Buyan to Munduk

We decided to embark on a 15 kilometer hike through the forest and past the 2 lakes. The day before I had met fellow hikers Geir and Trevylyan and hiked Bratan Moutain with them. For that hike, we first had to canoe across a lake to access the trailhead. We walked by tunnels left by the Japanese in WWII and up a steep mountain where the  exposed roots of trees served as natural stairs. At the top we had found a menacing macaque patrolling a temple and baring his teeth. He subsisted on all the temple food offerings left by people.

No more than 3 minutes on the path through the forest, Geir fell down. His face paled immediately and he writhed on the ground clutching his ankle in agony. He had an extremely weak ankle having torn ligaments many timed before playing soccer as a kid. As he limped out of the forest, he showed us the guilty pebble he stepped on. We walked back to the paved road and got Geir a motorcycle ride to the local hospital. 

I had to hike alone now... At first, the trek was easy as I followed car tracks. But then, the tracks ended, and I was left to find a trail. There were trees with painted red arrows on them. And I would follow a series of them till I hit a dead end like a stand of thorn bushes. Someone had gone to great lengths to play this sick joke on me. And I started to fear getting lost as I kept trying to find more painted arrows. One set led to a larger boulder... another to a ditch. Finally I found an unmarked small path. Thorn bushes and thick brush taller than me on either side. I walked briskly cause i feared getting lost and having to retrace my footsteps in the dark. Past a lake, I found a clearing in the woods and a coffee bean grower who offered me a cup of tea  and a seat in her house. She fortuitously pointed me in the wrong direction through the forest, and I followed anything that resembled a path. In the end, I decided to just head down the mountain straight through the brush thinking a direct path would save time and useless back and forth. I climbed over fallen trees, through tall reeds... When I finally popped out of the forest by the western lake... 8 hours had elapsed since I had started. I was greeted a young couple who were fishing by the pond. They had a big bag of tangerines and a bag of small fish hanging from a tree. They offered a handful of tangerines and then told me Munduk was another 10 km away. I sighed and then made my way up and down paved mountain roads. The hotel manager in Munduk felt sorry that there no vacancies in her hotel, and gave me her son's room to sleep in.