Southern Bali

Though we were seriously questioning our sanity for leaving the lap of luxury at all while we had it, we did decide to take a daytrip splurge and hired a driver from the hotel to show us around a bit of southern Bali.

 

From what we read, southern Bali is riddled with ludicrous traffic and an obnoxious number of tourists who park it there for entire trips that consist of nothing but shopping, beach, and nightclubs. For those of you who know SR or I at all, you might guess this wouldn't really be our scene, and you would be right. It was a cultural experience, though, to crawl (oh, that traffic! we could have walked faster) past the seemingly endless kilometers of the boutique shops of Seminyak and see all of the sun-bleached surfer kids on holiday from Australia. (Pictured here: Padang Padang beach)

 

 

Our fantastic driver, Widia, took us to two of the three most important temples in Bali and introduced us to other interesting aspects of Balinese culture. At the temple of Ulu Watu, we enjoyed the cliff views...



 

...the menacing monkeys, which ran around stealing clothing and valuables off of the tourists in order to receive the bananas that the guides would throw at them to get them to drop and forget about whatever they'd stolen...

 

...and of course the peaceful temple itself:

It was truly a marvel to watch Widia navigate the insane traffic. In addition to the congestion, we'd also read about the popularity of motorbikes in Bali as an affordable way for the Balinese to get around. The truth of that was IMMEDIATELY apparent. This picture is nothing; we would see two or three dozen motorbikes lined up in traffic along a string of cars, and this on very narrow streets with basically no road rules. It looked like chaos, but somehow everyone got where they were going. Eventually. (It could not be more different than where we were one week ago, driving all day at 60 mph down nearly deserted highways of Western Australia!)

 

Even the foreigners were getting in on the motorbike fun, though this looks way too stressful and horrifyingly scary to be fun to me...

 

Widia pulled over on a road between two rice paddies, where it didn't look like there was any room for anyone to pull over, and jumped out at a stand where a woman was selling this traditional Balinese treat. On the inside is a syrupy red sugar, surrounded by this gelatinous green pod that W says is made from some kind of leaf, and then shredded coconut is sprinkled on top. Yum.

The other of the "essential" temples we stopped at was Tanah Lot. Most people visit at sunset, apparently, when I guess it would have been even more picturesque, but we had been warned against going that late in the evening because of the throngs of visitors that descend on the place, making the already-hideous traffic even more impossible. Not sure I'd want to see it with throngs of people there, as it already seemed so crowded as to destroy any peaceful temple vibe it once might have had. Or maybe the problem was the virtual city of vendor stalls you have to wade through to even get to the temple. What is kind of neat about it is that you can only walk to the temple itself at low tide. We arrived an hour before low tide and got our feet soaked in incoming waves.

 

 

Probably the best part of that temple visit, though, was the look on SR's face when a bunch of (I assume local Balinese, but I'm not really sure) teenage boys asked to have their picture taken with him, as if he was a celebrity. Totally worth the visit, right there.