End Bicycle Tour

Did I mention that bicycles are wicked scary? After we left the traditional Balinese home it became sort of okay, because we were often on nicely paved, but mostly deserted roads, but we also would come upon roads that were all busted up and bumpy and hilly, so I was often in a constant state of braking and gripping. And fear-sweating. It was exhausting.

But anyway, the scenery was nice, and a few times we stopped to take pictures of things like rice paddies, as evidenced by all the rice paddy photos.

It was a holiday called Galungan, question mark?, in Bali the day of our tour, so there were a bunch of decorations like these hanging around the streets.

I took this picture because it's not pretty.

There were also processions going down a lot of streets, with drumming and such, so sometimes we had to wait for traffic to clear up before we moved on.

My mom mentioned at one point to the tour guide that she really wanted a picture of someone carrying something on her head, because it's so exotic, I guess. So the first chance he got, he asked someone carrying something on her head if we could take her picture. But unluckily, this first person was a crotchety old woman, who didn't even dignify him with a verbal answer, just gave a curt yank of her head to the side and kept walking. The group of young girls below were happy to have their photo taken, though. They were acting like they felt like movie stars, getting stopped in the street. Isn't that special.

The tour included lunch as well as breakfast, so after a couple hours of biking, we stopped at some lunch restaurant, the kind with only three choices for food. Or at least, the menu for those of us on a tour had three choices. But again, nice scenery. The toilet was some raunchy-ass shit, though, I gotta tell ya. I should have brought my camera in there.

Also on the tour we saw a couple abandoned temples. The first one was abandoned apparently because of the big tree outside it. I guess it is considered to give luck to people in marriage or something if you pin something to it, and the tour guide said that eventually so many people came over there just t put stuff on the tree, that there were more people outside the temple than inside. So they packed up and moved elsewhere.

Tree.

Stuff.

Helmet.

Then we saw this place that's meant for VIPs. The tour guide said Obama went there. We did not get to go in there.

Inside this little tower I think there was an old dude playing Solitaire or something. I could be remembering this wrong, though.

The final stop on the tour was this temple, which is the oldest shrine in Bali, triple question mark??? It's been a month just about since this all happened, so the details are now fuzzy. Anyway, it's a big deal for some reason or other.

I'm pretty tired of writing about Bali now. I've done some other things in Japan since then, but I guess I'm a stickler for chronology. I guess next time will be the last Bali entry. Thank glob.

Bicycle Tour in Ubud

I'm actually pretty afraid of bicycles. I'm afraid to get hit by cyclists, and I'm afraid when cycling to get hit by cars or to hit pedestrians. Consequently, renting the bikes in Gili T was the first time in over a decade that I'd ridden a bike. That was pretty scary at first, because I was having trouble with the wobbling and feeling like I was going to run into someone, but it wasn't too crowded, so I got used to it.

The bicycle tour we went on in Ubud was different, though. It was described in a pamphlet at a "gentle downhill cycle," but man, it was terrifying. Apparently wheels go fast even on a slight incline. I was braking for pretty much the whole tour. I was like petrified on the bike, man.

The first stop on the tour, which was actually before we got the bikes and were being driven around, was to a coffee tasting on a plantation. At this place, they sold the famous kopi luwak, the coffee that gets eaten first as berries by this animal below, an Asian palm civet, then gets pooped out as allegedly better-tasting coffee beans. So people sift through the droppings and find the beans, wash them, and brew them as normal, resulting in what is allegedly a milder, better-smelling coffee. It's very expensive. I didn't buy any, though. I was tempted to buy some flavored regular coffee, but then I remembered I don't have a coffee maker in Japan, so I didn't bother.

Here are some workers grinding coffee beans.

 

Besides coffee and tea, the plantation also grows the stuff they use to flavor it, including peppers for some reason, pineapples, bananas, vanilla, and some other stuff that I didn't recognize.

 

After walking around for a few, we got shown to this little hut to taste an array of coffees and teas, and even hot chocolate. Most of them were quite good.

Nice views around there, too.

The next stop on our tour was breakfast. I was having this internal debate for a millisecond as to whether we should eat our free breakfast at the hotel also, or just wait to eat the breakfast on the tour. We ended up figuring it would be better to eat an early breakfast at the hotel and then eat second breakfast on the tour, which would come about two hours later. I was glad we made that decision, because the tour breakfast was just one thick pancake. That would have been totally insufficient.

Here's me and mom at the breakfestaurant.

After breakfast we finally got our bikes. At first we were on a sort of busy road as we made our way into the villagy areas, which contributed to my terror.

After a bit, we stopped at a traditional Balinese home for an outdoor tour. This type of home is a compound in which there are several houses, which seem like they're probably just one room each, or maybe two. There is a house for the grandparents, one for the parents and children under five, and one for children five and up, and there is also a building for the kitchen and a family shrine. All these parts of the compound are supposed to be in specific locations in the north, south, east, and west, but I don't remember which goes where, and then I just read that the mountain range running across the island (east/west) and the ocean serve as north/south orientation for the Balinese, so those in the north vs. the south have different meanings for north and south, so just forget it, man.

Anyway, the house was pretty cool.

This is the Australian couple that were on the tour with us.

This family had a bunch of animals, including pigs and chickens.

Here's another picture you can tell my mom took.

Apparently in Indonesia, this fruit is called Japan, because the Japanese brought it down there. I had no idea what it would be called in English. The Australians said they have it down there and told us the name, but I forgot. Sorry.

Lookit this floor. 

After a bit more biking, we saw this home, which the tour guide said must be very rich, because it's expensive to grow flowers.

I think I'll stop for now. The tour had a few more stops, but I'll get to those later.

Bali Third Third: Ubud

Our final stop in Bali was in Ubud, which is a bit inland, therefore no beaches. Despite lack of beaches, however, Ubud was probably the best part of the trip. It's the arts area, with stuff like dance shows, woodcarving, and gold and silversmithing, and a lot of nature going on. Unfortunately, I messed up with the timing of this part of the trip. Our flight was at 1:20am on September 1, but for some reason I was thinking we were leaving the next day, so I actually ended up booking three days at the hotel, when we only had two nights in Ubud. Oops. In the end it was better that I booked the extra day, though, since we were able to go out and do things all day, and then have the room to come home to and take showers and naps and get ready to leave late at night.

After we arrived at the hotel from Gili T, we managed to catch a traditional Balinese dance show in town after supper. It was about an hour long and had one dance that lasted about 45 minutes called the Kecak (keh-chahk) Dance, which consisted of a lot of dudes (the gamelan suara, the group is called) singing a capella and chanting and such and providing the general audiovisual background for the main part of the dance, which is a part of a Hindu epic called Ramayana. This part of the story is about the heir to a throne and his beautiful wife and their bad luck at staying together without people lusting after the wife and kidnapping her and stuff. The second dance still featured the singing dudes, but it was a Fire Trance Dance that featured one guy dancing around on hot embers, riding a hobby horse. Strange.

The performances we saw are done cooperatively by a small desa (village) of about 140 families near Ubud, and according to the pamphlet, almost all the adult members of the desa are somehow involved in the production, be it through dancing or singing in the show, working on the costumes or makeup, choreography, writing, etc. There are tons of other places around town to see these things, so I imagine each one has its own village or other kind of group that does the show in their own way.

This is the venue for the dance.

Someone came out to light some torches before the dance started.

 

I took a lot of videos and photos of the dances, which featured a lot of slow movements and Spiderman hands. Because it was dark and my camera is crappy and can't focus on anything moving, my photos didn't really come out. The video is also poor, but the audio is fine, and that for me was the best part of these dances by far. I didn't really like the style of dancing. It didn't look like it took much talent, except for the patience and strain of moving so slowly.

I like that one guy's job was to just call out Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! for long periods of time. I was wondering if they switched roles periodically so as not to get bored, or if he had hones his Ho! Skillz for many a year.

You can catch a bit of the Spiderman hands in this picture.

Here is a part where there's no singing, just dialogue that we didn't understand. You kind of got the gist of it if you read the story in the pamphlet and really paid attention to what was going on with the characters in the show. Sometimes it was funny. Oddly, there was a moment when the younger-sounding one of these guys turned to the audience and spoke a bit of English to us, making jokes, like You need transport?, which is something tourists hear a hundred times a day in Bali. I think the main point of the English part, though, was to check in and say they hoped we were enjoying the show.

So after the end of the Kecak Dance, the thing that held all the mini torches was burned into this big fire, and when that burned down sufficiently, this dude on a hobbyhorse came out and danced all over it barefoot.

While he was dancing, he kicked all the embers around and spread them out quite a bit, so these other guys with brooms would sweep them all back into a big pile again, and it would start again. The sweeps wore shoes, though.

This is what the pamphlet had to say about this dance:

Trance Dance (Sanghyan Djaran): The Sanghyang is a god-inspired trance-dance the function of which is to protect society against evil forces and epidemics. It can take several forms and the version here presented is the Sanghyang Djaran, djaran meaning horse. In Java as well as on Bali the hobby-hourse is associated with trance and is also seen in the Kuda Kepang of West Java in a similar function. The horse rider is lulled into trance by the repetitive sounds of the gamelan suara and in his tranced state he walks on a bed of burning coconut husks responding to the rising and falling of the sounds of the gamelan suara.

Here is the end of the show.

Seeing one of these dance shows is apparently one of the major Things To Do in Bali, so it was good to be able to see one. The next day, we did a bicycle tour of some villages and stuff.