Tracy Carolyn Photography

Would you believe that this gorgeous temple, with it’s serene lotus pond,  is tucked behind a Starbucks?

I suppose that statement could be a testament to the ubiquity of Starbucks.  I assure you, it is not.  (As far as I know, there is only one Starbucks in Ubud.)  Rather, it is a testament to the number of temples that fill the streets of this town.

This isn’t even one of the famous temples in Bali.  When we popped in to take a look, there was no one else even here.Look at how beautiful and ornate the offerings can be.  Makes the little square of flowers we made in our cooking class seem unworthy.How can you not love a city where things like this are lurking around every corner?  And here’s how it looks all lit up at night.  Pretty awesome.

Where We’ve Been

Sydney and Katoomba in Australia, and Ubud in Indonesia

The Highs

• Watching the fireworks on New Year’s Eve at Sydney Harbor.  It was a truly incredible experience.
• Bali.  The food, the culture, the people, the housing, the monkeys…it’s all fantastic.
• Pain free yoga.  For the first time in over a year, I’m able to practice yoga without any wrist pain.  This is a huge win for me.  After countless attempts at finding a cure, I guess the combination of an acupuncturist in Guatemala and a break from yoga while traveling around New Zealand finally did the trick.
• Feeling presentable again.  After getting a facial and a haircut and buying a pretty Balinese dress, I feel less like a dirty backpacker for the first time in months.  Note that I said less (it’s an uphill battle.)

The Lows

• Device failures.  My Kindle and John’s Nook died within hours of each other (his from some sort of battery issue, mine from a cracked screen.)  So we are now sadly without any reading devices – though we are working on getting this fixed.  Also, my Quickbooks decided to epically crash, deleting all of my business accounting for the entire year of 2012.  I had to recreate the whole thing from scratch for my taxes.  Thankfully, this year was far quieter than most because we have been traveling, but it still was not a fun task.
• Getting sick after our crazy travel day from Sydney to Ubud.  We both caught a cold that kept us housebound for about a week when we first got here, which wasn’t much fun.  At least it wasn’t like the black bean incident in Peru…

Things I’ve Learned

John learned how to ride a motorbike this month (I’m still not ready.)

Time zones are difficult.  Trying to figure out what time to call people in the US in various time zones makes me a little crazy.  But it’s worth doing the math to get to make the calls.

After looking through images from the past six months, I’ve learned that we need to take more photos of ourselves while we are traveling.  I may not want to see my face in front of every landmark we visit, but we do need to have some images of the two of us doing stuff that we can look back on when it’s all over.

What’s Up Next

So long as there is no issue with extending our visa, we’ll be in Indonesia!

I may love traveling in and out of different environments every month (or week), but my skin decidedly does not.  To make its opinion heard, it has chosen to revolt.  I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say that ever since we left Cusco, Peru (which had a mountain climate quite similar to Colorado), my skin has been less than perfect.  Now that we are in Bali, home to ubiquitous cheap spa treatments, I decided it was time to act.  So I scheduled myself at one of the spas for a facial.  While I was there, I might as well get a haircut, since I haven’t had one since last July and my ends were starting to get yucky.  And I may as well add in the traditional massage with body scrub, moisturizer and floral bath.  I mean, if I was already going to be there…

The spa scheduled me for the haircut first.  Apparently not many people get haircuts at spas, and they had to specially schedule with the stylist because she isn’t usually there.  This makes sense, since most people going to a day spa are on vacation, and who gets a haircut on vacation?  Only someone whose vacation has been going on for a long time, ie, me.

So I couldn’t be too surprised that the stylist kinda sucked.  The cut itself was shorter than I actually wanted, as she cut it crooked and then had to cut it shorter to fix it.  (Whatever, it wasn’t nearly as bad as John’s haircut in Belize, and I still have lots of hair.)  She then started styling and blow drying my hair which, even when she sucked my ends into the back of the hairdryer twice, felt like quite a luxury.  I haven’t blow dried my hair since Lima, when our apartment happened to have one in the bathroom.  I was excited by the prospect of having straight, smooth hair, and when she was finished, I looked downright presentable.

Sadly, that styled hair would only last about 30 seconds, as my next treatment was the massage and body scrub and I was told to shower first.  (They really should have scheduled the haircut at the end, but what can you do.)  After a lovely full body massage, I was exfoliated with a nice smelling traditional spice scrub, and slathered in fresh yoghurt.  Once I’d  marinated in the yogurt for a while and rinsed off the residue, I had a floral bath waiting for me, alongside a nice cup of hot tea.  It looked lovely, but I must admit it was far too hot in Bali to be sitting in a hot bath and drinking a hot beverage.  The cinnamon tea was delicious, though.

Finally it was time for the facial.  I was escorted into another room, where a new therapist scrubbed and massaged my face, steamed open my pores and extracted the goo.  I’m sure she found goo in there dating as far back as Cuba (it was really polluted in Havana.)  Any time I’ve gotten a facial in the US – which is rare – it usually comes with a nice dose of shame, as the therapist tells me how terrible my skin is and how I really need to be coming in for facials more often.  Then they try to sell me some products to help fix whatever is wrong with me.  I don’t know if this is a version of a sales pitch that everyone gets, or if I just inspire a lot of shaming from the estheticians, but it doesn’t exactly make me want to go back.  (A variation of this happens every time I get pedicures, too.  Does this happen to anyone else, or am I just a huge beauty failure?)

I know for a fact that this lovely Balinese woman was seeing my skin at its absolute worst, but she never said a word about it, even though she spoke excellent English.  No shame, no comments on the number of blackheads she had to extract, nothing but friendliness.  Bless the polite Balinese.

All in all, my lovely 3.5 hour spa day cost less than US$47.  I have no idea what that would have cost back home, but I’m pretty sure it would have been a lot more.  Now I just hope I can keep my freshly cleaned pores happy and goo free for the next few months.

Still wondering what the image of butterflies has to do with going to the spa?  Nothing, actually.  But since I don’t have any photos of the spa, and I wanted you to have something pretty to look at, I decided to add this image of butterflies from the Sacred Monkey Forest instead.  Close enough.

Bali has some of the best local cuisine we’ve found since Peru.  Granted, we mostly eat at home, but we’ve been to a handful of great restaurants and found Balinese food to be quite flavorful and vegetarian friendly.  So of course we couldn’t wait to take a cooking class here and start making some of our local favorites at home.

Like all good cooking classes should, we started at the local market.  Every day of the week, it opens at 4am.  We didn’t get there until about 8:30am, and because of this our guides said we would not be actually purchasing any ingredients.  It was too late in the day, and in their opinion, everything had already been picked over and handled by that point.  I guess you have to get up early.The market kind of reminded me of the one in San Pedro, both in it’s size and density, and because they both featured these same huge umbrellas.  We saw water spinach, many types of eggplants and peppers, jackfruit, stacks of dried fish and bags of spices.This fruit is called snake fruit.  John had purchased some snake fruit just the day before our class, and we tried it out.  It looks kinda like a lychee, but the skin peels off easily and reveals a fruit with the consistency of an apple, segments that look like garlic cloves, and a pit that looks like a very smooth river rock.  They taste mostly like strawberries.  Before we knew what they were really called, we dubbed them ‘garlic strawberries.’  I like that name better than snake fruit, so I’m sticking with it.After our visit to the market, we drove out into the countryside to view the rice fields, and learn about about how they grow and harvest rice.I honestly don’t remember much of what he taught us here.  I was too busy looking at the gorgeous views.
A nice welcome tea (made from cinnamon and lemongrass) and some fried jackfruit with honey awaited us at the house of our hosts.  So good.Before we started cooking, we learned how to make offerings.  All over the temples, streets and houses in Ubud you will see offerings.  They get trampled a bit, then swept up to make space for the next one.  One per person is placed out at least three times per day (before each meal.)  One of our neighbors often places one in front of our house.Most of the ones we see involve intricate folds and often include a bit of sticky rice.  We started with the simple stuff – folding a banana leaf properly and stuffing it with flowers was crafty enough for me.
The second type of offering is made in a cone shape, which you hold between your hands while praying.  Then you put the cone of flowers in your hair, and if you are a tourist, they will insist on putting a traditional head scarf on your husband and taking your photo.  And you let them do it, because you think it might make your mom happy.

Coconut oil is a key ingredient to the cuisine here.  To make it, they grate fresh mature coconut and boil it for hours.  Then they skim off the oil from the top, and boil that again for hours.  It seems like a time intensive process, but the resulting oil tastes and smells amazing when you cook with it.
So many spices!  Chiles, lemongrass, scallions, garlic, turmeric, coriander seed, palm sugar, kefir lime leaves, bay leaves, cloves, white pepper, macadamia nuts, sweet chilis, nutmeg, and three types of ginger.  Whew!We chopped everything up, then ground them up into paste with a mortar and pestle.  Three (delicious) sauces essentially create the base for all of the foods we made – a general base seasoning, peanut sauce, and spicy chile sauce.  Mixed with the coconut oil and fresh kefir lime juice, these flavors are so, so good.Lots of sauteing, frying things in coconut oil, slicing carrots into little temple shapes, and many other steps later, we had an enormous meal to sit down.  Gado Gado (boiled vegetables, egg and fried tempe salad with peanut sauce), Vegetable Curry, Steamed Tofu made in banana leaves, Tofu and Tempe Sate (skewers of onion and green pepper with tofu and tempe, covered in peanut sauce), Nasi Goreng (the fried rice dish pictured above), Timun soup (black beans and cucumber in turmeric broth), and a dessert of palm sugar braised banana.  So.  Much.  Food.

You have to admit, it looks pretty good – even if you aren’t that into tofu.  I wish we could have taken to-go boxes of all the delicious food that was leftover.  Instead, we’ll head to the market and buy the ingredients to make our favorites at home (Nasi Goreng and Tempe Sate were our favorites.)  Yum yum yum.

When we started looking at houses to rent near Ubud, I had some anxiety.  All the villas were a 10-15 minute drive from town – or a long walk through rice fields, which we were told was not recommended.  Seeing as our main means of transportation during World Tour has been public transit (of which there is none) and our own feet, this posed a problem.  We were going to have to move into the countryside, and make that feasible, we were going to need a motorbike.

At first I was resistant to the motorbike.  When John suggested it, I was a definite no, probably due to years of training about the dangers of motorcycles in the US. But the more time we spent driving around Ubud, the more I noticed about the motorbikes.  First of all, they don’t go very fast.  You can’t – the roads here are all one lane and full of traffic.  Second, everyone seems to be riding one.  Which means there aren’t that many cars around that could run into the motorbike and cause serious damage to me or my loved one.  Third, there are old ladies riding motor bikes in Ubud.  If they can do it, it can’t be that dangerous, right?  Besides, I ride a flimsy road bike down curvy mountain roads going 25 miles an hour – surely going 15 miles an hour on a relatively flat and straight road on a motor bike should seem easy.

Once we found the house we wanted to rent, I agreed that John could learn to ride the motorbike, on loan from our landlord.  The first ride was just to get the feel of it.  The second time, he went to the grocery store and practiced riding home with extra weight on his back.  The third and fourth rides were practice in agility.  Before long, he was ready for me to join him.  I hopped on the bike and we took a very short ride down the road.  I practiced being a calm and steady passenger, and he got used to having an extra person on the bike.  A few days later, we rode together into the city for lunch, then went to the grocery store.  We successfully made it around all the turns, even loaded down with groceries in each of our backpacks.  It was fun riding around in our gorgeous environment, even if we weren’t going very fast.

That photo of John is a bit staged, by the way.  We always wear our helmets, but I made him take his off (it kinda makes him look like he’s about to be fired out of a canon :) )  We have helmets, though – look.  I’ll give you one guess which one is mine…

I’m not yet ready to learn how to ride it myself, but John thinks its only time until I’m running off on my own.  I’m not entirely convinced.  But I will admit that having our own transportation, and the independence that comes with it, has been pretty awesome.