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!

Toya Bungkah / Batur volcano

Our next Bali stop was the town of Toya Bungkah, nestled at the base of Bali's most active volcano, Batur. This is the view from up on the rim of a more ancient caldera, where the town of Batur moved to when it was repeatedly destroyed by the lava flows that you can see down in the valley.

 

Toya Bungkah is on the other side of Batur, which has (so far at least) been spared from lava flow during eruptions. It sits on a small lake (also called Batur). We made our home for three days at a simple guesthouse with this fantastic view and an equally fantastic name: Under the Volcano III.

Let me tell you, this was a blissful place to be. Maybe due to the higher elevation, it felt markedly cooler and less humid up here than down on the coasts, and the nights were cool enough that I (gasp) could put on long sleeves for the first time in a few weeks. It's kind of shocking how fast days can pass when you just eat breakfast (banana pancakes with honey and local coffee), play some Yahtzee (SR has invented "metaYahtzee," our new obsession), eat some lunch at Volcano I (owned by another branch of the Volcano III family; you wouldn't think that Hershey's syrup in avocado puree would be tasty, but you'd be wrong)...

...wander around the town, where there was a soccer game every single evening...

...and then have some fried rice for dinner before a solid nine hours of sleep. What more could one ask for?

The highlight of the visit, and the impetus for choosing this particular town as a base for a few days, was the pre-dawn, two-hour climb from the village to the top of Batur volcano to watch the sun rise. That's the neighboring island of Lombok (and its own, incredibly massive volcano) that you can see on the horizon, there.

Once light, along with a good hundred other people (mostly Balinese, which surprised me in a good way), we enjoyed the views of the crater rim and, on the other side of the lake, Abung mountain and (the larger shadow behind it) another volcano called Agung.

After our guide cooked us breakfast (a hard-boiled egg and cooked banana between two pieces of white bread--that was a new one for me) over a vent of the volcano, we set off on the very narrow rim of Batur to check out the caldera from a different angle.

We descended on the opposite, less steep side, where you can see the secondary and tertiary calderas of Batur, as well as the lava flows over where Batur village used to be. (The rim at the top of the picture is where I was standing when I took the first shot in this post.)

There's even a colony of macaque monkeys living right up there in the danger zone.

The end of our walk took us down through local gardens...

...and rice paddies...

...back to Toya Bungkah and our days of leisure there. If I ever withdraw my life savings from the bank and seemingly disappear off the face of the planet, this village is probably one of the places you should check for me.

Bila Village

When SR and I went on our daytrip around southern Bali during our fancy hotel time, our driver for that day was this incredibly sweet guy named Widia, who speaks terrific English. We plied him with questions during the entire outing, and his casual invite to come visit him in the village where he's from in the north turned into a conversation about how he was actually renting a car to take his wife and son up there in a few days, which turned into him picking us up in Ubud on his way north so that we could go up there with him to visit his village. There are "homestay" opportunities galore in a lot of parts of Bali, as there's a very effective tourist market for letting people see "the real Bali." Unless he's a master actor, I don't think Widia has ever brought any tourists to his village before, but he is a total natural and I think would be extremely successful at the homestay thing. If you ever get a chance to go to Bali, let me know and I'll give you Widia's number. You won't regret it, as you'd get to have an experience something like this:

 

When we first arrived at his village, Bila (very easy to remember, since you just reverse the vowels in "Bali"), Widia took us to the home where he grew up. His family's compound has clearly benefited from the tourist industry salaries he and one of his brothers draw, as there was a dramatic mix of bright white shiny new rooms and the older, much more modest rooms of the house that he was raised in. His wife, Putu, dashed across the street and brought back an overwhelming selection of traditional Balinese treats for us to try.

 

Widia, opening the dried-leaf wrapping of a black rice sweetroll:

 

There was a lot of sugar involved in most of these things (except for the extremely spicy noodle-meat-veggie dish, which it was clear I would not be able to handle). My sweet-tooth loved them all, but my brain, knowing it's so bad for me, preferred this one (below). It looks like algae or seaweed, but it's actually this kind of jello-textured stuff in a mildly sweet broth. Most of these traditional Balinese treats seemed to revolve around gelatin of some kind or another. Looks weird but tastes great.

From the village, we went out into the rice fields, into what Widia called his "garden." It was kind of a family compound planted (ha, ha) among the rice fields and dry land that his family owns and cultivates. One of his brothers actually lives full-time at the garden, and it's clear that it's where Widia's heart lives. His dream is to save enough money to buy a dozen pigs and a car, and then to live up here in Bila raising pigs to sell to local restaurants (which specialize in suckling pig delicacies) but also to be able to easily drive down to southern Bali and do some tourist guiding when the opportunity arises.

His mom had cooked up some rice and beans for lunch--my idea of heaven. Though what looked solely like green beans on the side had sneaky green chilis mixed in. I would have a hard time living full-time in Bali, with how spicy most of the traditional dishes here are!

After lunch, Widia took us on a little fieldtrip. Less than 10 km away is the north, black-sanded coast of Bali (we were vaguely near the Lovina coast). The boat on the right side of this picture is a traditional Balinese-style boat.

After an extremely refreshing swim at a public fresh-water pool in town, Widia made another stop at a traditional fish market. (Either to capitalize on the tourists' love of anything "traditional" or (less cynically) to make a point of separating the Balinese cultural heritage from the constant encroachment of western goods and ideas, they seem to attach the word "traditional" to everything, here. I finally figured out that "traditional market" just means that it's vendors on the sidewalk rather than an indoor supermarket.) There, he bought the makings for dinner for us and many members of his extended family.

Then it was back to the garden for the evening for cooking and eating under the Balinese stars.

This kid, Widia's nephew, I think, shimmied right up this coconut palm tree, plucked and threw down a few coconuts to his friend waiting below...

And then they opened them so we could drink the freshest coconut water I've ever had in my life. After we finished the water, they split the coconut open, hacked off a little fragment of the outside shell to use as a "traditional spoon," and then gave both back to us so we could scrape out the meat. YUM.

In the meantime, Widia's adorable mother was making a "traditional griller" out of the spine of a palm tree frond for the chicken we'd just purchased (at the time, alive; here, no longer) from a nearby hamlet.

By the time we actually ate, it was too dark to really take pictures, but the food was delicious, as Widia worked for awhile as a chef, and actually tried to start his own restaurant at one point.

It was a really beautiful, interesting day/evening, and it felt good to feel more like I was back in Peace Corps, in the middle of it all, rather than just one of the throngs of gringos (SR wants to try to introduce the word gringo to Asia; I have a feeling they already have a similar word, though I haven't pinpointed it yet--Widia just adorably calls us "foreigns") in southern Bali or Ubud. Such a great experience.

Ubud

From South Bali, we headed to Ubud, a sprawling town (which runs into adjoining towns, so that I have no idea how anyone decides where Ubud ends and other places begin) that every piece of tourism print I saw called "the cultural heart of Bali." Here, there are nightly Balinese dance performances, yoga studios on every block, shop after shop of beautiful fabric and clothing and crafts, vegan cafes, WAY more free wifi than we've found so far in all of Australia combined, and anything else all of the MANY foreign residents and visitors might desire. Toss in gutters full of trash, horribly maintained sidewalks, a beautiful Hindu temple (or five) on every street, and six knock-off Polo stores to remind you you're in Bali, and it's a very successful recipe for Eat Pray Love romanticism (it's here the third part of Elizabeth Gilbert's book is set). Even when it was verging on in-your-face travel-chic, somehow I found it all charming and really like it here.

 

 

 

I love how all the little snack shops sell petrol for the motor-scooters in repurposed gas bottles, and especially love it when those are Absolut bottles. It's almost modern art. (And really, to a non-drinker like me, vodka tastes like it might as well be gasoline, so it's completely appropriate.)

 

One of the standard Ubud stops is the Monkey Forest, where a patch of jungle in the city shelters some spectacular stone carvings (animals, temples, you name it). Yes, and lots of monkeys. At least these ones weren't crafty thieves like those at Ulu Watu.

 

And, completely coincidentally, we managed to be in Bali, and in Ubud no less, for Galungan Day, an important Balinese holiday marking the beginning of a ten-day celebration of the return of the gods to the island. It was fun (but oppressively hot and sweaty, if you want to know the truth) wandering around town watching the locals in their finest...

 

...seeing the offerings that are already left in front of practically every human structure every day ramped up to a fever pitch...

...seeing people make and then struggle to erect the penjors (huge bamboo poles, colorfully decorated and placed to the right of the entrance of every home)...

...watching the temples go from ornate to positively festooned...

...and, toward sundown, hearing the music of groups of celebrants moving through the streets with ceremonial animal costumes and what look to me like a type of parasol that I'm now coveting.

 

Things just get better and better, I tell you!