that means ingredients will never be just ingredients to me. For having someone with whom to experience all of it. And simply, for life.

Namaste in Sanskrit means “the divine in me honours the divine in you.”

Namaste .