Bubble Hotel: See inside one of Bali’s most unique stays

Only an hour’s drive from Bali’s international airport but a million metaphorical miles away, Nyang Nyang beach on the island’s south coast is one of the least-known and visited beaches in Bali — but the most spectacular by a long way.

The difficulty in getting to Nyang Nyang explains why so few people go there. From the carpark, beachgoers must continue by foot for 20 minutes in the blazing, hot sun down a steep, winding road that curls like a snake through thick jungle home to long-tailed macaques, metre-long monitor lizards and birds of the tropics. Some daredevil locals and tourists do it on their scooters, though with gradients of up to 25 per cent, it’s not recommended.

From a clearing at the bottom of the cliff, a concrete staircase passes a small, open-face restaurant and bar, the only one on the beach, before emptying into in a scene cut straight out of Tahiti or Hawaii: a 1.5km-long stretch of bone-white sand lapped by sparkling, turquoise waters and backdropped by 150m-high cliffs carpeted in greenery.

With partly exposed reefs right on the beach back-ended by endless barreling waves, Nyang Nyang is a top place to surf. You cannot swim in open water though you can take a refreshing dip in the gin-clear swimming holes that manifest on the reef at high tide.From the restaurant, another 10-minute slog along baby-powder soft sand takes you to the only accommodation on the beach that is as romantic and impressive as Nyang Nyang itself.

Rated by Airbnb as one of the world’s most unique places to stay, Bubble Hotel Bali is a quixotic accommodation concept where guests sleep in futuristic, inflatable, climate-controlled, transparent spheres that offer unobstructed views of nature without forfeiting the comforts of a modern hotel room.

Bubble hotels first appeared in 2018 and there are now more than a dozen around the globe. In Iceland and Finland, bubble hotels allow guests to doze off while watching the northern lights. There’s a bubble hotel in a vineyard in Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe, another in the deserts of Jordan and Bubbletent in the Central Tablelands of NSW overlooking Capertee Valley, one of the widest gorges in the world. Bali’s is the only bubble hotel on a beach — and the first in South-East Asia.

The property is the brainchild of Felix Demin, a university dropout from Russia of Ukrainian heritage who made his first million at the age of 19 importing robotic vacuum cleaners from China. His business empire today includes La Perle Group, a trading company in Hong Kong, Bali Investments, a construction company, another bubble hotel in Ubud and logistics companies in China and Russia with more than four million users.

The entrepreneur’s attention is currently focused on private jet villa. A world-first, it is set inside an old Boeing 747-200 Demin transported at great expense to the clifftops of Nyang Nyang that will have a jacuzzi in the cockpit among other rock-star features. If the trick works (and based on the 150-plus global publications that have already written about the project, it probably will) Demin plans to build a chain of 30 private jet villas around the world. Meanwhile, he has put Bali Bubble Hotels into the capable hands of Kit Cat Cahill, a remote-era specialist from Australia with 30 years of hospitality experience including a decade managing properties in the Kimberley and Pilbara.

“Bali’s south coast is already a bit of a remote location because deliveries and services are not as readily available as they are on other parts of the island. Then add the fact that we are one kilometre from the main road at the bottom of a 150m high cliff, and you’ve got yourself a huge challenge logistically speaking,” she explains.

“You need mental tenacity to deal with it all and a real knack for planning because if we need something we can’t just nip out to the shops. Everything needs to be ordered two or three days in advance. But I wouldn’t be a remote-area specialist if I didn’t love a challenge. We recently built a rope and pulley system, basically a flying fox, that can take up to 50kg of food down to the beach. Everything else — fridges, mattresses — has to be carried along the beach.”

Keeping the spheres in good nick presents an even greater challenge. Custom-made in China from PVC, they last about a year and the maintenance is relentless. They need to be cleaned every day to mitigate discolouration and stiffening by the salty sea air, which explains why nobody else put them on a beach before.

The bubbles are kept inflated by a silent exhaust system hidden behind a row of hedges that pump ambient air in. And they are kept cool by an air-conditioner that runs 24 hours a day. The rack rate of $350 per night — the same average nightly rate for a five-star hotel in Indonesia — reflects the operating expenses.

Mr Denim’s genius as a hotelier is that every inch of the Bubble Hotel Bali, much like his upcoming private jet villa, was designed to encourage guests to create content for Instagram, the world’s most popular travel noticeboard. Set within private gardens, each bubble comes with a beachfront infinity-edge plunge pool, a large swing set above a heart-shaped sandpit, a fire pit and a framed flat hammock with big cushions that hangs over the beach. There’s an open-roof bathroom with a mini-garden, the same kind you find in luxury villas around Bali, plus a gazebo with a sofa and large coffee table where guests eat. The food is pretty basic but satisfying — chicken and tempeh burgers, cheese platters, smoothies and juice and eggs on toast or cheese toasties with spicy sambal for breakfast. There’s also a basic wine list.

Each sphere has two sections. The first is a plastic chamber guests must unzip to knee height and hobble into. They must then zip it up again to ensure the main sphere doesn’t deflate when they wind down a second zip to access the bubble. The process is laborious, though at the time of writing in November Kit Cat Cahill was replacing the chambers with a framed glass version and the first zip with a glass door that she says will simplify the process.

Bubble Hotel Bali is more like camping or glamping than staying at a hotel. Much of the time, guests are outside, absorbing the mind-blowing natural surroundings of Nyang Nyang beach.

“We know that camping is not everyone’s cup of tea,” Kit Cat says. “So we turned it into a luxury experience with all the creature comforts of a hotel combined with an intimate connection with nature that is unmatched in Bali.”