Asia 2026

We woke up in our strange wooden house again extremely late and only departed around midday towards the northern coast. Passed by a coffee plantation for some coffee tasting and descended the hills to the coastal town of Lovina.

Damn, those mountain roads were scary on a motorbike. Steep, curvy and slippery during rain. We are all exhausted and wet as we arrived in Lovina, so no much other activities for today. Laundry shop we had to find though, as all our clothes were completely wet. :)

It's completely different Bali here at the north coast. Silent small villages with not that much tourists around. Seems like most of the tourists are elderly people, these places are known as a retirement heaven as they are peaceful and more like Bali used to be long time ago before the tourist invasion to the southern parts of the island. Could easily spend a bit longer here, especially if it was not raining all the time.

Meh, I didn't remember that Bali traffic is a mess also outside the city. The main roads are very crowded and slow, which is not exactly comfortable on a motorbike.

We drove to the northern part of the island and didn't actually do much anything else today as we woke up late and in the evening fog and darkness prevented further driving. Arrived to the mountain areas though, so tomorrow after earlier wakeup we should be able to go see some waterfalls and nice views.

As the weather in Labuan Bajo doesn't permit diving at least before next Wednesday we changed the plans and took a short flight to Bali. Way more hot here, it's really warm and humid but also windy.

Even if the flight was only an hour most of the day was still spent traveling. We arrived to Bali, left most of our heavy luggage at airport storage and picked up our rented motorcycle for further exploration of the island. First night will be spent in Denpasar (or actually Ganggu) near the rental shop and tomorrow the three-day exploring begins.

The weather is like it's supposed to be at wet season. Raining, not raining, raining, some sunshine and raining heavily again. That's not a huge problem, I even did a motorbike trip out of the city today.

However, a problem is that the harbour master today denied all boats to depart the harbour or enter the national park, for a week.. So, we are now stuck for a week in Labuan Bajo with dive trips canceled and hoping the weather improves after that.

Quick rescheduling and I think we depart to Bali on Friday for a couple of days and then come back to Labuan Bajo for a new diving attempt. It's a cheap one hour flight anyway and there is not much to do in this small village.

After a turbulent flight (as always here) we made it to Labuan Bajo, a small island town next to Komodo national park. I rented a motorbike, but let's see how much actual use we have for it as Iryna is busy writing and the weather seems to be a bit rainy.

First stop reached via Doha. Even though we arrived in the afternoon it felt like a good idea to book a downtown hotel, and I guess it was. We could have a nice city walk in the evening, good Japanese food and a beautiful hotel instead of some boring airport transport hotel.

KL is still nice, maybe my favourite Asian megacity. There's way less traffic, noise and pollution than in Bangkok and the city is green and beautiful.