June 16, 2016

June 16, 2016

Yesterday I contacted my driver who picked me up from the airport to see if he could drive us around Ubud for the day and luckily he said yes!  I compiled a list of places that I wanted to go that I had gathered from my Lonely Planet Bali guidebook, Pinterest, various travel blogs, and articles titled exciting things like "19 things nobody knows about in Ubud" or something like that. So he picked Kirra and I up at 10am and I was beyond excited.  On our way to the driver's car, we walked past a temple (there are temples literally everywhere here. Literally.) that had a ceremony. It was a special Hindu holiday today, something about the full moon. If I'm being honest, I'm not entirely sure but it was still fascinating to witness.  I should mention, the island of Bali is predominantly Hindu, which is unique because Indonesia (the country that Bali belongs to) is the largest Muslim country in the world, so for this entire island to be almost completely Hindu is quite special. Hinduism is taken very seriously here and while I am a proud atheist, I am completely in awe of this religion. It's beautiful and if I was not a serious lover of red meat (the cow is holy), this is a religion that would be entice me. Balinese make offerings of flowers and leaves every single day and leave them on the streets or near statues, some even stick them on their windshields so that they will be protected while driving.

These are the offerings

The first place we stopped on our day trip is a traditional Balinese house, which is separate buildings for each room. One building is a kitchen, another to prepare food, another to perform religious ceremonies, another to sleep in, etc. This particular house had people still living in it so we were walking in their real house (it felt a little intrusive to be honest) and taking pictures of their real belongings like it's a museum. At one point, we even walked into a bedroom where there was a television on as if someone had just been watching it. The most exciting part of the house, besides the cultural goodness of it was that the family had pet porcupines! They were kept in a cage out back and they even had a little baby - it was so cute.

Traditional Balinese house

Pet porcupines!

After stopping there, we went to a jewelry-making shop where women made fine jewelry with their bare hands. It was a little expensive, but still neat to see the process. Following that, we went to an art gallery and I was blown away by the artistry. Such beautiful paintings. I found myself drawn to the texture of each of the paintings, especially in the paintings of rice fields where the painter managed to create the perfect texture. After the art gallery, we went to a woodcarving shop. Everything was impeccable and meticulous. The details of each carving had taken months, sometimes years to perfect and it was obvious.

We left the woodcarving to go to a temple. You'll have to forgive me because the names of the temples I have visited have slipped my mind, if I even knew them in the first place. This was the first temple I had visited and women are required to wear modest clothing. Technically, women who are menstruating or are pregnant can't even enter the temples (thankfully, I had neither of these problems) but it's all based on the honor system. If I had come all the way to Bali just to be told I can't enter a temple because of a monthly biological norm, I think I would lie to get in. And maybe that's why I'm an atheist is because I clearly don't respect other religions. But anyway, in order to enter the temple we had to rent a sarong (a long piece of fabric wrapped around your waist like a skirt). The best part is that men and women wear their sarongs differently, so when they tied mine, they tied it like a woman sarong. When they tied Kirra's, they tied her's like a man's sarong! I couldn't even contain my laughter. We walk in and it's beautiful (I feel like I'm using this word too often but it's really the only word that so adequately fits), we get our pictures taken, we watch an Asian couple have a photoshoot reminiscent of prom, and walk around for a bit.

Look how Kirra's sarong is tied differently than mine!

Part of the temple

My sarong

After the temple, we went to a butterfly park. It was fun because none of the butterflies would land on us so we resorted to picking up the dead butterflies and pretending they were alive. Now that I've typed that out, I realize how demented that sounds but it was loads of fun.

This is a dead butterfly

One of my favorite parts of the day was going to a waterfall. We walked down something like 500 flights of stairs (that may be an underestimate) despite Kirra's complaints about it, to which I responded something like "come on, we're in Bali we have to" (I would later come to regret my words). When we got down to the bottom, we walked around, took some pictures, climbed over a log across the river, and climbed up some more stairs and some rough terrain to get right next to the waterfall. It was nice. After hanging out for a bit, we decided to make the journey back up to the top. This is when I began to regret my previous enthusiasm about going down the stairs. Let me tell you that these stairs were not normal stairs. Each stairs was like a stair-and-a-half so they were inconveniently large for someone who is 5'3". After stopping every 10 steps, we finally made it to the top where I proceeded to nearly puke over the edge whilst collapsing on some wooden structure to catch my breath. This lasted for about 15 minutes. Then we celebrated our feat with a Bintang (beer) and got back in the car.

Waterfall

My sweaty body while I concurrently threw up and died

After the waterfall, we stopped for lunch on a rice field where I got an exotic burger. I'm still nervous about the food considering my unfortunate experience with the food yesterday so lay off me for not eating Indonesian food.

When we finished lunch, we headed to the Elephant Cave (there were no elephants, sorry to disappoint you). This is an ancient temple built a long time ago (this is my most intelligent and technical guess as to how long ago) that was covered by the debris of an earthquake then rediscovered in the early 1900s. There is a fountain of youth where if you put the water on your face, you will stay young forever, this is a scientific fact. And I'm vain, so naturally I hopped right down into it and lathered up my face.

Elephant cave

Fountain of youth - I'm gonna be young forever!

After the Elephant Cave, we went to the Tegallalang rice fields where we had no motivation to climb down and up stairs anymore so we gave it a good look from the top. The structure and functionalism of the rice fields is beyond me and I'm actually convinced it takes a rice field engineer to build and figure out.

Rice fields

By now it's 6:30pm and we're tired from a day in the sweltering heat and we have arrived back at the hotel. All is good, I've showered for the second time today and am just now relaxing. Except when I lay down in bed, I make eye contact with an enormous gecko on my ceiling. Don't let the Geico commercials fool you, geckos are like straight up the size of a full grown iguana. While I'm normally a lover of all animals, my newfound friend who I named Richard (he goes by "Dick") was not welcome when I wanted to sleep. So I went to the front desk and they took a broom to the ceiling and Dick ran off (probably waiting for me to fall asleep so he could come cuddle in bed with me). It was a heck of a day.

This is Dick