Bali

Hi everyone!
I went to Bali 2.5 weeks ago and stayed in Ubud for 5 days.  Ubud is the artistic, cultural center city of the island of Bali.  It is in the center of the island.. so no, I did not go to any of Bali's famous islands... I've been hot all the time for many months now. the thought of a vacation where I willingly subject myself to the heat by laying directly under the sun sounds horrible.  Maybe a clean beach would have been a nice change, but still Ubud sounded more interesting to me.  It was a pretty small town, with artists everywhere.  It is the heart of Balinese art and performances.

Kecak
I only went to one performance - a Kecak dance, where the only music is a hundred male voices chanting and moving their bodies to the sounds while the story is told through the dance by eccentrically costumed characters.  It was really awesome.  There were around 100 performers or so and I think 10 or 15 audience members.. we were sitting outside on plastic chairs in one line in a stone plaza in the middle of Indonesian homes.  The group was known to be one of the best Kecak troupes.  It surprised me that the audience was so small, but I guess it makes sense given there are 10+ performances per night (maybe 3 or 4 different Kecak dances) in Ubud every night of the week.  But it made me think about how much we paid for the show.  I added the total amount that we audience members had paid, subtracted an average production cost, and then divided the amount by the number of performers, and it turns out that each performer would make somewhere around 10,000 Rupiah for the night's performance.  That is equivalent to about $1.

That's where I stayed - Alamanda! It was basically a family's house that had a spare bedroom on the 2nd story (like most accommodations in Ubud) .  It was really nice a - I highly recommend it.  And the Ibu (mother), is very sweet old lady.

Keliling Bali

Tanah Lot temple
(Click on any of the photos to enlarge)

After the first day in Ubud I started asking tour companies how much it cost to go see the historic sites/famous temples/etc around the island and they were all around $30 ish for a half a day tour.. which might sound reasonable, but that's 300,000 Rupiah, which is outrageous!  Ubud is definitely a tourist destination which you can see in the crazy-high prices there.  For example, ojek drivers (the guys on scooters) were telling me it cost 20,000 rupiah from the market to where i lived (about a 20 minute walk).  Then I would start speaking Indonesian to them (and they would be extremely surprised) and explain that I knew the price of gas and how much that service is supposed to cost - 3,000 rupiah - and then we'd settle for something like 5,000 Rp.  That's 50 cents versus $2.  They are ripping people off so badly!  It's hard to know how to feel about it since most ojek drivers are pretty poor.  Sometimes after I bargained with them I would give them extra money anyhow if they were really nice or something.. I just don't like the dishonesty/ripping-off part that they do.  My Indonesian came in handy soo much in Ubud - it probably made my trip 1/3 of the price, as well as making me a few friends :).  

Gunung Tampak Siring, one of the oldest
and largest sites in Bali. 

      Anyways.. back to my story.  So since the tours were expensive I decided to see how much it would be to rent my own moped thing and drive around the island myself trying to find the temples and other sites.  I asked a bunch of locals that I met and people that had lived in Ubud for a while, so that I could know what price to bargain for.  I ended up paying $10 to rent a moped for 2 full days.. and that included the insurance!  So for days 2 and 3 I went/toured around (keliling) Bali on my moped.  Right after I rented it (which I wasn't planning on doing), I started driving and didn't stop until I reached the southwestern coast of the island (about 1.5-2 hours away) where the temple Tanah Lot (pictured above) is located.  I didn't think anything of driving the moped the way I was until I returned to Ubud after dark and some girl I met who was also from the US but had lived in Ubud for a few years told me I was crazy and that she would never ever drive a moped that far in Indonesia.  It was my first time driving in Indonesia, but I think since I had been observing the crazy driving for so long, doing it was a piece of cake.  Luckily, I had a small map with me, but I ended up having to ask random people in random villages which way to go numerous times b/c the map only showed major roads, and the way to the temple was mainly on small back roads.  There was a lot of traffic, so I weaved in and out of busses and cars, beeping at practically everyone I passed, driving on sidewalks, or the other side of the road if it was empty, and passing lots of people... basically I was pretending I was an Indonesian driver.  If I had been in Lampung I would have felt weird doing this, but in Bali everything seemed so different, so international, that I felt fine (like I wasn't being continuously observed by many pairs of eyes at each second), so I felt fine with driving like that.  Only once in a while, when I was at a stoplight, did I notice that I was really the only foreigner that was driving a moped.  Towards the end of the trip, I started noticing the rest of the Indonesians around me on mopeds were looking at me in a sort of shocked and amused way.

Tirta Empol

The second day with the moped I drove north - again going on little tiny 6 ft wide roads and found my way to Tampaksiring, where I saw both the old holy pools of Tirte Empol and Gunung Kawi Siring.  The entire area is hilly and beautiful (the moped ride was fu-un!), and is all being considered for recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage site. 

      On the left you can see one of the holy pools - Bali Hinduism is the most eccentric thing I've ever seen.  There are little shrines on every corner of every thing.  The yellow table-like thing in the picture is to build your own shrine to offer to the gods in the pool at each of the water fountains.  

Lunchtime adventure

Notice all the old t-shirts and other random objects hanging from
the sticks that are stuck into the field... those are the Hindu shrines.
They are supposed to protect their fields. 

I made a lot of friends traveling alone while I was in Ubud - it was a pretty interesting experience.  I met people wherever I went.  It was sort of funny actually,.. I kept happening to make friends with couples and then we'd plan to meet again later and it'd be me and the couple.  haha.  One day I walked to this restaurant out in the middle of nowhere.  I walked for like a half an hour through a 1 ft. wide path in between rice paddys.  Eventually when I thought that couldn't be the way to a restaurant, a cute little organic lunch hut place showed up.  It was really yummy.  I couldn't get enough fresh fruits and vegetables in my 5 days in Bali.. I have been deprived.. here in Lampung there is only rice and fried meats or vegetables to go on top.  Which is good, but ends up not being very good when it is the only choice for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner.  Anyways, pictured above is the path I took to the little restaurant.  That is one of the many adventures.  I really liked Bali - or at least Ubud.  The tourism might get old, but there are still more locals than tourists.  I think the biggest difference was the Hinduism coming out (versus the Islam in Lampung).  It made the Bali and Lampung feel like completely different cultures and even countries.