Nothing quite like throwing yourself to the not-so-gentle vicissitudes of jungle-bashing. Never any shortage of geography, critters, climes or circumstances waiting to assail you.

The Amazon’s a nice place to start, not that I’m any kind of authority on these things. Its bushmasters, jaguars, fire-ants and piranha and non-stop rain thrumming from the dripping condensation of millions of leaves should spark your imagination. And any phobias you might  have about stings, bites, tropical diseases or being eaten alive.

Of course, you can wrangle with tigers and pythons and bugs the size of plates in the dense forests of India. Or perhaps the lion, leopard, cheetah and spotted hyena predators of the deepest darkest Congo, if you’re an Afrique tragic.

Not this armchair explorer, though. Much prefer my spot out in his backyard kennel.

I do, however, occasionally venture into the jungle, those species of jungle that aren’t a million miles from civilisation at any rate.

I’m happy to explore their waterfalls and beaches and rivers and gorges and the like. I’m big on old jungle temples. But I’d much rather avian squawkers and howler monkeys ahead of apex predators yet to understand their place in the planet’s food chain.

Matter of fact, one of the best sounds you’ll hear is the cry from a jungle bar, a shout to be precise. Nothing quite so inviting, especially when it’s attached to a pisco sour in Peru, an icy Antarctica pilsener under Morro Dois Irmaos or a chilly Bintang in Ubud.

A recent sojourn to Bali’s Gianyar regency found me scuttling down a precipitous track to revisit the famed Tegenungan Waterfall. Great way to cultivate a thirst.

 

By no means off the beaten track these days, it’s still a jungle favourite. Cliffs chiselled like something from Fred and Barney’s Bedrock, impenetrable jungle foliage, blazing sun and a stunning cascade crashing onto the heads of fools splashing about a hundred feet below. It’s a jaw-dropper.

I was taken aback, however, to realise this erstwhile primitive attraction – one of decidedly shonky stairs, rusty handrails, slippery muddy tracks and dodgy bamboo footbridges – had been concreted over, updated, usurped and pitched headlong over a cliff into the A-level rankings of knockout tourist traps.

Lord help me, even a massive, brand spanking, glass-bottomed 199-metre suspension bridge soars over the entire precinct, connecting two villages separated by the Petanu River gorge 66 metres below. The Bali Glass Bridge.

Never seen anything like it.  Yet right next door, the Omma Day Club, designed by bamboo magicians Studio 3 Bali, is giving it a fair run for its rupiah.

Perched impossibly on the edge of a cliff punctuated by smaller waterfalls, Omma is an architectural cacophony of said bamboo, thatch, outrageous mosaic tiles, swimming pools, restaurants, cafes and lounges.

It’s somewhere between George of the Jungle tree-hut, Gilligan’s Island and Pablo Luna with its mathematical hyperbolic twists and turns. Its outlook is eye-watering. and, thankfully, nowhere as vertigo-inducing as the bridge.

Tellingly, it’s an important refreshment station as you gird your loins for the exhausting, dehydrating climb back up those precipitous million or so steps. But gloriously, as a doe-eyed angel behind the jump told me, it also hosts an elevator back to the top.

Whaaat?! Of course it does. How else do the staff and everything else come and go? Brain fade moment. Curse this damn heat. Edgar Rice Burroughs never really mentioned that in the Tarzan comics and novels I was raised on.

Tell you what, though, for sheer feverish jungle intrigue you can’t go past the Boeing 737 I discovered deep in the Ubud suburb of Penestanan below the Svargo Loka Hotel.

 

Yep, giant bloody airplane surrounded a river gorge, a rocky redoubt, coconut trees and palms, and any number of monkeys, chinchilla squirrels and spa healing tragics you can imagine.

And it’s loud. Emblazoned with giant tailplane images, and fuselage wording, of none other than the uber-capitalists Warren Buffett and Milton Friedman. Straight out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

You can’t see the thing from basically anywhere except the hotel property it’s on: Villa Biyu Siyu. It comes up, however, like a priapic Roman brothel sign on Google Earth.

Coincidentally, ridiculously, the hotel room and pool I’m polluting just happens to be directly opposite this plane, across the gorgeous Tjampuhan River gorge. I can see part of tailplane through the trees a hundred metres away. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew what it was, to mangle logic and language.

It’s further evidence the universe is dragging me into the jungle towards those rock apes my forebears descended from several generations ago. But tracking the plane’s provenance down is proving tricky.

No-one was around with enough English to quiz when I visited Biyu Siyu. No marketing spiels or blurbs or web ads offer any clues. Pretty pictures around, sure – you can find some sharp drone footage at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDj3Sznd9-E&t=15s – but these websites offer next to nothing about the whys or wherefores of the plane’s presence in an impossible location.

Neighbouring locals are no help, repeat no help. They don’t even know it’s there, and that includes staff of two popular hotels less than 100 metres away. Fortunately, I had a surveyor with similar jungle fixations to me on hand. He discovered the thing in the first place, on Google Earth, so we knew where it was, we just couldn’t get there.

Upper food-chain apex predators that we fancied ourselves, a couple of hurdled fences and gates and it didn’t take too long. Shove over Tarzan Greystoke, we’re the lords of the jungle now.