Contributing Author
Hospitality Student · Foodie · Indonesia Traveller
Matteo Esposito is a Filipino-Italian student of Hospitality and Luxury Management at De La Salle College of Saint Benilde in Manila. Born in Rome and raised in Manila by his parents, he grew up moving between two food cultures, which shaped both his palate and his curiosity about how places welcome travellers.
His interest in hot springs began with a first trip to Indonesia in October 2024. Based in a villa near the Monkey Forest in Ubud, he did the usual rounds of temples, jungle swings, and photo stops until a local pointed him toward something quieter: a natural hot spring about an hour out of town at Angseri, reached by a walk down into a green canyon beside a waterfall. A few days later, a sunrise hike up Mount Batur ended at Toya Devasya on the shore of Lake Batur, where he soaked in an infinity pool facing the volcano. Those two very different baths, one hidden in a rice-terrace valley, the other framing a smoking caldera, left him fascinated by how each spring carries its own setting and story.
A keen cook and self-described foodie, Matteo pays as much attention to the meal after a soak as to the water itself. He writes about Indonesian hot springs for SpringsAtlas with a hospitality student's eye for what makes a visit comfortable, memorable, and worth the journey.
Fluent in Italian, English, and Filipino, he plans to travel the world after graduation to practice hospitality management and seek out the unusual and the overlooked, hot springs very much among them.
A long soak leaves you starving everywhere on earth. From kaiseki in a Japanese ryokan to gozleme at a Turkish village stall, every hot spring culture has built its own answer to the same very real hunger.
Budapest has more thermal baths than any capital on earth. Here is how to pick between the big three for your first soak, from a hospitality student who tried all of them.
Indonesia sits on the Ring of Fire, which means volcanoes, which means hot springs everywhere. If you have never soaked in one here, this is what to expect, what to pack, and how not to look like a total beginner.
Everyone goes to Bali for the beaches, the rice terraces, and the Ubud swings. Almost nobody tells you the island also has hot springs. Here is how I found two of the best, one in a hidden canyon and one facing a live volcano.
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