Things we learned in Bali

Every restaurant has features two traditional Balinese desserts: fruit with Balinese honey, and warm mashed bananas drizzled in palm sugar, cinnamon, and coconut.

Always double check starting times of booked excursions.

Monkeys don't come out when it's raining.

You'll never have trouble finding transport.

Bali-appropriate showers are a must: you're hot when you first get in so initially the water should be cold. Once your body temperature returns to a somewhat normal level, you can turn up the heat and enjoy a regular hot shower. But make sure you go back to cold water for at least the last minute or you'll be sweating in the humidity before you can fully dry off.

Hiking up a volcano for 2 hours to watch the sunrise Christmas morning won't replace being with family but comes pretty darn close.

One way streets for cars aren't necessarily one way streets for motorbikes.

Always order dessert.

Don't pay as much for 5 pieces of fruit as you do a massage.

Internet speed sucks during convenient hours but is always great at 2am.

11:30am isn't too early for a Bintang.

When it rains, every tourist thinks a massage is a great idea.

Luwak coffee is made with beans a luwak has pooped. But it still tastes great.

Sometimes a bike's right hand break stops the front wheel.

Always bring a rain jacket.

If your 5:00 bus isn't there at 5:30, it's okay, it's probably still coming.

Every shop and door smells like incense.

You can use Nick's Pension's amazing swimming pool without being a guest.

Kafe recycles plastic water bottles but laughs at you when you pull 7 out of your bag.

Puppet shows and shopping

So Christmas night we had dinner at a wonderful restaurant called Bali Buddha. It's all local/organic/natural/everything great. And it's delicious. Plus it was only a 3 minute walk away from the hotel with a puppet show we wanted to see.

We walked into the room where the puppet show would be. It was in an art museum/gallery so the walls were all white and there were paintings all around us. There were about 20 chairs set up in rows facing a sheet with a single candle flickering behind it. Almost all the chairs filled up, too, with older married couples, a mom and her daughter, and a small group of traveling college students.

So at 8(ish) the puppet show began. It started off with a huge sound from a gong behind the sheet. There was about 10 minutes of beautiful music played on traditional xylophones and some instrument that made a whirring noise. It was loud.

Balinese puppet shows themselves are called Wayang and they use shadow puppets. They're put on by a Dalang, who is essentially the puppet master. The art of being a Dalang is passed down in a family, according to the little handout we were given. The Dalang who put on the show we went to was 80 years old. The story he presented was originally from India. I couldn't believe how fast he moved. He also had two assistants who handed him the correct puppets, although he did everything that was visible to us himself. The show was put on mostly in Indonesian so we couldn't understand much of the dialogue, although there were two short sections in English that were insignificant to the plot. The basic story, again outlined in a handout, was that a demon was threatening to kill a king's entire kingdom. To appease the demon, a human sacrifice would have to be made. A man, knowing he had strength beyond any normal human, volunteered to be the sacrifice. He ended up killing all the demons so everyone was able to live happily ever after.

The puppets themselves were incredibly intricate. Their body positions were individual and spoke to their character's qualities. most had moveable hands and arms, and a few had jaws that would move when they spoke. If they didn't, the Dalang vibrated the character to know who was doing the talking. The Dalang also had used a different voice and inflection for each character. He moved between personalities so fluently during dialogues it was incredible.

My favorite puppet wasn't a person but rather anything that it needed to be. In this play, it was wind, water, thought, and movement (if I remember correctly). It was in the shape of a leaf and danced around the stage many times. With that puppet and the others, the Dalang had incredible skill moving them closer and farther from the screen to show overall outlines or the intricate details. The xylophones continued to play throughout the performance. Whenever a character walked, two wooden blocks were hit together, and the timing of this sound and the Dalang's movements was perfect.

The entire show took an hour, which was a little on the long side for uncomfortable plastic chairs, but it was beautiful nonetheless. On our walk back to the hotel, we bought some gelato. Elena said the cold almost made it feel like Christmas.

Yesterday we had a slow day. I was up early and went for a run before many people in Ubud were awake. It was great to be able to run in the road instead of on the sidewalk that has so many dips, cracks, and missing planks. When I ran by Monkey Forest, a few monkeys eyed me wearily, but none chased. I'm really not sure what I would have done.

I had breakfast at Kafe and caught up on recent world news online. Funny how a week without reading a newspaper can make one get so behind. I window shopped for the rest of the morning, looking at clothing stores and souvenir shops. And I had one of my most successful bargaining experiences ever! A lady selling paintings started at 150,000rupia for one, but I got her down to 100,000 for two. So I'm now the happy owner of two 12'x12' paintings of people working in rice fields.

Elena and I had lunch in the room and did work and relaxed on the porch until dinner. At dinner, I tried my first Bintang, the Indonesian subsidiary of Heineken, which was pretty nice. But the dessert Elena and I both had was the best part of the day. They had warmed up bananas and then mashed them up. Then they sprinkled it with cinnamon, palm sugar, and coconut shavings. It was like dessert baby food. So yummy.

We had another early night, which gets us to today. It was pouring rain at 6am, so I sat on the porch with a book. There are some incredible birds that live in and around this hotel so I've been listening to them all morning. I had breakfast: a bowl of fruit and a warm banana sandwich. Again, yum. In half an hour, Elena and I will take the bus to a beach for the day. And that's about it!

A Very Bali Christmas

Merry Christmas!!

Days 3 and 4 were a blast.

I’ll start with today. Since it’s Christmas, we decided to do something special: we were up at 1:15am to get ready for our 2am departure for a sunrise trek (the hike was the special activity, not the hour of departure). At approximate 2:12 we were met outside our hotel by a very nice driver and two Australian girls who were the other half of our trekking group. They just graduated from high school, had been in Bali for 3 weeks, and were really nice. We drove for about an hour to a coffee plantation where we were served coffee and banana pancakes with chocolate. yum. Then off to the starting point where we met our guide, MyYoung. There were probably thirty other tourists with their guides as well..

It was also my first time using a hole-in-the-ground-toilet.

It took us about two hours to get up the active volcano. The hike reminded me a lot of Mt. Nkhoma in Malawi because it started off on a gradually inclining path that wasn’t hard at all. Then we hit a point and it got steep. When we started it was pitch black outside so we each carried a flashlight. The stars were great but not the best I’ve seen. Elena and I each saw a shooting star.

Then we started to climb up rocks. Eventually they turned to gravel which was tougher. I came my closest to falling, of course, when I was standing still and the rocks shifted under my feet. As it slowly got lighter, the sky turned red behind two huge mountains. Between the mountains and us was Bali’s biggest lake, with small fish farms scattered around its perimeter. Once the train turned to hairpin turns, the views got better with each curve.

Only once did we stop, and it was so our guide could put incense and a floral offering to a statue of the god of the mountain. There were at least ten sticks of incense burning and it smelled delicious.

We finally made it to “sunrise point” where we were offered soda and water from vendors. We took a ton of pictures and then went fifteen minutes further where MyYoung promised the view would be better. And it was. From above, you could still see the two mountains with the rising sun but the lake was much more visible. In addition, to the left there were green fields of rice.

We also had our breakfast cooked there: banana sandwiches and hardboiled eggs, all cooked in steam vents from the volcano. delicious.

Instead of heading back down the volcano, we hiked the rim. At its widest, the path was 2.5 feet; at its narrowest, less than 6 inches. And both sides went pretty much straight down. Last month there was a super poisonous snake at a certain point, so our guide made sure he went first so he could hit the grass with his walking stick. Luckily we didn’t run into it. He also only checked within ten feet of where it had been seen, so I’m not sure what we would have done had the snake moved.

We made it around the rim and then went down “the back way” by young crater. This trail had lots of volcanic sand which was both fun to try to slide down and also painful once it got into tennis shoes. So with many stops to dump piles of rocks out of our shoes, we made it down the volcano in about as long as it took us to get up. On the way, we saw three more craters that had each erupted within the last 100 years. One of the craters had spewed red lava, one had spewed black lava, and one had just released steam. The most recent eruption killed two Germans when they got too close the day after the major eruption and the heat killed them.

We walked through a village on our way back that we’d apparently walked through at 4am but hadn’t seen since we our lights had been so focused on the ground in front of us in the pitch black.

It took about 1.5 hours to drive back, which we all used to catch up on sleep.

We got back to the hotel at 11am exhausted but with the whole day ahead of us. So we packed a quick day bag and walked 20 minutes to our hotel’s sister but much, much nicer counterpart to relax by the pool. I enjoyed the pool and sun while Elena slept in the shade, and once it started to rain, we ran into the restaurant for lunch. Now, an hour later, it’s still raining too hard for us to walk back to our room. Tonight, we’re planning on a dinner at the Jazz Club and then heading to a traditional Balinese puppet show just down the road… never thought I’d say that on Christmas!!

So, that’s today. Yesterday was great too. We woke up early enough to get to our 9:30am Balinese cooking class only to realize at 9:10 that it had actually started at 9 and was a 20 minute walk away. oops. So we arrived a little late but met the rest of our group in the market where we saw every vegetable, fruit, and meat imaginable laid out for sale. We didn’t get to buy our own ingredients though, because they’d been prepared at the restaurant already.

Our group was both sweet and interesting. A nice woman from Germany who was travlieng on her own and seemed to be spending no more than 2 days anywhere she stopped – Thailand, the northern part of Bali, Ubud (where we were), and Australia for two days was her next stop. And there was a family of three from San Diego: a mother who lived in Korean and loved cooking and loved talking about it even more, and her two sons. The class itself was set up different than I’d expected as well. We were seated in the dining area of an open-air restaurant with one teacher. We prepared six dishes, so each one of us got to make a single dish that everyone ate. I decided to eat meat for the day and loved the pork dish. It had amazing spices and was balled up onto a stick and then pulled down to make a sort of meat-lollipop.

The chicken wasn’t so great though. But the rest of the food was delicious and the spices were incredible. One of the sons made Basa Gede, the staple spice dish that was used in everything else. Elena made seared tuna that was also incredible. And it’s the first fish she’s eaten and not gagged on! My dish was a peanut sauce with Basa Gede and cooked but still crunchy vegetables: sprouts, carrots, and spinach. The sprouts and peanuts were my favorite parts.

The meal was finished off with dessert: fresh fruit drizzled in Balinese honey. yum. We were sent home with a book of recipes and a black and white checkered apron.

Once the cooking class was over at 3pm (that’s right, 6 hours of straight cooking) we visited an old palace that’s been opened to the public. Parts were still marked as private and entry was forbidden, so I think what we saw was just the courtyard. The plants were overgrown but it gave the buildings a very real feel. The stonework was as ornate as anything we’ve seen so far. There was one doorway that was painted red with gold details that was absolutely beautiful. We spent a few minutes wandering around the market and went back to our room.

I went to bed at 4pm and slept through until 1am when we were up for our hike this morning. I’m still not sure if my sleeping schedule is out of whack from traveling or if I’m still recovering from finals & a long semester.

The rain has just about stopped so I think we’re going to slowly walk back to our hotel and get ready for our Christmas night full of jazz and puppets!

(and hopefully pictures will be up on facebook soon!)

Christmas at Cape Maclear

After a few hard days of work at the WC house, Jaren and I decided to take a few days off and celebrate Christmas at the lake. Instead of going to Senga Bay, where we take the volunteers every session, we wanted to check out Cape Maclear. We tried calling a few lodges with dorms but they were either full or didn’t answer – we decided to wing it. So we caught the 7am bus on Christmas Eve and got ready for the 5½ hour drive to Monkey Bay. We were some of the last ones on the bus so it was standing room only for us. About two hours in a seat opened up so I got to sit down and make friends with Johnny, the guy sitting next to me. Also on our bus: a chicken, tied up in a plastic bag and hung from the luggage rack.

We got to Monkey Bay (John’s home village) and were dumbstruck by the greenery and beauty. There were huge hills covered in trees and plants. We met some guys who drive between Monkey Bay and Cape Maclear and agreed to pay p300 for an 18km drive. So we hopped in the back of their truck along with three other Azungu, a lot Malawians and a few huge bags of maize. I sat on a paint can, which reminded me a whole lot of The Groover from rafting up in Idaho. We also saw a few troops of baboons on our drive.

Once we got to Cape Maclear, we tried to find some beds in dorms, but they were all booked. The only place we could find was a chalet at Tuckaway’s. It turned out to be really nice with a porch really close to the ocean. The beach was absolutely beautiful – we walked quite a ways down although the sand was some of the toughest I’ve ever seen. There was a huge island that looked remarkably like Lizard island in Senag Bay, just much closer. There was also a huge island to the right that was only separated from land by a narrow passage. While we were reading on the porch, a group of kids walked up and stood behind the 1foot tall gate they’re not allowed to pass. They had a drum set (two traditional drums held on a stand) and a makeshift guitar (strings tied to an empty gas can on one end and a stick on the other). They sang two songs for us and danced. The first went like this: “How are you? I’m fine! How are you? I’m fine! How are you? I’m fine! Muli bwa? Dili bwino! Muli bwa? Dili bwino! Muli bwa? Dili bwino!” and the second was “stronger” by Kenan. We had dinner that night at another small lodge, checked out the live music at the Gecko Lodge for about half an hour (a complete failure, it was 9pm and hardly anyone was there) and called it an early night.

On Christmas, we went for a swim first thing in the morning. There was a floating dock that we swam out to and both got really sunburned on. We had breakfast at the same small lodge and chippies at a nearby stand for lunch. We read on our porch and in hammocks, walked on the beach, played some Boa and swam again. I got to talk to my family, which was really nice, although I’m still jealous they had a snowy Christmas!

Once our Christmas phone calls were done, it was 7.30. We headed back to Geckos but their kitchen was closed for the night. We walked along the road and passed quite a few closed lodges. Finally we found one that was open. We sat down and ordered – although they didn’t have cold beer or Jaren's first two dishes of choice. After about an hour of waiting, we gave up our large table to a bigger group. We played some boa and tried not to think that we’d been waiting for our food for an hour and a half. Eventually we asked the waiter who said it’d be 10 minutes. Two minutes later, another guy brought out our dishes with steaming hot chips. My veggie burger was sliced tomato, onions, peppers and lettuce on a bun. Jaren’s fish was big but cold. So at 10 we paid our bill and headed home. It was another early night.

The next morning we were up at 5am to catch the 5.30 truck into Monkey Bay to catch the 6am bus. At 5:10 we got on the back of a truck going the wrong direction, although they told us you could still go that way. We drove all the way into town, turned around and drove all the way back. It was 6.05 by the time we left Cape Maclear. Luckily, even busses wait for small trucks. We drove the twenty minutes to Monkey Bay and hopped on the bus, which left right away. Apparently it had been waiting for our truck. This time I was lucky and got a seat. We made it back to Lilongwe without any major problems, although I was convinced the entire time our bus would break down – there were some pretty funky noises the whole drive. We showered and rehydrated after such a hot bus ride, watched a movie, cooked some baked Mac ‘n Cheese for dinner and had another early night. I don’t think I’ve stayed up past 9.30 in Malawi, apart from the one night we didn’t eat until 10.

Cape Maclear was a beautiful village that I’m really glad I got to see. The one sunset I saw was incredible. The people were really friendly but they also didn’t badger us once we said we didn’t want a boat to the island or to go to their Christmas BBQ at the Reggae Bar in town.