A Weekend in Bali

So this weekend, Chris and I spent a weekend in Bali, an island in Indonesia made famous (at least in recent years in the United States) by the novel Eat, Pray, Love and its film adaptation.

On Friday evening, Chris and I arrived in Bali late, and haggled for a taxi to take us to our hotel in Ubud, a famous town/village in central Bali.  In Bali, everything is about haggling and fees that you don't necessarily think that you should have to pay - you pay tolls to both enter and exit the country, and you haggle for everything, right down to having a driver for the afternoon.  This first evening, we definitely got taken advantage of cost-wise by our driver, but he did take us safely from the airport (on the south side of the island) to where we were staying, which was about an hour and a half trip.  The road infrastructure in Bali is virtually nonexistent, so getting anywhere takes a lot of time - most roads are just two lanes, and there are constantly vespas zipping about, cars parked taking up most of the lane, or dogs meandering across the street, making passage a very very slow endeavor.

When we finally arrived at the place we were staying - a small home stay - around 11:30, the incredibly nice owner informed us that all of the rooms were occupied for the evening, at which point I apparently appeared the most horrified and scared that Chris had ever seen me.  The owner, however, then informed us that his relative living across the street had an extra guest room where we could stay, and she welcomed us in and allowed us to sleep there for the evening.

The next morning, we returned to the home stay for breakfast, at which point the owner cooked us breakfast and showed us to our room.  Both the room and the breakfast were absolutely to die for - he made us amazing banana pancakes with coconut (maybe the most delicious thing I've ever eaten), and our room was on the second floor, with an open-air balcony and a bed with a canopy inside.  When you get off the main roads in Bali, everything just smells fresh and amazing - it's a sweet, earthy, incense-y smell that I think every yoga studio back in the States hopes to achieve.  At night, we'd just leave the windows open and let the breeze blow through, which was great until we were woken up every morning by the roosters next door!

Our breakfast - banana pancakes and a fresh fruit salad, plus fresh Indonesian coffee (called kopi)!

On the balcony getting ready to head out for the day.

Our room entrance.

After breakfast, we left our home stay to head into the town of Ubud, which was about a 15 minute walk away.  After arriving in town, we went to the Ubud Monkey Forest, which is a holy monkey sanctuary right at the center of the town.  I don't know what Chris and I were expecting, but essentially it was just a set of pathways through an area FILLED with monkeys, who would just hang out in the trees and on the walkways, getting fed bananas and doing other things that monkeys do.  They also get a little bit rowdy - Chris had set his bag down to take a photo, and one of them grabbed it out from between his feet!  I can now say I've seen one of my friends get into a tug-of-war fight with a large, agressive monkey; luckily, Chris won, and we proceeded through the forest holding on tightly to all of our belongings.

VERY close to the monkeys.

After the Monkey Forest, we walked to the Ubud Market and did a bit of souvenir shopping, then got massages (about $25 USD for 90 minutes at a very upscale place), and stopped for a juice break before heading to dinner at a place called the Dirty Duck, which specializes in a fried duck entree with a lot of Indonesian spices.  Juice breaks and fresh fruit may have been my favorite part about Bali - for about $2, you can get a fresh pineapple, mango, banana, or orange juice fresh squeezed from the ripest, best fruit I've ever had.  My favorite combination was mango banana, which I enjoyed at a restaurant with a view of some rice paddies, where a local vendor introduced us to his son and taught me how to fly a kite (unflattering picture below).  After dinner, we stopped for a quick $2 beer at a small bar up the street from where we were staying, then read on our porch (where the owner of the house brought us tea and late-night snacks) before going to bed early.

Learning to fly a kite over the rice paddy.  The day we left was a big kite-flying festival in Bali, and a ton of people were out flying HUGE kites all day.

Sunday morning, we had breakfast at the home stay before heading out for the day with a driver that the owner of our home stay had suggested.  There are a bunch of cool things to see and do in Bali, but unfortunately they're spread very far apart, and it's difficult to see that many in one day because of the uncertainty of travel time between each place.  Sunday, we got to see a water temple, Mt Batur and Lake Batur (a beautiful volcano with a crystal clear lake underneath), traditional rice terraces, and another temple just outside of Ubud.

At the water temple.

Mt. Batur (off to the left) and the lake underneath.

Rice paddies just after harvest - usually green, but all the rice stalks had just been removed.

Last temple of the day!

We ended earlier than expected, but unfortunately we weren't very close to any of the other places we wanted to see, so our driver just took us back to the airport, where we ate dinner outside (a very different airport layout than anywhere I've been before - most of the things were outside before you even entered) and waited for our flight.  Overall, a very successful (but very short) weekend in Bali, and we definitely learned a lot (and bought a lot of souvenirs)!

This weekend, we'll be staying in Singapore to help with a Startup Weekend for the SUTD entrepreneurship program, but hopefully we'll be doing some interesting things this week so I can have something to post.  As always, let me know if there's something specific you'd like me to talk about!

Hugs,

Dara