Ninety Minutes of Mud
A self-drive ATV through rice fields, bamboo and deep brown puddles, and the most fun most adults have had with their clothes ruined.
The road out from Ubud is a good way to see how quickly Bali stops being a town. The shops thin out, the lanes narrow, and the rice fields start coming right up to the edge of the tarmac, with a small shrine at the corner of each one. Transfers are not part of the ticket, so the hotel arranges the car, and the one instruction worth giving the driver is the time of your slot. Rides here run in fixed slots through the day, and arriving in time for yours matters more than anything else on the schedule.
Kuber is a base at the edge of the fields: a check-in counter, rows of ATVs lined up in the sun and still caked in the last group's mud, and a rack of rubber boots in every size. You swap your shoes for a pair of boots, and somebody fits a helmet and does the strap up properly under your chin. The helmet, the boots, snacks afterwards and insurance are all part of the ride, so there is nothing to pay at the counter.
Look at what the people coming back from the previous slot are wearing, and then look at what you are wearing. It is the single most useful piece of briefing you will get all day, and nobody has to say a word.
The briefing
The briefing takes a few minutes and covers everything you actually need: throttle, brakes, how far to stay behind the machine in front, and what the guide's hand signals mean. Each of you has your own single ATV and drives it yourself, so everybody gets a turn around the flat practice area before anyone goes near the trail.
Nobody needs to have driven anything before. The machines are simple to handle, the speeds on the trail are sensible, and the guide at the front sets a pace the slowest rider in the group can keep. Anyone who stalls on a slope or sinks a wheel into a rut gets help quickly, and with a good deal less embarrassment than they were bracing for.
Children under ten are not allowed to ride, and the staff are firm about it. Everybody else, including the people who arrived convinced they were going to hate it, is out on the trail within a few minutes of their first lap.
Look at what the last group is wearing when they come back in. It is the most useful briefing you will get, and nobody has to say a word.
On the trail
The trail leaves the base and goes straight into the kind of country you otherwise only see from a car window. Narrow tracks along the edges of the rice fields, where farmers look up for a moment and go back to work. Stands of bamboo so tall and close together that the light goes green. Steep little drops into gullies and slow climbs out of them, with the engine working and the tyres hunting for grip in the wet clay.
Then the mud. There are puddles on this track deep enough to spray you to the shoulders, and it takes most people about five minutes to stop steering around them and start aiming for them. By the halfway point everybody in the group is the same colour, and everybody is grinning. There is something about being thoroughly and completely filthy that makes adults laugh the way they did when they were eight.
Ninety minutes is longer than it sounds. There is time to get properly comfortable on the machine, to stop concentrating quite so hard, and to look around at where you are, which, in between the puddles, is some of the greenest country on the island.
Hosing down
Back at base the boots come off, and there is somewhere to wash off the worst of it. If you brought a full change of clothes, this is the moment you are extremely pleased with yourself. If you did not, the drive back to the hotel will be a quiet and slightly damp lesson.
Snacks come out while the guides line the machines back up for the next slot, and the photographs start going round the group. Somebody will have been soaked from head to foot by a single puddle. Somebody will have got stuck and been pulled out. Those are the pictures everybody wants copies of.
You will find mud in places you did not know mud could reach for the rest of the day, and your forearms will ache a little from the handlebars tomorrow. Neither of those things will stop you telling people at home that this was one of the best mornings of the trip.
It takes about five minutes to stop steering around the puddles and start aiming for them.
Rides close at three in the afternoon, and the slot you get depends on availability when you arrive. Be there by half past two at the latest, and earlier if you want the rest of the day for anything else.
Experience Ninety Minutes of Mud
Ninety minutes on your own ATV through the rice fields and the mud. Tell us your dates and we will hold the slot.
