Simples

It is, purely and simply, just a really nice day.

I wake up, as is my wont nowadays, at the barely ripe hour of six am, throw some clothes on (including a Cardigan - a Cardigan!!) and take myself, my laptop and my battered old notebook out onto the small balcony outside our tiny, perfectly formed room. It's still largely dark, but the view out over the mountains is a beautiful cool haziness, gradually clearing as I write, until the dim lightbulb on the balcony grows quickly redundant, and the haze clears to reveal the lush green tree coveted mountains, the lake, still, like a mirror on the landscape, and tiny clustered villages nestled into the foliage, as if trying to keep warm. It's beautiful and it's blessedly cool and the air is sharp and fresh and tingly on my tongue as I breathe it - and it's really quite a place to be positioned to write in.

And you know Neville the novel and I have been getting on famously. Since I began this regime of early morning installments I have written better than I have in a while, with proper focus, and each morning, without fail, I have achieved what I wanted before the rest of the world around me wakes up. Even better, I have that elusive feeling which I get only when a novel is really in its element, where it resides in the back of my mind all day, like a happy mantra, the characters feel real and I am sure of their responses to every situation that I, the grand puppet master chose to put them in. And if that sounds a bit grand - it is. It is genuinely amazing but I would challenge any writer who says they feel it unfailingly. It happens for a while and you ride, gleefully on the wave of it. But you have to enjoy it, because there'll be a time later when you will have to make effort. Neville and I are like puppy dogs in love right now. But we'll be snarling bitches in time. And it'll take serious effort to force grudging reconciliation.

Right now though, we are flying with it, and I will, as I smugly close my laptop and prepare to join M and begin the day, gave a warmth in me from it until I go back to bed again this evening.

We repair to the Waring on the roof of the home stay to eat Burbur Ingin, black rice pudding in a sort of coconut soup, for breakfast, with Kopi Rempah, coffee with a stick of cinnamon. It is as delicious as it sounds. Then we set off, clad in walking boots and anoraks (worn like belts in preparation for potential monsoons) to walk, hike, trek or whatever you want to call it. We have never quite managed to work out the distinction between these terms. 

We head for the waterfalls, if which there are two, and as soon as we turn down the rather slippery path between the greenery and up and down along the side of the mountain, than we cease to hear the noise of any motorbikes (apart from a rude few which have the audacity/skill to ride past us on this track) and we begin to hear better the crickets. They sing loudly, so loudly it's like standing beneath the world's most powerful pylon, and the rhythm and pitch seems to differ as the day grows older, and as we move further up or down the mountainside. We can also hear birds, who seem to sing more lustily and clearly here, and, every so often, the odd croak from a toad or a frog hidden in the wet fronds of something. 

The first waterfall is the largest in the sense that it falls from the greatest height and is reached by a series of treacherously slippery steps cut into the mountainside. It has rained heavily overnight and there is a lit of bright moss on the surfaces, which looks lovely but which would quite like to kill us. Luckily we are intrepid enough to own such a thing as walking boots and they have properly grippy undersides. Even so, we still slide. When we encounter two other walkers in flip flops we are not sure whether we should honour them for their courage or think them crazy. What's nice though is that, being out of season,  we are not seeing anyone else in the way of tourists. It's just us, the massive butterflies the size of small birds, the greenery and the water.

And what water. When we get to the bottom we simply sit on a small bench in front, and stay there in silence, listening to the roar of it, feeling the spray on our faces and watching the sun on the very top, making the water there glow as it begins its thunderous descent.

I like that we don't talk about this. We don't verbally agree to sit for a while without speaking, we just do it. And when we do decide to leave and make our way back up, that too is tacit.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that M and I are at our best in natural surroundings. We hate traffic and become unreasonably cross about its existence, growing snappy even with each other when we walk by the side of a road on which the traffic is making louder noise than we are, and drowning us out. In the jungle, in the countryside, in the mountains it feels as though not only verbal communication is easier but that we can hear unspoken things better, can interpret gestures more, walk more in step. Hippy nonsense perhaps, but it does seem to be true. And even if you are too cynical to go that far, definitely nature makes us happy. We appreciate a mountain more readily than we appreciate a car or a house or even a city. 

On the way to the next waterfall, we come across a small Warung ams I persuade M to stop and refuel over coffee.

The coffee, in fact, is ginger tea, and the owner, a smiley Balinese named Made (so we instantly know of course that he is the second child in his family) beams at us as he tells us that he has mixed the western and Balinese tastes to make his very own version of Pisang Goreng (generally fried banana in batter, served with palm sugar syrup and shaved coconut). Obviously we don't have the heart not to try this creation, and are rewarded for this with a wide smoke and a plate of thinly sliced dried banana just to whet our appetites. The waitress is French. We get talking to her while Made gets busy in the kitchen with his creations. She is a teacher by trade, teaching languages, but she has a sabbatical and us travelling for as long as she 'can keep going' before either monetary or mental limitations kick in. 

"I want," she says, "to have time when I get home, to practice the things I have learned while I am away and use them in my normal life. I think it will take some time."

I know what she means. Seeing so many clever and wonderful things, getting new insights and growing new attitudes is great. Here. But what would make much more sense would be to take them back home. And realistically, that's difficult. For one thing you have to work at home. And you have a culture to deal with, and alternately embrace or resist the different parts of, which you no longer have the luxury of seeing yourself as being 'outside of'. It would be possible, certainly to return a little wiser and hold onto it, but it takes time and practice. And concerted effort. Most wisdoms tend to sit outside of the norm, they make you walk a different path or a different to everyone around you. And human beings are naturally social.

"Why are you crying?" asks the protagonist in a book I love, in which said protagonist us wandering through a landscape in which humanity is based on a pack of cards. He is talking to the Joker.

"Because," replies the Joker, who has much more grasp on reality than the rest of the pack and therefore does not follow the simple customs they so unquestioningly obey, "there us only one joker in the pack. Only me. I am the only one."

And he bursts into inconsolable tears.

It's hard to be the joker in the pack. It takes practice to live in a culture and practice what amounts to a motley collection of little 'wisdoms' accumulated from various 'elsewheres'. I enjoy talking to our French friend (avoiding yet another pseudonym!) and I enjoy the 'special bananas' we have ordered.

As we go to leave I, characteristically, emerge from the toilet to discover M deep in conversation with the owner of the restaurant, Made. (It is rather useful that so many people are called Made or Wayan here, removing the need for pseudonyms!) Made tells us he would like to invite us for dinner at his house, which is also where the French lady is staying.

"Money is OK," he tells us, "you just pay what you think. I not a restaurant am just liking new friends."

We agree. We continue our walk through more beautiful, peaceful greenery to the second waterfall which is also lovely, though the first, a more dramatic drop, remains our favourite.

Then we walk a bit more. We walk through small winding dirt roads cut into the side of the mountain, with houses dotted along the way, containing small waving children, feverishly barking dogs and scuttling hens, hustling their tiny chicks away from this danger. We are rewarded by a beautiful view through trees, just tiny peeks, as though a well kept secret, of the rice terraces Bali is so famous for, cut in steps down the hillside, to maximise the use of land and to allow for the ingenious irrigation systems which mean that one field can be flooded, which another is dry, harvesting rice from somewhere, all year round. These are not the UNESCO protected landscapes of Jatiluwih, they are practicalities of daily life for farmers here, that just happen to have the side effect of being beautiful. Palm trees growing here and there among them, seem to have realised this effect and be making every effort to optimise it.

We float back to our room, shower and contemplate the view until its time for our dinner date, when we are escorted into Made's family dwelling, sat down at a table laid just for us in the courtyard, and served a variety of amazing food.

It's a lovely end to a perfect day though, in keeping with the theme, the experience at Made's would have been even better if it had been simpler. The family eat separately on the floor in their kitchen, and, though everyone pops out now and then to have a chat with us, and our French friend comes to swap contact details with us, if they didn't mind we would have enjoyed just sitting down on the floor with them and having a chat. Perhaps that's selfish though. Would you want random tourists round your table each evening? Inspecting your normalities and making uninformed generalisations about  your 'simple lifestyle?

We roll into bed. What we have discovered is simple. More than anything on this trip we have realised how happy nature makes us. If we love a good waterfall, why do we not put more effort in England, to visiting its waterfalls, it's heritage sites? Some of the things we have travelled the world to see, do in fact exist on our doorstep.