Bali’s hidden gems and stunning secret spots where tourists rarely tread – from a resident who wrote a book on them

A herd of deer blocks the potholed forest road, so I ease the car to the side of the track and switch off the engine. As I watch a young fawn foraging quietly near its mother, the rasping call of a green junglefowl – a wild cousin of our domestic chicken – breaks the silence. Then, from up in the canopy, comes the bickering chatter of two gleaming white Bali starlings, which are among the world’s rarest birds.

After living in west Bali for six years, it still strikes me as almost inconceivable that this expanse of wilderness can exist on an island that has become a byword for saturated tourism. Few people, even among the islanders themselves, realise that the interior of the western end of the island – an area measuring about 600 square kilometres (230 square miles) – is still covered with uninhabited jungle.

Bali, however, is still able to surprise visitors with a few spectacular “secrets spots” for those who are willing to head off the beaten track. The few travellers who make the three-hour drive from the airport out to the island’s “wild west” are usually stunned to find that at Prapat Agung Peninsula, on the farthest western tip, wild deer still outnumber tourists.

The endangered Bali starlings – sparkling avian beauties with their vivid flash of blue eyeliner – are still struggling to secure a viable population. Conservationists in this area are trying hard to build up a wild breeding population.

The starlings, which feature on a 200-rupiah coin, have become status symbols for bird collectors. The Menjangan deer remain a symbol of another, more mystical, type for west Bali fishermen who revere them for the ease with which they swim between islands. Most of the wooden outrigger boats near our home in Pekutatan, on Bali’s southwestern coast, are adorned with lucky effigies of wooden Menjangan heads.