Around Ubud

We decided to spend our last few Bali days based back in Ubud, enjoying more of the vicinity. We walked out to an incredibly beautiful, lush river valley area to the west of town. Man, is this island GREEN!:

 

We also got to see some of the rice terracing northeast of Ubud:

 

One of my favorite stops was Gulang Kawi, an historical site set tucked into another lush river valley, where there are nearly a dozen huge stone carvings representing temples to the gods.

 

We were there early-ish in the morning, and on the day before the Galungan holiday, so the site was mercifully quiet, with most of the vendors not open--though some of their wares were still out for display, like these funny little farmer dudes made of bamboo.

And there was an entertaining (in their loungingness) group of ticket-takers on duty.

On another day, we headed northwest from Ubud into the central mountains area, to the famed rice terraces of Jatiluweh (which are either already an UNESCO World Heritage Area or have an application pending to become one). It was a pretty spectacular sight.

We were encouraged to go for a walk anywhere we liked in and among the rice paddies, but the rice was nearly ready for harvest and so draped over the already-precarious packed-mud paths, and we didn't get too far before our ankles were slashed by rice stalks, our clothes soaked through with the heat/humidity, and our sense of direction telling us it might be better to backtrack the way we came than risk wandering the rice fields, lost, forever.

After Jatiluweh, a stop at a coffee stand, which was actually a pretty sophisticated tourist trap marketing Kopi Luwek: coffee made from beans eaten and shat out by the civet, a cat-like creature of the jungle. The coffee-stop guy showed us a few caged, sleeping (they're nocturnal) civets...

...explained the eating and expelling process (which didn't really need explaining), showed us some not-yet-washed, civet-processed coffee beans...

...and then offered a taste-test of Luwak coffee for about the equivalent of US$4. Why not? It's not like I'll ever actually buy the stuff at some other time, as it's marketed at several hundred US$/kilo of beans. Yikes. And, well, yum.

Then we sat in some serious holiday road congestion. This is a traffic jam, Bali-style:

But the amazing thing is, no one was angry or frustrated or impatient. Everyone just zipped along wherever they could and somehow (upwards of an hour later) it all worked out. Oh, and I have been trying the past two weeks to get a picture of four people on one motor-scooter, which is a more common sight than one would hope, but they're always moving too fast for me to get my camera going. So I was amazed and undeservedly proud of myself when I was trying to take a picture of three people on a motor-scooter, but I hit the button too late and instead, ended up with this unintentional shot of a scooter I hadn't seen coming up from behind us.

A good deal of our time in traffic was in an effort to get to our final stop, a Balinese chocolate factory! Alas, when we finally got there, it was closed for the holiday. I tried to take it in stride, like a Bali native stuck in traffic. Instead of gorging myself on chocolate, I contented myself with this picture of the factory building, which is supposedly one of the largest bamboo structures in the world. (??)

And that's all she wrote on Bali, folks. It's slightly painful to leave here. It's a place apart from any other I've been, and I've had a great two weeks and would gladly return here someday. Luckily, Australia is calling us back, and there are many more adventures still to come in the land of Oz. See you back there!