Day 4 - The evil side of Bali

Time to move to our next destination - UBUD, which is an area in the middle of Bali - the so-called center of art and culture of Bali.

Since it's a travel day, we decided to hire our local driver Deddy and have him drive us to a few destinations before checking into our next villa.

First stop - Bread store - Eddy really liked the first piece of french bread he bought 2 days ago. We found some random bakery and he bought a long french bread - 'not as good', he claims. I personally think he was just too hungry 2 days ago :)

We drove through the city of Denpasar - it had so many wonderful sculptures everywhere (like the one in the picture here). Each sculpture had some story behind it, since Bali is the 'land of Gods'.

We were then brought to Celuk (jewelry) Village and Mas (wood) Village - supposedly famous for their silver jewelry making and wood sculpturing skills. They end up to be just tourist scams - they take you to a small destination, give you a 2 minute, totally set up presentation of the art of making jewelry / sculpturing, and then take you to a shop for you to buy stuff. We left so quickly I think the village people were stunned.

On the way there Eddy spotted an art store and we stopped to check it out. There are some pretty good arts, our favorite was one of the Elephant god one. The price they wanted was a bit ridiculous though. We ended up not getting it.

We went to central UBUD for the famous 'Ibu Oka' lunch - crispy roasted pig meal, with some blood sausage and some unknown veggies. The meal is like $1.50. The place is across from Puri Palace (where the King used to live). They only open for a couple of hours during lunch. If you miss their limited servings, sorry, please come again another day. There were many locals as well as tourists enjoying this delicious meal. The pig was roasted so well that the meat peels off without any force, it was amazing...

In the early afternoon we got to Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave) - it was really not interesting at all...other than a really old sculpture and a really small cave with a few elephant king statues, there really wasn't much - felt like a tourist trap to me.
Next stop is Klunkung in the District of Candidasa. It is the old court house where people used to get prosecuted. The ceiling is painted with scenes from Hell (punishment for evil doing). It was very impressive. Thumbs up.

克倫宮 - 法庭屋頂的繪畫. 有印度史詩的爭戰故事, 提醒王公貴族和平相處; 也有 警世的地獄酷刑, 告訴眾生 諸惡莫作.

Then we got to Pura Besakih - so called the Mother of All Temples - what I call the 'bad side of Bali'! All temples by now are starting to look the same, but the bad experience here is that the people here are so mean and they force you to pay money to rent salons, both male and female, and they want to charge you entrance fee, and when you get up to the temple (10 min uphill walk) there are only certain sides you can go in, you can't go to the main one (if you do they want extra money paid to this little kid who says he's the keeper of the temple) - anyway, an overall BS experience. I don't think I'll ever return to that place again.

Lastly, we got to Pura Tirtha Empul (聖泉寺) - the story for this temple is that there was an evil power that tried to poison the entire village, and the good god made water coming out of this temple 'saint water', if the village people got sick, they would come here and wash themselves here, and they would live. Even till today, villagers still believe in the healing power of this water and come to take baths in the open water here. Amazing...

Day 3 – Tanah Lot bike ride adventure

Today is a lazy day. We got up early (must be jetlag still ^_^), enjoyed our in-villa Balinese breakfast, got mixed juice and watermelon juice for a change – and fell right back asleep on the pool lounge after discovering our secret housemates – a little birdie and its mom living secretly on the poolside tree. Mother bird is smart. She would fly back to the tree, look around, then suddenly disappear. Had I not been starting at her discreetly, I would have never discovered the nest with the baby bird.

At 2pm we finally decided to get our lazy bums up and do something. Today’s plan was to either go to Tanah Lot, or walk around in Seminyak and shop at Geneva (wholesaler for little gifts). According to the villa, Tanah Lot, the temple of the Ocean, is located 45 min north west of Seminyak. After a few struggles (from Vic), we decided to ride the villa-provided mountain bikes to Tanah Lot. With a general map in hand, and a rough direction from the villa employee, we set out for our adventure of the day.

In Bali, they drive on the left
In Bali, the roads are not even
In Bali, there are motorcycles everywhere
In Bali, it is about 100F (38 Celcius) in May
In Bali, no one rides bicycles – especially on the main roads
In the whole world, riding a bike to a tourist location in the summer heat without a clear map… they call that ‘crazy’

And yet here we are, two Asian tourists with very thick sun screen lotion, riding alongside locals on motorcycles, disregarding the ‘you’re nuts’ looks, checking out the rice fields on the side while yelling ‘Turn Left’, ‘Turn Right’, ‘Are you still behind me’…

Finally I see the ocean far far ahead. We stopped for a brief water brake, all of a sudden, I had a blackout when standing up.. too dehydrated.

At last we arrive there. We parked our bikes, and went to get ticket to the humongous park.

The special place is the temple in the middle of the ocean. When the tide is down, you can walk over to the temple. Unfortunately when we got there it was high tide. We still enjoyed the view and the ocean air, and had this HUGE coconut to replenish our fluid - to be honest, I don't really like coconut unless it was really really chilled.

We then began our adventure again - going home was all about memory - there were no signs back, we had to use our memory to turn left or right. The sun was half down already and we were worried we'd get lost in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, both our memories were still kind of good and we managed to get back to the city without any wrong turns.

We biked directly to Made's Warung of Seminyak (we liked the food so much we wanted to try it again). Surprisingly, this warung was so much bigger and nicer, yet at the same price and with equally excellent food. Awesome find!! We were so hungry that we ordered a full table of food...we stuffed ourselves, and quickly rode back home - we went to bed with the amazed gazes we received from our villa staff after they heard of our adventure....