I've been to Bali too

I'd asked John to take us to Kuta, Legian & Seminyak today.  I felt that as this was our 6th trip to Bali I really should see where most of my Australian friends stay and shop when they come over for their holidays. 

Although we've been to Kuta a few times for dinner and shopping I'd never seen the beachfront before.  I got a good look today and it looks very beautiful, but very crowded and the traffic was a nightmare.  The main shopping area in Kuta looked to be very brash and tacky as I'd remembered it - the still empty plot where the Sari Club was an aberration amongst the glitz and bling of this tourist area. Seminyak was a mile long shopping strip, but very trendy and looking much more westernised than other parts of Bali.

We all breathed a sigh of relief to return to Sanur, our favourite beach front village where John introduced us to a new little locally run seafood restaurant Cafe Kesuma Sanur, at the far western end of Sanur Beach.  You can just see it tucked in behind the sun loungers in the picture above.

Our bar-b-qued whole snapper with rice, and side dish of kangkung (sort of like spinach) and chillies and 3 snappy sambals cost 49,000 rupiah (about $6AUS).  The freshness of the flavours and the view from the little sandy floored restaurant out to the beach and blue ocean beyond was just priceless.

This little restaurant is only about 15 metres away from the Mercure Hotel, Sanur. I made a mental note to check out its website.  It looks to be a beautiful hotel with Balinese inspired architecture, and I love the look of its lounge area on the beach.

John also showed us unexpected gems like the huge Carrefours shopping mall in the back blocks of Kuta.  Because of its French origins it carries the only traditional style French breads and pastries in Bali.  Rob bought one of his favourite baguettes to enjoy this evening with his Bintang, but by the time we arrived back in Ubud the bread was completely riddled with tiny little brown ants.  We thought there were a few messages in this about the challenges of establishing French style cooking in the tropics.  

We also stopped at John's favourite supermarket in Sanur and we picked up wine to take to Gregg and Leigh in Lombok next week.  

A walking day

Rob woke up this morning much improved so we set out a little after 8.00am for one of our favourite walks, along one of the East ridges of the Campuhan River, among some of the most picturesque, terraced rice paddies surrounding the village of Ubud.

Very few tourists were about this early but Monkey Forest Road was abuzz with children arriving for school and getting ready for Friday sports day.  These children attend the little school opposite the sports field and were exercising a great deal of co-operation as they hopped into their school transport truck!

Turning left at the Lotus Gardens on the Main Road of Ubud we were quickly into the farm land adjacent to the river.  These women were delivering rocks and granite to a building site that will be another hotel/villa "with rice paddy views" by our next visit.

Lush greens, the sound of water rushing through the irrigation channels beside the narrow walking/motor scooter track and the constant soundtrack of chooks and roosters crowing, farmers (men, women, old, young) working in the paddies, tending their lots as though they were gardens, weeding and trimming so everything is neat and beautiful.



The track is full of interest: beautiful views, lots happening, farmers, villagers, animals, traditional Balinese artists working in lean to bamboo "studios", little warungs serving (real) coconut juice drinks and snacks, a couple of family compounds offering homestay accommodation.

Back in the village we reward our exertion with a cold drink stop at the Lotus Gardens Cafe. Whenever I go there I try to imagine how it must have looked when Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall were married there in the beautiful gardens back in the 80s(?).

We weren't ready for lunch until quite late so we decided to combine lunch and dinner today at our favourite Indus Restaurant overlooking the Western facing ravine of the Campuhan River, directly opposite the rice paddy covered ridge where we'd been walking this morning.

 

The staff looked a little tired after a busy lunch sitting but we were not disappointed with the food that was served us.  We started with Balinese tapas (spring rolls, tempe, corn fritters and chicken satay) served with sambals.

Rob is looking delighted with his Balinese paella and I loved my spicy fish steamed in banana leaf.

for dessert I could not resist the famous Indus black rice pudding and coconut icecream, while Rob chose his favourite Brownie "block", with Bali Kope of course.

If any of you are wondering why we are eating out so much at such fine dining establishments I need to tell you that this 3 course meal at the Indus, with fruit juices and coffee cost us just under $50.00 (for the two of us, including tips).

We are enjoying a quiet evening on our villa's balcony, hugely enjoying the display of all the kites flying, the nightly duck round up and watching dusk settle on the rice paddies and village around us as we drink our Bintangs.

Bumi Bali Cooking School

This is Tuna Sambal Matah (Tuna with Raw Seasoning) which is a lot more delicious, mild and sweet, than you may think.  It was one of the dishes we learnt how to make at the cooking class run by the Bumi Bali Restaurant on Monkey Forest Road yesterday.

First, our chef Ketut (fourth born son), walked us up to the fresh food market on Ubud's main street.  We had to take a little detour on the way because the laneway was blocked by all the preparations being made for a cremation ceremony outside a family compound.

Although I use fresh ginger in my cooking at home all the time I never realised how beautiful the stalk and flower of the ginger plant are.

Ketut explained to us all about the ingredients we would be using in the dishes that were to be prepared at cooking school.  Quite a few of the familiar ingredients: cucumber, spinach, shallots, saffron, even garlic, looked quite different in Bali, and are more intensely flavoured apparently!  Here he is explaining all the dry ingredients we'll be using.

Small and big galangal have different flavours I discovered.

This young (Belgian) girl in our class made very slow work of grating fresh coconut for Sayur Urab (Mixed Vegetables), but she looked good doing it.

By this stage we've learnt how to make Base Gede (a wonderful Balinese curry paste that is used as the basis for a lot of different dishes) and Ketut is putting the finishing touches to Sayur Urab.

There is quite an art to twisting the pork mixture onto the bamboo sticks for Bali Sate Lilit.

As well as preparing Opor Ayam (Curried Chicken) and Tempe Manis (Sweet Tempe - yum!) Ketut finished off by showing us a simple dish he learnt from his mother, a curried prawn dish - wonderful.  By now the class had gone well over time but everybody was kept sparkling by rounds of Bintangs and a rice wine cocktail for everybody.  We finished off with my favourite black rice pudding, one of the best I have ever eaten in Bali. This was a GREAT cooking class!

I feel quite callous in admitting that while I was having so much fun Rob was having to try out the health care system here in Ubud.  The cold he had developed after arriving here turned bad yesterday morning.  He did find the service at the local Klinik Dharma Usada extremely thorough and professional.  We were both impressed that the antibiotics and cough medicines dispensed directly by the doctor were so beautifully packaged. 

After sleeping most of the afternoon he was starting to feel well enough to go out last night to dinner at the ARMA (Agung Rai Museum of Art) Restaurant and the Kecuk dance performance in the beautiful grounds of ARMA.  Although we have seen the spectacular Kecuk dance a number of times before this was going to be a very special one in celebration of the new moon.

It was an amazing and heartstopping interpretation of this story from the Hindu Ramayama epic.  There were no women performing, and instead of the fire walking that usually happens at the end, after all the trance like chanting, this time they staged an awesome and rather frightening (though choreographed) "ball game" with balls of fire and lampsticks, involving all the participants, which included a large number of children.  There were flames popping up everywhere and swirling all over the performance space.

This manic monkey character jumped down amongst the audience at one stage and presented me with a little bunch of carefully arranged flowers.  It was a moment of great incongruity.  I'm just glad he didn't invite me to join in the fire throwing game.

A day In Denpasar

Not every visitor to Bali includes a day in Denpasar in their list of things to do, but we always really enjoy it.  It's only a small Asian city (smaller then Canberra), with no high rise, but pretty dirty and undeveloped and crowded and crazy around the central market district.  It has a small and quite genteel old Dutch colonial district with wide streets, parks and old colonial buildings now doing service as government offices.  We love the huge old food markets in central Denpasar and the amazing textiles along its main shopping street mixed in with the antique and art markets.....and, there are hardly any tourists.

The markets fill an enormous space and are crammed with stalls of every type of fruit and vegetable, spice and flavouring you would expect in a county with such an exotic cuisine.

We had an adventure purchasing 2kg each of mangosteens and mangoes (both from Thailand as it is the wrong season in Bali for these two tropical fruits).  John believed the price per kilo was too high and walked away from the bargaining initially.  The determined shopkeeper then followed us all the way on our tour of the market, up two floors, around all the spices and nuts and vegetables, pausing with us whenever we stopped to look for something (or take a photo) until she finally got John to agree to pay the "fair" price: 30,000 rupiah per kg (divide that by 8000 for its AUS$ equivalent).  I guess she thought she may not get too many more Aussie tourists coming into the Denpasar markets that day who could afford the high prices she had to charge for imported fancy fruit!

After the crowds of the market area it was very nice to return to the old Dutch colonial Inna Hotel in central Denpasar and sit in the breezy open pavillion and enjoy their version of a Rijstaffel lunch.  There were no tourists at this hotel. These days the hotel is mainly used as a conference venue.  It was very crowded today, with a forestry conference in progress! 

I was very impressed with the quality of the beautiful contemporary batiks at Maju's in central Denpasar.  I bought this stash of fabrics with no clear idea of what I'll do with them.  Only $2.00 per metre, beautiful quality cotton in gorgeous colours and patterns.  I met someone from the Canberra Quilters Society there. She was on her third buying trip this year (and will be back for her fourth in 8 weeks time).  She is obviously developing a profitable little business out of it.  I'm not into patch work though; I lack the skills and the patience.

By the time we got back to the villa late this afternoon the two rice harvesters were working directly beneath our balcony sifting the rice seeds from the bits of stalks and loading the grain into the bags.  This would have to be the most back breaking, labour intensive work. There's no way we could sit and drink Bintangs in front of them.  They would only have collected about 20 bags of rice so far!

A day in Ubud

One of the advantages of staying in a small hotel run by a local family is that they are on smallish lots of land, in amongst the rice paddies still being farmed by the villagers of Ubud - even though the income from leasing/selling land to hotel interests is somewhat higher than the rice yield brings these days.  

This means we can sit on the shaded balcony of our deluxe villa, drinking ginger tea (in the morning) or Bintangs (if it is later) and watch the rhythm of a working day in Ubud unfold before us.  It's taken the pair in the photo above (a man and a woman) the last two days to harvest the rice in the three small paddies in front of our villas.  The only tools they have are a sickle and a netted basket arrangement for collecting the seed from the bundles of rice stalks they shake vigorously against the edge of the basket.

Through our villa's bathroom window we can watch the construction of new villas at the back of ours.  Women are doing all the preparation for the foundations, carting loads of fill and rocks in from busy Monkey Forest Road, on their heads, while a male supervisor tells them where to place things (while he smokes a cigarette!).  This woman was carrying two large boulders on her head.

Which she delivered with precision to the designated pile.

By this evening the three paddies were cleared, around 6 bags of rice were collected and the ducks were let loose into the now empty paddy.  Their delighted quacking created quite an uproar in everyone's peaceful late afternoon.

We didn't spend the whole day watching other people working very hard.  We spent a few hours wandering the fascinating little laneways of this gorgeous village, noting the huge increase in traffic and movement around 12.30pm when morning school ends, and before afternoon school starts.

It was much steamier today in Ubud so we took regular cold drink stops.  Our best find today was Miro's Garden Restaurant, in the main street of Ubud down near the bridge over the Campuhan River.

Lunch was at Tutmak's and we returned John's hospitality tonight by taking him to dinner at our favourite Bumbu Bali.  I had smoked duck and tried not to think of all those cute ducks quacking delightedly outside my villa this afternoon.

I was also hoping someone was cooking a nice meal for those amazing women building the new villas next door, load by load, carried on their slender necks!

Indonesian Independence Day

By 9.00am this morning the sports field on Monkey Forest Road was filled with uniformed children from all the schools around Ubud, a small army of civil servants, police and military types, ready to mark Indonesian Independence Day. Although the mood was pretty militaristic with lots of regimentation and saluting we saw plenty of Balinese touches lightening the mood.  

There was the gorgeously decorative marching band for a start.  The band master was dressed Balinese dancer style, but chose to complete her outfit with white high heeled boots.  The band members were dressed in a colourful array of styles including one boy dressed in gilded Balinese royalty type clothes, and with noobvious instrument to play. 

The sports field itself was decorated with the huge bamboo decorative installations that mark every Balinese ceremony.  Traffic in the village was at a standstill, but everywhere there were happy relaxed families, healthy looking and very cute village school children - all out to enjoy their national holiday.

John picked us up around 11.30am after the official ceremonies were over and the streets had started to clear.  He'd invited us to lunch with him in Gianyar, a short drive from Ubud village.  There'd been a big day market in Gianyar and he'd bought his favourite pork dishes and salads from the market to share with us at his home in Gianyar.  

We'd remembered some of this amazing home style, no part of the pig wasted, food from our very first visit to the Gianyar night market back in 2002.  It was so much more enjoyable this time sitting out amongst John's tropical garden greenery under his thatched garden bale eating this delicious food from a plate, with a fork even!

We spent all afternoon chatting with John, drinking wine from the hilly, northern region of Bali and strong and thick Bali Kope.  John has lots of stories to tell and it is remarkably easy to pass the time in his company.