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Ubud, Indonesia

A pre arranged tour of Bali was our way of saying thank you to the guests who came to our wedding. It was so good to get out of Kuta and see more of Bali and it’s people. A Bali we know.

With 32 people aboard one bus and a tour guide selling Bintang at a $1.50 or 15,000rp we were set for a great day.

The first stop was to the very long but interesting Barong Dance. It’s a traditional Balinese Dance and is all about good and evil. The black and white checks seen on many of the religious offerings also represent good and evil. This basically sums up what the Balinese believe in. It’s inspiring to learn that the Balinese Hindu religion is so extremely peaceful. They believe that bad must happen for good to exist equally. You never see them upset when confronted with a bad situation.

We drove through many different villages including the Silver Village, Wood Village, Stone Village and Art Village. If you are born into a stone village for example, you must stay in that profession or change villages completely. The average wage for a local construction worker is approx $13 per day. It doesn’t seem very much to us, but I have never met happier, more contented people. Doesn’t that just show you?

The next stop was to the Luwak coffee plantation to taste the ‘world’s best coffee’. There is a special creation process where a mongoose eats the berries, passes the seed before the bean is cleaned and roasted to produce the coffee. Personally I didn’t think much of the taste. Fortunately Dave enjoyed it and finished mine off too. I have heard that it sells overseas for $50 per cup and we paid $5 or 50,000rp. Well worth the stop as most people enjoyed a sip or two.

We continued on to Bali’s second highest volcano for lunch. We sat on the summit of the outer rim of the large volcano. Since the original explosion, a smaller volcano has erupted inside the crater, creating a volcano inside a volcano. (kind of like those little Russian dolls). On the way back to Kuta we had a quick stop at Ubud’s monkey forest. All enjoyed watching the naive tourists feed the monkeys before they began pick pocketing the hands that fed them. Particularly amusing was the monkey that pulled down the lady’s strapless top.
Another enjoyable part of the day was seeing the reaction of the locals receiving $2 in Australian coins from us.It was as if we had just given them gold. To be able to share the ‘real Bali’ with our family and friends was very important to us. We hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.

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