I dismissed Bali for years - then one trip changed everything I thought

We're lying beneath thatch umbrellas, reading, napping, and occasionally rousing ourselves to amble across the sand to cool off with a swim. There are no vendors trying to sell us anything. No cocktail bars or beach clubs blaring bass-heavy music, just the luxury of quiet.

Yesterday, we wandered with a guide through the ancient walled village of Tenganan, deeply immersed in green. Home to Bali's indigenous Bali Aga people and one of the island's oldest inhabited villages, it's a place where cultural traditions are practised unchanged since the 11th century.

Neither scene fit my preconception of a destination that had always languished below the fold on my travel wish list. "Too many Australians." I thought. "Rubbish beaches. Inauthentic." But after two work-related trips, I began to question my beliefs and this visit, my third, is by choice.

While you could, technically, drive from one end of Bali to the other in about four hours, most Australian travellers see no reason to, rarely straying beyond a handful of familiar hubs, Kuta, Legian, Seminyak, Canggu, places where tourists outnumber locals, and traffic jams the roads - ground zero for Bali's reputational nosedive.

But at almost 6000 sq km, the island has a remarkable diversity of climate, geology and culture. Inland, the coastal humidity gives way to cool, mist-wreathed peaks, natural hot springs and dense forest. Along the coast are fishing villages, marine parks and islands with unspoilt beaches.

We are heading north, to Karangasem Regency, to stay in a locally-owned resort between the fishing villages of Gretek and Tianyar.

We're winding through the mountainous interior, through hilltop towns where scruffy gangs of monkeys sit on the side of the road grooming each other, admiring the temples and the rice terraces, carved into green valleys, when our driver tells us there are plans for a second airport, here on the north side of the island. It's a prospect that has apparently been received with ambivalence. He has no such mixed feelings.

"We don't want it," he states definitively. "We have been told it will be good for us, that it will bring money. But we enjoy our quiet life here, respecting nature, and we don't want the same sort of problems with tourism they have in the south."

The new airport is due to break ground midyear and be completed sometime in 2027. When it does, Bali's north will feel considerably closer. For now, though, the three-and-a-half-hour drive provides its own kind of protection, keeping the crowds away and the developers at bay.

For now, prices, too, are still to catch up. For $56 a night, our hotel, the Kirana Tembok, has generous, air-conditioned rooms in double-storied bungalows, with a shady terrace or deck overlooking lush gardens. There's an open-sided restaurant with both Indonesian and Western options, a small infinity pool, massage pavilion and a black sand beach. While nightlife is thin on the ground, there are plenty of activities in this part of Bali, including trekking up Mt Batur and visiting Savana Tianyar, a vast grassy plain that looks more like Africa than Asia. There are sunset sails in traditional boats, cooking classes and about 30 minutes away, in the sleepy town of Amed, renowned dives and reefs to snorkel.

Further south, Candidasa sits somewhere between old and new Bali. There's a nascent Ubud-by-the-sea atmosphere about the village, but for now, it's mercifully free of yoga shalas, co-working spaces, surf shops and beach bars. Our resort here, the Candi Beach Resort & Spa, has bungalows and villas dotted through luxuriant gardens, three restaurants, a huge staff-to-guest ratio, a spa and a postcard-worthy beach that, sandwiched between two small rock outcrops, is, for all intents and purposes, private.

The writer travelled at her own expense