If there’s one outstanding town away from the crowds in Bali, it’s Munduk. Living around Canggu means that the crowds and traffic can get a bit too much sometimes, so I love to head out to places like Kintamani and Munduk. A cool climate, nature views and delicious coffee. What else could you ask for? In this article I review my stay at Munduk Moding Plantation. A resort that pioneered in this area and really did not disappoint.
Munduk Moding Plantation used to be an abandoned coffee plantation and I’m impressed by the vision of the founders to turn it into a resort like this. Without seeing the villas myself, I would have struggled to imagine a resort hidden in this much greenery. Seeing how they built it without losing the natural atmosphere was one of the best parts of my stay.
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Where is Munduk Moding Plantation?
Even though the resort is called Munduk Moding Plantation, the real location is in Gobleg. It’s easy to navigate to and located close to the twin lake viewpoint, and not too far from Bedugul as well. Bedugul is famous for the Ulun Danu Beratan temple, the temple on the lake that dominated travel books about Bali for decades.
It took us around an hour and 45 minutes by bike from Kerobokan. As we visited at the end of August, we didn’t face any rain and the skies were very clear. I haven’t seen this area free of clouds that often, so it was a warm welcome to Munduk. Where the welcome was warm, the temperatures were not. I was happy that I wore long pants and a hoodie, because without these I would have been freezing (not literally, tho). The resort is about 1200 meters above sea level, so you can imagine it can get a bit chilly up here. Keep it in mind while packing your bags.
Arrival and first impressions
Upon arrival you notice that the resort pays attention to detail. The laneway is smooth, clean and sets the tone for everything that’s to follow. You’ll pass the padel court and the horse stables before a big bamboo tower shows up next to the reception. I also saw local kids on the laneway and heard traditional music from one of the communal spaces. At this point, I had no idea about the local impact of this resort yet, but I would find out during the trip.
We were welcomed with a flower garland and a delicious hot tea with strong cinnamon notes. I absolutely love cinnamon, and it was the perfect treat after the colder final minutes of our ride.
You instantly notice how green everything is. At this time I had no idea how huge the resort would be. The staff told us the current size is about 6.5 hectares, and counting. You only realise how big it is the moment you get escorted to your villa by one of the buggies.
All the buggies are electric, and so are the scooters staff use around the property. This was one of the first signs I noticed that this is operated as an eco luxury resort in Bali, not just marketed as one. After a quick stop at the main area, we were brought to the villa. It was located right around the corner, which was convenient as we could just walk to the restaurant, the main pools and the public jacuzzis.
Our one bedroom private pool and jacuzzi villa
The villa we got assigned was a one bedroom villa with a private pool and jacuzzi. The villas are private and spacious, designed by Balinese architects Popo Danes and Era Anastasia, and it shows. They all come with a view, and the whole property is more of a boutique resort in North Bali than a standard chain.
The staff kindly prepared a twin bed set up for us, as two men traveling together. This is a request that’s very easily overlooked, so I was pleased to see they took care of these notes. There were multiple places to relax with a huge sofa in the living room, a cabana and sun loungers on the terrace. Given that it’s a one bedroom villa, we had enough space to be on our own or hang out together.
I counted three showers in our villa. One outdoor shower next to the pool, an indoor shower and another outdoor shower next to the bathroom. There was a separate bathtub as well, besides our 38-degree jacuzzi outside and our private pool. The pool felt noticeably cooler than the one by the restaurant, so we didn’t really end up using it.
Another thing that stood out was the number of coffee options you have in your room. I learned soon enough that the owner absolutely loves coffee, and he treats his guests to every option you could wish for. The room is equipped with a V60, French Press, Nespresso, an espresso machine and the traditional Kopi Bali. You get designated coffee for each of those options. For tea lovers, the room was also equipped with delicious turmeric tea and lemongrass tea, as well as prepacked tea.
Pools and Wellness
Munduk Moding Plantation offers multiple pools and jacuzzis for guests, as not every room comes with a private pool or jacuzzi. The main pool and secondary pool are heated to 28 degrees Celsius and feature an infinity view stretching to the northern coastline. On clear mornings you can even see Mount Ijen in Java.
These pools are the resort’s most photographed spot. During the morning hours, they allow you to walk over the ridge of the second pool to capture beautiful infinity pool views. I love that they put up signs to regulate this, so people don’t take up the spot forever. This also keeps the main pool’s view from the restaurant clear, so you’re not watching people pose for photos while you eat.
There are two public jacuzzis. One between the main and secondary pool, and another private jacuzzi that you can book for certain timeslots on the other side of the resort. This makes it a true jacuzzi resort in Bali, offering an experience you won’t easily find somewhere else on the island.
There’s a spa offering multiple treatments and a sauna, as you may expect from a resort in Bali. The gym is surprisingly well equipped, so you don’t have to skip your fitness days either.
The Coffee Plantation
One of the things that sets Munduk Moding Plantation apart is that the resort is surrounded by a functioning coffee plantation. The resort is around 1200 meters above sea level, making it the perfect altitude to grow arabica beans. A tour is included in your stay, where you learn about the history of coffee in this region, the variety of blends they create, and ultimately what they taste like through cupping.
The tour takes you along the resort’s paths, past several coffee plants. They also show you the filter system for all the wastewater processed on site. The walking tour has some steep inclines and declines. If you’re not up for walking, you can opt for the buggy plantation tour too, held in the afternoon.
The tour didn’t go as deep as my experience of a coffee plantation tour in Colombia, but it gives you a decent glimpse of a working plantation. They offer to let you plant your own coffee plant as well, and it’s great to see how they blend the coffee plantation seamlessly with a resort without being too much of a plantation or too much of a resort.
At the end of the tour you get to taste the different coffees through cupping. This is a manual process, where you get to try small sips of a variety of coffees, in a way you totally get to experience all the flavours.
Luwak coffee at Munduk Moding Plantation
One of my favourite parts of the coffee plantation tour was hearing about their luwak coffee process. Luwak coffee is one of the most expensive kinds of coffee in the world. These animals eat the beans, and their digestion creates a unique flavour in the beans. The process is very complicated, but unfortunately many plantations in Bali have turned it into a tourist attraction.
Places advertising luwak coffee along the road often cage one or two luwak cats, creating a fabricated version of the process. This is not the case at Munduk Moding Plantation. The resort is close to the forest, home to several wild luwak cats. They eat the beans on their own, and staff collect the digestion to create luwak coffee out of it. The guide showed us CCTV footage of a luwak wandering the resort at night, hence why they call their coffee ‘wild luwak coffee’ and not just luwak coffee.
Luwak coffee is also not promoted as a main attraction. It’s just one of the types of coffee the resort offers. The plantation creates five other blends, and the focus is on thes, not on the luwak coffee.
Activities at Munduk Moding Plantation
Another strong point of Munduk Moding Plantation is the huge variety of activities offered. Many of them are even free and included in your stay. The activities are centered around the resort’s ecological theme.
During the stay we obviously joined the coffee tour, but I also joined a healthy drink workshop. We learned how natural products can have healing benefits for your body. We made two drinks, one with turmeric and one with guava leaves. The turmeric juice could be combined with raw egg yolk. I skipped this part, as I wasn’t that keen on drinking raw egg yolk, but it’s apparently something the local population has done for many years.
My friend joined a bracelet-making class, where you get to hear about the plastic recycling process in the region and make a bracelet out of what used to be plastic waste.
At night there are evenings around the firepit, with free marshmallows to roast over the fire. Above you, you’ll see one of the clearest skies you can find in Bali. One of the best moments of my stay. They also offer a stargazing experience with a telescope. However, the stargazing appears to be more like moongazing, as the telescope isn’t strong enough to see much beyond the moon. The staff member isn’t an astronomer either, more someone who has picked up some knowledge of stars and constellations as part of the job.
The resort offers a variety of other activities too. There are animal enclosures with goats, turkeys, doves and rabbits. Munduk Moding Plantation also offers horseback riding with one of the horses in the stables. Based on observation, it looks like they take care of the animals very well, with staff monitoring the animals frequently.
Food at the resort
Munduk Moding Plantation offers two restaurants. The main restaurant is open all day and serves breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. There’s a Balinese restaurant next to the second pool and a sunset bar with daily happy hour from 5 until 7.
There are no restaurants in the immediate area, so staying here for a couple of nights means you’ll have most of your meals at one of the resort’s restaurants. Breakfast offered a wide variety of local and international dishes. The Mimpi MMP Breakfast is a solid choice, the resort’s version of a big breakfast, with eggs, avocado toast, chicken sausage, pork bacon and a fruit salad with yoghurt and granola. Breakfast came with a hot beverage and/or a juice. The communication wasn’t very clear, as I wasn’t sure if it was a hot drink and a juice, or a hot drink or a juice. It also wasn’t clear whether we could order only one dish for breakfast, or make a combination. This is something that could be improved.
For lunch and dinner the resort offers a similar menu, with lunch offering some lighter dishes as well. I tried pumpkin soup and some fish and chips for lunch. The pumpkin soup was delicious, the fish and chips rather simple. For dinner we tried the seafood skewer as a starter, the traditional rendang and a 180-gram tenderloin steak as mains.
For dessert, we tried dadar gulung and the strawberry sorbet. Dadar gulung is a traditional green pancake with coconut shavings inside. In my opinion it was a little too decorated, but the flavour was very good. The strawberry sorbet was combined with whipped cream and some biscotti, a huge portion to finish on your own. It’s delicious, but very rich and enough to share with someone else.
During the afternoon tea, we ordered a drink and received some cookies and traditional cakes.
Overall the food quality was good, but service could be improved. A little more attention to guests, offering house water, asking how the food is. All these details were a bit on and off, and could be the next step in offering a real premium experience.
During our stay, we didn’t try the sunset bar or the Balinese restaurant, so I can’t share my experience of these parts of the resort.
Sustainability and Community Impact
Munduk Moding Plantation aims to be a sustainable resort in Bali, and the efforts are easily visible. The resort reduces as much plastic as possible. The plastic that is still used will be recycled on site. Plastic waste is pressed into new building materials. All around the resort you’ll see small signs, tables, and even banner holders made of recycled plastic.
The wastewater, as mentioned before, is filtered through a variety of tanks on site and used again for water distribution across the property. You start noticing sustainability details everywhere once you start looking for them. Lights won’t be unnecessarily turned on during the day, jacuzzi heating is turned off after 9PM (though staff will keep it on longer on request), and even the Nespresso cups in the room are reusable.
Climbing the bamboo tower near the entrance also showed me solar panels on the rooftops of some of the bigger buildings. In European countries the main reason for using solar panels is often based on the payback period and the savings on expensive energy, but electricity isn’t that expensive in Bali. Observing this made me think that Munduk Moding Plantation doesn’t do it to save money, but to reduce the impact on the electricity grid.
The impact Munduk Moding Plantation makes isn’t limited to the resort itself. Remember the first impressions on arrival, when I saw local kids walking around on the laneway? They were practicing local dances and traditional music on the property. The resort also invites local schools to teach them about sustainability. I truly believe that a better future starts with educating the younger ones, so I was glad to hear about this. Another way the resort impacts the local area is by collecting plastic waste from surrounding villages, directly contributing to the waste management of Gobleg and Munduk, recycling it into furniture and other recycled plastic items.
It matches another impressive fact: the plantation and resort run on a 100% Balinese team, close to 150 people according to the resort itself. That says something about how much of the local economy depends on this place, well beyond the plastic recycling and the school visits.
What Could Be Better
Even though it’s very comfortable, I wondered about the ecological thoughts behind the heated jacuzzi’s. It’s part of the experience, but I wondered whether it matches the rest of the ecological and sustainable mindset of the resort. After checking with the team, I learned that it’s been part of the first features of the resort. The resort doesn’t ignore the impact, and as part of their efforts to reduce energy consumption, the jacuzzis are switched off during the night and covered after use to retain as much heat as possible. This helps reduce the amount of energy required to bring them back to the desired temperature the following day.
Service at the restaurant could also be more consistent. Whether we’d get asked how the food was, or offered water without asking, varied from meal to meal. None of this really changes the overall picture. Munduk Moding Plantation does very, very well.
Who Is This Resort For?
The demographics of the resort were mainly young families or older couples during our stay. I didn’t see many young couples or groups of friends during our time. If you’re looking for a great honeymoon resort in Bali, it’s perfect for that too. There are romantic corners with amazing views at the restaurant. Generally the resort is for anyone looking for a more authentic Bali experience than the south, and for those who are willing to sacrifice some beach or rice field time with a true nature escape.
Practical Information
You can book Munduk Moding Plantation through their official website. There are multiple room types, ranging from suites to villas with jacuzzi, or one- or two-bedroom pool villas with jacuzzi. The biggest villa has 5 bedrooms, and if you’re feeling extravagant, you can book the presidential suite with a private fireplace, a big pool and a total villa size of 200m².
The nightly rate is around 2,500,000 IDR for a suite for two, up to 4,000,000 IDR for a private villa for two. For this price your breakfast is included, as well as an afternoon tea. Pricing is a bit dependent on the season, so it could be a bit more during high season.
Getting to Munduk Moding Plantation is best done by car. It takes around 2.5 hours from the airport or 2 hours from Canggu. If you’re exploring the island by bike, it’s possible too.
The weather can be unpredictable. We had beautiful sunny and clear mornings and nights. Around noon, clouds would roll in and cover the skies until sunset. I’ve seen beautiful sunset photos of the resort, but unfortunately we didn’t experience anything like this. During the rainy season from October to April, Munduk becomes grey and moody. However, this is a unique experience too. The hot tub will still be hot, and it adds a mystical touch to your stay.
Conclusion
All in all, Munduk Moding Plantation has really impressed me. I’ve known this resort for years. I’ve seen videos about it, and of course the famous photos of the infinity pool. Staying there is a whole new experience. The size of the resort blew me away. The vision of the founder and architects amazed me. And the points of improvement turned out to be small details. I would love to bring my family here one day. I brought some fresh coffee beans to remember my time in Munduk, and I’m already looking forward to my next stay at this resort.
Upon leaving the resort property, I instantly noticed the difference between the resort and the local village. Waste started to appear again, I noticed that the area itself is still underdeveloped. And it took me away from the pink clouds where everything seems to be perfect. There’s still a battle to win, but Munduk Moding Plantation has initiated it towards a better future for northern Bali, without losing its identity.
Any questions this blog didn’t answer? Please let me know below!
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