Travel guide to quiet alternative to Ubud in the shadow of Mount Agung

I’m at Green Kitchen Cooking School in Sidemen, a village inland of Candidasa in Karangasem on Bali’s east coast. I’m with six other travellers and we’re making sambal, the spicy Indonesian condiment that combines fiery chilli, aromatic garlic, zingy shallots and a variety of other ingredients to make almost any dish in the nation’s vast archipelagic cuisine taste enak sekali, very delicious. As I pummel ginger in a cobek with my ulekan (Indonesia’s version of a mortar and pestle), I also have an ear on the conversation of my cooking classmates.

“We came to Sidemen because we read it was the next Ubud,” one says in a Dutch accent. “It is nothing like Ubud. Yes, it is nice, but it is nothing like Ubud”. Her boyfriend, American maybe, takes a break from peeling garlic, to chime in: “There are not even any restaurants here,” he says. “And what about yoga studios? There’s not much to do.”

My cooking companions are right. Sidemen is definitely not the next Ubud. Where Ubud is known as Bali’s cultural and spiritual hub, it also has a reputation for rampant overdevelopment, road congestion and infrastructure that can’t keep up. Sidemen offers a quieter, more immersive Bali for those who relish a slower mode of travel.

I continue meditatively macerating my aromatic mixture. Where they see nothing to do, I see this incredible cooking school in an open-air pavilion surrounded by tropical gardens, rice paddies and coconut trees. Where they see a lack of yoga studios, I see an absence of traffic. Where they are pining for restaurants, I see the simplicity of local warung cooking.

I scoop my mix from the mortar into a pan sizzling with fresh coconut oil, a clear sweet-smelling elixir typical in South-East Asian cooking. Made fresh, this magical ingredient is liquid gold in Bali. As our host tells us, there are coconut trees aplenty on Bali, but these days fewer people are willing to climb them to get the coconuts. Making oil is also labour-intensive, a process of grating the coconut, wringing it to produce coconut cream, then boiling the cream to extract minuscule amounts of oil. Once a daily household chore, it’s now something of a culinary craft.

Sidemen sits in the foothills of Bali’s highest point, Mount Agung, an active volcano whose triangular form comes and goes with the mist and the clouds. In its momentous shadow, Sidemen’s rice terraces zigzag across the valley, a checkerboard of emerald green.

The local government has mandated that this lush scenic countryside be retained rather than developed. For a small fee, visitors can enter via the little bamboo hut at Pucak Luah Santi to trek three kilometres past tethered cows and ploughing farmers to a viewpoint overlooking the town.