Boldly go where no man has gone before

When travelling I always recommend going off the path. Why? Because that way you truly explore and experience the beauty of nature and other cultures and places. I went to see the famous Hindu pilgrimage temple Pura Tanah Lot, which is a very popular tourist attraction in Bali. When you get there you pay an admission fee to get into the area, which is ok I think, but when you walk from the maingate to the temple itself you have to walk through a purely selling anything you can to tourist market place, which I didn’t like that much. Well let’s not get into that, lets talk about going off the path.

It all started with getting there, I didn’t get a paid travel tour to the temple with guides and drivers, I just took the my motorbike, put some water and sunblock and my camera in my backpack and drove away without a hurry, stopping everytime I saw something nice and took pictures.

So once I get down to the temple, I took a couple of photos of the temple and a selfie with the temple in the background and here is where I made a choise of taking another path from most tourist. It seemes that for most tourists it’s enough to get some pictures of them posing in front of the temple, but for me, that’s not it, that won’t give me kicks or won’t make me smile. What I get kicks out of and what makes me smile is going exploring, so I went off the path. I saw a nice cliff further down the coast, but still close enough to be able to walk and climb there.

The path to the cliff was exciting as I stumbled on a crab colony, and litterally stumbled upon it as the crabs are very well camouflages withing the nature they are in, so at first I didn’t see any of the crabs, but all the sudden something jumped, yes jumped over my foot, first I got a startled as I didn’t see what it was, then I saw the crabs small and big. The smalles where around just 1 cm and the big ones where around 20 cm in size, and they can actually jump.

After going through the jumping crab colony, walking through water and climbing some rock I got to the place and the view was breathtaking. I’ll let the picture do the talking.

On my way back from the cliff I meet an old woman who was gathering seaweed for eating.

Now would you have seen amazing view from the cliff? The crazy jumping crab colony? Or meet a true local old lady gathering seaweed for food if I had stayed on the path like most tourist?
Go off the path, and like Captain Kirk from Star Trek said, boldly go where noman has gone before.