Buahan, A Banyan Tree Escape

Travel into Taro Village to explore Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese philosophy of balance between nature, people and spirit. The journey begins in a vintage car, passing local temples including Gunung Raung Temple, where you’ll learn about community rituals and daily spiritual life.

Along the way, you may join local prayers and walk through the Alas Jaka Palm Forest, where there’s a chance to plant a palm tree. The experience continues on a local farm, where you’ll make coconut oil, taste palm fruit snacks and see everyday farming practices up close, followed by a light lunch in the village.

Walk through Bali’s rice fields at Sandikala, the time between daylight and night, guided by a local farmer and your host. The journey begins at the Subak temple, where you’ll learn how Bali’s traditional irrigation system connects farming, community and spiritual practice.

From there, the walk continues slowly through the fields as the light fades. Along the way, stories about the rice-growing cycle, seasonal patterns and local farming traditions are shared. Fireflies appear, frogs call from the fields, and the earth cools underfoot. Part of the proceeds from this walk support Subak preservation and organic rice farming.

Start your soul freedom journey with the making of a Canang Sari, a traditional Balinese offering created as a gesture of gratitude and intention. Guided through the process, you’ll learn the meaning behind each element before dressing in traditional attire and walking through the valley towards the resort’s waterfall.

The path moves through forested surroundings, with the sound of water growing louder as you approach. At the waterfall, a guided meditation and soft mantra chanting help settle the mind and bring focus to the moment. The experience ends with a flower release ritual in the water, creating space for reconnecting with yourself and nature.

The Bali architect Gede Kresna built these sixteen balés with almost no industrial material and, more striking, with almost no walls — bedroom, bath and deck sit open under a single roof above the Ayung valley, the living space left without barriers between you and the highland. Kresna learned the approach at Rumah Intaran, his own vernacular-building school in north Bali, where local timber and stone do the work concrete usually does. You wake to mist rising off the river gorge and the ridgeline of peaks beyond Payangan, forty minutes north of Ubud. Buahan opened in 2022 as Banyan Tree's first Escape; the openness is the whole idea.

Purnama, the full moon, is one of the most auspicious days in the Balinese saka calendar, marked across the island with offerings and temple visits. Buahan's evening gathering draws on that observance and on agni hotra, the fire offering in which grains and ghee are given to the flames while mantras are spoken, fire standing for purification and renewal. This is a resort adaptation rather than a temple rite, and it helps to hold it as that — a borrowing from a living faith, led at the property rather than by the village priest. You sit at the fire pit as dusk fills the valley and set an intention for the nights ahead.

Dinner at the Open Kitchen is built from what grows within an hour's drive, and the kitchen forages the surrounding highland for plants most Balinese restaurants no longer cook with — part of a deliberate effort to bring back older island recipes that fell out of use. The menu runs to roughly five courses and leans plant-forward, the produce arriving from the valley floor and the gardens around you rather than from a supplier in Denpasar. You eat on an open deck as the light goes off the gorge. Ask what the wild greens are; the answers tend to be plants you have walked past on the trails without noticing.

The bracelet tied to your wrist on arrival is a tridatu — three threads, red, white and black, twisted together. The colours stand for the trinity that orders Balinese Hindu life: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer and renewer, the cycle of birth, life and death held on one wrist. It is a genuine devotional object here, normally knotted on by a priest at the temple and worn until it falls away on its own, not a souvenir. You will see it on wrists all over the island once you start looking — children, drivers, shopkeepers. Take it as a blessing for the days at Buahan rather than a welcome gift.

The resist-dye you try in this workshop — tying and binding cloth so the dye cannot reach the folds — is the everyday end of a Balinese textile tradition that runs much deeper. At its far end is geringsing, the double-ikat woven only in Tenganan, a village of Bali Aga people who predate the island's Hinduisation; a single sacred cloth can take years, both threads dyed before a line is woven, and the name means without sickness. What you make is simpler and yours to keep, but it sits on the same island lineage of pattern made by withholding colour. Plan to get your hands stained; the dye does not wash off in a day.

Loloh is the Balinese herbal drink families have brewed for generations, the best known being loloh cemcem from Penglipuran village in Bangli — cemcem leaves pounded with tamarind, palm sugar, coconut and lime into something sour, sweet and faintly sharp. It sits in the same tradition as Javanese jamu, and Bangli has put it forward for recognition as Indonesian intangible heritage; the plants in it have been studied for their antibacterial compounds. In the workshop you grind your own seasonal blend by hand and taste as you go. The point is the knowledge, not the drink — which leaf settles the stomach, which root warms you, gathered from the same hills the kitchen forages.

The herbal paste in this treatment is Boreh, and it did not start in a spa. Balinese rice farmers made it to warm aching muscles and keep off chills after working the wet fields — cinnamon, cloves, ginger and rice powder ground with coconut oil and spread on warm. The massage that goes with it follows techniques recorded in the lontar usada, Bali's palm-leaf medical manuscripts, and carried down by balian, the island's traditional healers; the pressure-and-stretch style absorbed Indian and Chinese ideas through centuries of trade. Designed for two, it runs about an hour. Worth knowing what boreh is for: heat in the muscle, not fragrance.