Tracy Carolyn Photography

The heart of Ubud feels a bit chaotic.  Traffic, motorbikes, men on every corner offering taxi service, the smell of durian coming from streetside vendors…it’s your basic hustle and bustle.  Take a few steps off the main drag, however, and you can be enjoying the breezy narrow paths through the rice fields in no time.This particular walkway, lined with palm trees, snakes through the rice fields on the north side of town.  While many locals ride motorbikes on the narrow and windy path, it’s a bit too advanced for novice riders.  We walked instead.
The fields are all at different stages of planting – some are just pools of water waiting for crops, others have mature plants ready to harvest.  The full cycle of the rice crops takes about 4 months.Unfortunately, many of the rice fields are being sold so that foreigners can build villas on the land.  We saw signs advertising luxury villas with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, full living spaces, terraces with gorgeous views and a pool for US$110,000.  I hope that in the next ten years all of these lovely farms aren’t completely replaced by housing developments.All of the fields by our house have been tilled into ponds, waiting for new plantings.  While they don’t look as lush as all of these, they do make for the most perfect reflecting pools at sunset, as I’m sure the one below would.At the end of our walk was a lovely organic farm and restaurant, which made excellent fresh juice.  Not that we’ve had any bad juice in Ubud…or any bad food, either.  In fact, we’re still trying to figure out what Bali does poorly.  Everything we’ve experienced has been excellent.  Maybe by the end of our next month here we’ll have sussed out some of Ubud’s faults.  Don’t hold your breath.

Now that our visa extension paperwork has been completed, it is official – we’ll be staying in Bali for another month.

I realize that back in Guatemala I mentioned we would not extend our stay in lovely San Marcos because there was so much more world to see.  Yet here we are in Ubud, extending our stay.  Whats up with that?  Isn’t the point of our travels to keep moving?  Have we decided to move to Bali permanently?

First and foremost, we are not moving permanently to Bali, but we do love it in Ubud.  We have a great house, our own transport, perfect weather, delicious food, and so many things to experience…it would be hard to fit in everything we want to do in just one month.

Second, we needed a bit longer of a break than just 30 days.  After traveling for five weeks through Guatemala, Belize, New Zealand and Australia, we needed a bit more time of simply being in one place.  For the first 10 days we were in Ubud we did practically nothing.  I didn’t leave the house for a week.  It was awesome.  We had been going and doing for so long, this was the first time we had to just sit and relax and not think about playing tourist or booking our next flight.  It was a much needed break, but if we’d had to leave the country less than three weeks later, we would have missed out on a lot.

Third, and probably most importantly, we need to be in a space where John can do some work and replenish some of our travel funds.  While he’s been working on his own projects the entire time we’ve been traveling, he’s had a harder time taking contract jobs when we keep moving from place to place.  The ‘up in the air’ nature of it all makes it hard to make promises and sign contracts.  With a beautiful setting and strong wifi, this is an excellent place for him to get some solid work done.

So you can look forward to more posts about the paradise we’re living in for the next month.  Or, if you don’t find Bali as alluring as we do, feel free to tune out until March when we head to Singapore. :)

You cannot walk the streets of Ubud without seeing heaps of offerings, called canang sari.  And I do mean heaps.

As a practice of Balinese Hinduism, these offerings are put out three times per day as an offering to the good and bad spirits.  They are meant to thank the good spirits, and ask for further health and prosperity.  For the bad spirits, they serve as a bribe to keep them from interfering with the peace.

The offerings usually consist of flowers, rice, crackers, and incense.  They are placed at temples, out in front of stores and businesses, and outside homes.  A household can easily go through 50 offerings in a day, and they are all made by hand each morning.  We frequently come out to find that our landlord or neighbors have placed them in front of our house, and often find one sitting atop our motorbike.  Because they are put out three times daily, the streets are often filled with offerings.  Fortunately, it isn’t considered bad luck to step on one – accidentally, that is.  Doing so on purpose is a big no-no.  They are usually swept up at the end of the day, and replaced with fresh offerings the following morning.The multitudes of canang sari on the streets are beautiful, and really attest to the dedication of those who live here.  But the offerings are just one of the many ways that spirituality pervades everyday life here in Bali.  There are frequent ceremonies held in the temples, processions in the streets, and days dedicated to special prayer.  The day we took our cooking class, for example, was Tumpek Landep, a holiday of prayer and gratitude dedicated to the god of metal and all of the metal related implements that make every day life easier.  For days afterward, cars and motorbikes were decked out with elaborate offerings on their windshields and handlebars.

While I may not understand all of the ceremonies and holidays, I do love the constant reminder of gratitude that the offerings represent.  It really is a beautiful tradition.

Every night in Ubud you can hear the drums of traditional gamelan musicians and drive by crowded temples full of tourists watching traditional Balinese dances.  It’s a thing to do here.  We knew we’d end up going at some point.

While we initially intended to see a Kacek fire dance at another temple, we managed to choose the only night in the week that they do not perform (literally, the only day.)  As a second choice, we stopped into Ubud Palace for the Barong and Legong Waksirsa Dance.  There is a guy on virtually every corner selling tickets to tourists a half hour before the show, so we had no problems with our last minute change in plans.

Legong dance involves women making elaborate eye movements and very specific hand gestures.

Then there are the eeire masked dancers.

Barong is the name for this lion like mythical creature around which the second part of the dance revolves.  Its a little difficult to understand what’s happening if you don’t speak Indonesian.

After several scenes in which a guy dressed like a monkey tries to provoke the monster, and guys like this hatch plans, the Barong is finally defeated.  At least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.This was hands down one of the most touristy things we have done thus far on World Tour.  While it’s supposed to have provided us with a view into the traditional Balinese culture, I much prefer the view we get from seeing people place offerings on temple walls every day, watching processions of musicians and men in masks walk through the street every so often, and hearing the drum music from the temple across the rice field from our home.  It just seems a little more authentic.

Durian is infamous in this part of the world.  Well known for its unpleasant odor, I’ve heard tell that certain hotels in Asia have signs banning the fruit from their premises.  So of course we had to try it.

It’s hard to open, so the ladies at the market cut it up and put it in a bag for us.  The inside just looks like yellow smush.  They offered us a taste right there as they opened it.  The fruit itself has an odd texture, like a smushy banana, and tastes kind of like onions with a hint of caramel.  It’s odd.  And while the smell isn’t offensive right off the bat, I can certainly understand why a hotel wouldn’t want durian hanging around.  The pungent smell becomes more off-putting with time, and after a few hours of having our bag of durian sitting a few feet away from me, I found it to be downright nauseating.  John didn’t find it as offensive, and gladly consumed the fruit to keep the smell away from me.  I left the durian to him, and turned to the other fruits we picked up from this morning’s market trip.

These are mangosteen.  Inside they are white and segmented like an orange.  The red part is bitter and hard, but the white segments are juicy.  At once sweet and tart, mangosteen are far more palatable than durian.I’ve already mentioned the snake fruit, which is named for it’s paper thin, reptilian feeling skin.  Segmented and firm like cloves of garlic, it tastes almost like kiwi strawberry candy.And of course, we know these guys from Nicaragua.  We called them hairy berries back then, but they are actually lychees.  The ones here are just slightly different.

The insides still look like eyeballs to me.Jackfruit, which we saw growing in Nicaragua but never tasted, is hard and green with small spikes on the outside.  The inside looks somewhat like pineapple.  We tried some fried jackfruit, and it just had a mild fruit flavor.
There’s also coconut, pineapple, dragon fruit, papaya, mangoes, several types of bananas…your basic smorgasbord of tropical fruit.  With flavors like these, its no surprise we have a fresh fruit smoothie nearly every day.

Not with durian, though.  I refuse to have any more durian in the house.  Ick.