The Day We Saw Everything

5am - Morning prayer sounds (like it's time for fourth period), followed by chanting for 15 minutes.

9am - Breakfast: banana pancake, fresh fruit, coffee. Boats honk arrival in the harbor.
Ali takes us to a traditional Balinese dance performance. The Sekehe Barong Sila Budaya, where we watch the Barong and Kris Dance. Something about the eternal fight between good and evil spirits represented by monsters with wonderfully elaborate costumes made from real flowers and hair. I am oddly reminded of Cousin It. Beautiful Balinese women with handmade frangipani headdresses dance with painted eyes wide open, unblinking. Emphasis on fluttering fingers and careful, measured foot placement. Busloads of Muslim children from Java literally wait in line to have their photo taken with us after the performance instead of with the widely fantastical dragon from the play.

Traditional Indonesian boat in Padang Bai harbor

11am - Walk the town of Ubud, great shopping. Local artisans have made the town quite popular (silver smiths, painters and wood carvers). Also here: Monkey Forest. I would not recommend feeding the monkeys bananas (which the locals sell at the entrance to Monkey Forest). They are mean, they hiss at you and have massive fangs. Neither will they hesitate to jump on you and take your watch, your credit card, and sunglasses and sell them at the nearest pawn shop, perhaps after a fancy lunch and shopping excursion. We indulge in a fried spring roll/taquito hybrid from a street vendor, who chops it into pieces with tiny scissors and then tops it off with many small green chilies, serving it to us in a brown paper square stapled into a pyramid. Delicious. And fried.

1pm - Lunch at a local restaurant per our request. Ali has eaten here many times before, they serve traditional Balinese pig, which is slow roasted over a spit and then displayed in a glass enclosure at the front of the restaurant. Tehbotl to drink (bottled sweetened iced tea). Our food arrives with many small bits and pieces, some roasted, some resemble jerky, and one bit looks like intestine. It's served on a bed of rice with a spicy green sauce unique to the restaurant. We bravely dig in and ask no questions. When we are down to three last questionable bits, we ask Ali about them. The pig lung is dried like jerky and quite tasty. The intestine we both leave on the plate.

At the coffee plantation - in the jungle, baby!

2pm - Coffee plantation. They grow everything here, from cinnamon bark to vanilla pods, to cocoa, Arabica beans, and limes. After touring the gardens and various flora we taste 5 varieties of coffee and several teas - including saffron, ginseng and lemongrass teas. The vanilla and coconut coffees are delicious and the ginseng coffee is amazing. Also on order, the special Luwak coffee - from the shit of the weasel-like Asian Palm Civit. It's alright, but not worth the extraordinary prices charged. It is one of the world's most expensive coffees. A warning to the coffee drinkers out there, the Balinese do not strain their coffee, but serve it with an unflattering sludge at the bottom of the cup - do not gulp every last sip of your coffee or you will have a mouthful of grounds!

3pm - Lake Batur. Unfortunately there's no swimming in this big, beautiful lake because of the volcano explosion in 1999. They are, however, farming fish in this lake today for food for the villagers. There's a startling blackened lava trail still visible on the south-western slope of Mount Batur from the 1968 explosion (which killed 1700 people!), nothing grows there. But tourists hike up this active volcano every day.

The Balinese leave these at the entrance to
their homes and temples as offerings
to the gods for protection, daily

3:30pm - The Mother Temple, or Pura Besakih. Chris did a whole post on this place, so I will summarize here: it's 1300 years old, and resides on the sunny side of Mount Agung. The entire site, consisting of 52 buildings, is constructed from lava stone, which gives the temple it's famous black facade. Each temple has 11 palm-thatched roofs (which get re-thatched every 20 years), and statues of the 4 Hindu gods. Construction is underway on one of the buildings and workers are balanced on bamboo (!) scaffolding high in the air.

4pm - Rice paddies. It must not be rice harvesting season, because there is no water in the paddies. They have the stepped, green resemblanjce to the photos I've seen in National Geographic, but are slightly disappointing without the water and sky reflection. There is, however, beautiful jungle and flowering frangipani trees surrounding.