Day 9 (July 26, 2014): Exploring Bali

How does one start to explain Bali?  Here are some facts:  Bali is an island and province of Indonesia with a population of 4.2 million. It is located between Java to the west and Lomboko to the east. Its capital, Denpasar, is located at the southern part of the island. And it is predominantly Hindu. In fact, after six hours of touring around the island today, we were left with that single overall impression: Hinduism permeates everything here. 

I had negotiated a driver outside the hotel complex on Friday evening and - true to his word - young Ngurah was at the hotel front lobby at 8am sharp. And boy, did he ever have questions!  His dream is to move to LA and make lots of money so his questions centered around life in America (he couldn't seem to grasp that Canada was a separate country). 

Okay, so Hinduism permeates life here. The second overall impression is that traffic makes getting anywhere painful. And I mean PAINFUL. There doesnt seem to be much of a highway existence. Getting from place to place means driving the urban, narrow, crowded streets from town to town. And one town simply melds into the next. 

Ubud is a major city two hours north of Nua Dusa (the beach resort area). It's a town filled with artisans of every type and their stores line the streets, mile after mile: paintings, Hindu carvings in stone and wood, furniture, etc. We arrived at Ubud's Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary at 10am and, just as Ngarah promised, the park was filled with monkeys (grey haired and greedy long tailed Balinese macaques) and temples. Quite the place!

From there it was on to see the most amazing terraced rice fields we have ever seen. The pics speak for themselves.

The Balinese plant three rice crops every year. 

Next, it was on to a coffee plantation to see how the luwak helps produce the richest coffee bean in the world!  Here's a luwak:

The little guys are picky: they only select the best beans, digest them, poop them out (sorry!), and then the pooped out beans are roasted (these are they!!):

I had a cup of the stuff

(the beans sell for $50 per 100g) - an interesting flavour indeed!  We also sampled a number of other coffees - yes, all these were presented to us!

Temples are everywhere. And tiny shrines are everywhere.

And people set food offerings all over the sidewalks - everywhere!! - three times a day.

So one needn't go far to experience a temple. But Ngarah took us to one of the more major complexes southeast of Ubud. We had to adorn sarongs to enter. 

Pam had fun trying out the musical instruments used for ceremonies. 

This isn't related to anything, except to show something local that is bizarre... All along the streets, shops well bottles of gasoline! Can you imagine that happening in Canada?!

By the time we were finished at the temple, it was 1pm. And the noise and traffic and incense of Bali were making us long for the beach at the Melia. After all, Bali is our end-of-vacation rest spot. So we felt we had gotten a good sense of life here and headed back to the hotel. By 2pm we said good bye to Ngarah, wished him all the best with his LA dreams, and hit the beach and pool until 5pm. Sitting on the beach, we were surprised to see a long Hindu procession coming to perform a ceremony at a small beachfront temple. 

Dinner was at one of the hotel's restaurants. Following dinner, we took in a short cultural show which showed some of Bali's great costumes and told stories to traditional music which we couldn't figure out for the life of us!! Fun to see, nonetheless. 

And so ended our last full day of vacation.  The long trip home starts on Sunday.