We flew JetStar airlines from Singapore to Bali, arriving in the evening. Bali is an island in Indonesia, just one of over 17,000 islands in the country. It is the 4th most populous country in the world at 275 million people. We were staying in the central city of Ubud, which took about two hours to get to by car from the airport. The road there was small and congested with cars, small trucks and hundreds of scooters and motorbikes. There were not many traffic controls and staying in your lane was not really a thing. Scooters were constantly passing cars on the left and the right. Cars and scooters were always trying to turn in or out of the road to join or leave the stream. Intersections were not for the faint of heart – everyone just kind of merges and weaves their way through without stopping.
Our hotel was along a road in Ubud called Monkey Forest Road. Yes, there were monkeys, but none came into our hotel while we were there, but we were instructed to not interact with them if they did! Our hotel was small and picturesque. Our room overlooked a rice field with new seedlings freshly planted. They had decorated our bed with flower petals when we arrived. Our bed was equipped with netting all around presumably to keep mosquitos at bay, but maybe it was just for show. With all the water around, there were mosquitoes but they didn’t bother us too much. We wore mosquito spray, and they had anti-mosquito incense burning in most places.
While it’s very picturesque to have a rice field outside your bedroom, it was very noisy at night with frogs. They would sing the strangest songs loudly at different times at night waking us up. The grounds of the hotel were lush and green. Exotic fruit trees and coconut palms were growing everywhere. They had a nice pool in the shade we enjoyed one afternoon. It sat at the edge of a deep jungly ravine.
We hired a guide to drive us around the first day so we could learn more about Bali and its culture. Our first stop was a traditional Balinese home where a family was living, but welcomed tourists. These “homes” were actually a collection of several small buildings and temples inside a gated wall. Hindu is the primary religion in Bali, and it has a big influence on the architecture and daily life. There are many gods and spirits to appease (both good and evil ones) and daily offerings are a ritual that doesn’t just happen at temples, but in homes and businesses as well. And it’s not just one place where offerings are placed in a home. There could be dozens of little temples, statues and places on the ground to leave offerings throughout the home and in front of the gate. Some people may spend hours preparing and placing the offerings. Offerings to gods were often flowers arranged in a banana leaf tray. Each flower had a color that appeased a certain god, and had to be placed facing the right direction. Burning incense was usually added to these arrangements. Offering of food, drinks, even cigarettes were also made to appease the evil spirits and keep them away.
When we entered the Balinese house gate, there was also a mirror placed in the inside wall to ward away any evil spirits. The first little house by the gate was usually the kitchen. This was extremely primitive. Many people still cook over wood fires – and claim that rice tastes much better cooked this way. We were a little shocked at how dark and dirty it was in there. There was cloudy dishwater in a bucket that couldn’t be healthy.
There were a few other houses around with beds for the family. Parents, kids and grand parents had separate buildings. In the middle was an elevated room with open walls and a large bed. This was a death bed, reserved for when people were dying or already dead, so people could pay their respects. A bit morbid that this was the centerpiece of the home.
In a corner of the home was the temple area, with several little shrines and another platform where offerings were prepared. A woman had prepared a large tray full of offerings and was walking around carefully placing them in the right spots.
There was another area where they were raising chickens – including several roosters for cock fighting. They were sitting calmly under baskets, which is where I presume they stay most of the time. Cock fighting is another Hindu ritual – something to do with offering blood to some gods or spirits. Over the years, gambling on cock fights was developed – but that wasn’t the original intention.
The area around Ubud is known for its crafts and artisan communities. Each village was known for some skill like wood carving, textiles, metalwork, jewelry, basket weaving, furniture building, painting, etc. We visited wood carvers, jewelry makers and textile artisans on our tour. Their skills are impressive, and have been passed down generation by generation. We were particularly interested in how they made patterns on the beautiful sarongs they make – a process called Batik. A woman used hot wax to outline designs on a white fabric so when they dyed it, those spots wouldn’t take the dye. This process was repeated multiple times on each side for each color until the pattern and design was done. They melted the wax off with boiling water. We also watched them weave fabric on the loom in a unique process called ikat. In this technique, they dye the yarns with linear patterns before weaving them to make the patterns. So interesting to see the patterns emerge, and how fast they were at lining things up.
Next we went to the Batuan temple. There are thousands of temples in Bali and this one was pretty representative. It was built in the 900’s, making it well over one thousand years old. Both men and women are required to wear a sarong to enter the grounds, which they provided. The statues and carvings in and around the temples were so different. Dragons, elephants, lions, snakes, eagles and scary looking spirits were all represented.
We then took a longer drive out to the mountains to see some volcanoes. Unfortunately, the clouds had thickened and we were unable to see either one from the viewpoint. The trip was not a waste, though, as the road there went by some of the biggest agricultural areas in Bali. Because the weather was cooler in the mountains, they grew lots of vegetables, coffee and fruits there. We stopped at a roadside stand and tried durian for the first time. This is a large football-sized fruit that is notorious for its bad smell. In fact, all during our trip the hotels had signs forbidding the fruit from hotel rooms. The durian is split open with a large knife to reveal a white flesh inside, with pockets of the soft fruit you eat. The durian we tried did not smell offensive to us and it didn’t taste bad. I’m not going to say it tasted good either. I thought it had a bit of an acrid taste. I think we’ll stick to Mangosteens.
Next we stopped at a coffee plantation that was very interesting. We walked through a large grove of exotic trees as we entered. Growing together were durian trees, coffee trees (both robusta and arabica varieties), snake fruit trees (very unappealing), cacao trees, mango trees, papaya trees… They then provided us with samples of twelve different coffees and teas they produce there, plus I ordered one cup of the most expensive coffee in the world: Kopi Luwak.
A civet is a type of nocturnal marsupial that likes to eat ripe coffee beans in the wild. Their stomach enzymes partially digest the coffee bean making it smoother and less caffeinated, and supposedly healthier for you. Their poop is collected in the wild, the coffee beans are then cleaned and roasted to produce Luwak coffee that can go for $600 per pound in the States. So, how did it taste? It was a bit smoother and more refined than the normal Balinese coffee (which was very strong), but nothing my taste buds would discern enough to want to seek it out again. On the other hand, we were pleasantly surprised by how good the other coffees and teas we tried were. They had ginger coffee, coconut coffee, ginseng coffee, Bali cocoa coffee, turmeric tea, mangosteen tea (made from the skin) and many more. We ended up buying some Bali cocoa coffee and mangosteen tea to take with us. It may come in handy when we are camping in New Zealand if it doesn’t make it all the way home with us.
Our final stop of the day was the best: the Tegalalang Rice Terraces. Another UNESCO site, these terraces have been cultivated with rice for centuries using an ingenious 8th century irrigation process called subak to keep the water levels just right. The terraces were built on both sides of a steep ravine that we were able to climb down and up on steep, winding stairs and narrow paths.
We ate supper at the hotel when we got back. Their dining area is outdoors under a palapa roof. They had some musicians playing traditional Balinese music. It was a long day, so we enjoyed winding down at the hotel.
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