Tourists Share Their Craziest Bali Travel Stories

From waking up in a rice field at 6am, to getting regrettable face tattoos, here are travellers' wildest Bali stories.

Tourists Share Their Craziest Bali Travel Stories

Left image: The Bali Bible. Right image: Forever Vacation

Bali. The promised land of cocktails. The mecca of mysterious tan lines. A melting pot of hedonism and spirituality. Alex Garland’s worst nightmare. A place best experienced while you’re still young enough to look good with tattoos and a motorbike, but old enough to be able to afford travel insurance and a villa in Canggu. That’s how many tourists think of Bali, anyway (as one TikTok user puts it: Bali is one of the best islands to visit while you’re young).

But that’s a skewed vision of Bali. There’s more to it than what your local influencer shows you. The Island Of Gods has plenty of quirks that can confuse, amaze and shock tourists. And over the years tourists have had some pretty crazy experiences in Bali.

Images via The Canggu Pole

Speaking of which: The Canggu Pole (a Bali expat community page/meme account, based in Canggu) has shared a bunch of the wildest experiences tourists have had in Bali, generated by responses their followers gave to the question: “tell me the wildest thing that’s ever happened to you in Bali.”

Images via The Canggu Pole

From walking out of a place called “DJ cafe” at noon (presumably after partying all night/all morning) to a guest “getting murdered at a villa I manage” responders to The Canggu Pole’s question had a frightening variety of answers.

Other answers included meeting someone with a personality in Canggu (apparently that’s a big flex right there), having “so much red Kratom I thought I was Batman” and “accompanying a tinder date buying shrooms at a street clothing store.”

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Further intriguing responses included: “waking up in a rice field” and “the whole thing with a French MMA fighter terrorising Canggu” (one which raises more questions than answers).

Another answer had something to do with someone getting chased by machetes. The notorious “shortcut” (by the looks of it a not so maintained road out of Canggu) also gets quite a few mentions. Other mentions include getting dengue fever, experiencing earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, snake bites and “spaghetti with ketchup.”

Another claimed they “partied with Shapelle’s siblings” but didn’t accept their invite to dinner “for obvious reasons.”

Another said they once woke up with a tattoo on their cheek after a night out “getting too drunk at pretty poison.”

Another said: “I got roofied at Sky Garden, woke up in Mbargo bathroom, lost phone, wallet, friends car keys.” Another said they got stalked by a psychopath from LA who claimed they invented Facebook.

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This isn’t the first time tourists have shared their wild Bali experiences. Who could forget the time monkeys had sex on a guy’s head in Ubud monkey forest? Or the time a Quora user claimed they were once tripping so hard on mushrooms in Bali that they thought they had overtaken an impossibly giant truck on their motorbike (in a vision, in a dream, etc), only to realise the next day they had actually overtaken a truck with a small migratory whale inside (“we had ridden our bikes a mere meter away from a whale, in a truck, which was then driven into the ocean…”).

Another wild experience shared on Twitter, comes from a surfer who claims he was almost lost at sea, after being unable to paddle back through the cave at Uluwatu.

Not to mention the story of the woman whose husband almost accidentally tried to drag race a cop on a motorbike, which she shared on TikTok.

Finally, there’s Bonny Rebecca, a Youtuber who talks about coming off her biker on the beautiful island of Nusa Penida, after riding over a slippery patch, and being sent flying into the mud.

“The best way to describe it was as if someone ran over the road with a jackhammer, and left it for a hundred years,” she reportedly told followers.

Consider yourself warned…

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