Making the transition to Bali’s countryside was seamless. After 3 days of lounging on the beach, we headed northeast for the town of Ubud (or Bali’s cultural epicenter). Located in the middle of the island of Bali, Ubud is surrounded by incredibly lush tropical vegetation and continuous rice fields. It’s home to 30,000 people and is renown for several things among them: woodcarving and sculpting, a vast array of shops and an incredibly eclectic food scene as we found out.

B-A-L-I, Bali! A place that’s so talked about as 2 million tourists visit each year, and we were eager to find out why. The large island is home to 3.5 million Indonesians who consider themselves Balinese first. Their unique culture, religion (Hinduism is most predominant), and character is what sets them apart from the rest of Indonesia.

Our next stop in Indonesia was central Java and so we flew into Yogyakarta (1 hour by plane from Jakarta). After about another hour – by cab – we found ourselves at the wonderfully green hotel accommodations of Manohara. This was the hotel our friend Izabel recommended due to its amazing location. Amazing for a couple of reasons; it’s surrounded by tropical rain forests and mountains (and even a volcano, Merapi which happens to be one of the most active and dangerous in the world), and it’s also on the doorstep to Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world.

20 years ago seems like the distant past and that’s exactly when Brigitte left Indonesia after living there for nearly 4 years. Therefore going back to Jakarta meant so much more than just visiting yet another Southeast Asian capital. We planned for 5 nights in the megalopolis and stayed with Izabel, Brigitte’s best friend from growing up in Indonesia. During those 20 years Izabel embarked on an illustrious modeling career followed by heading up the editorial departments of various fashion publications.