Ubud Is SoGood

We left the beach to drive up into the highlands/forest.  Ubud, where we stayed the next 5 nights is supposedly more authentic, and there is certainly more Balinese culture in evidence there.  But it is also quite touristy and geared toward the almighty dollar.  We couldn’t really complain though.  The large number of relatively well off Western tourists means that there is a really broad range of foods represented in Ubud restaurants, and a really high quality of cooking.  This is quite handy when traveling with a four year old who has limited willingness to subside on nasi goreng and satay.  Ari did not have to live on rice alone, but feasted on pizza, pasta with (pretty good) pesto, gelato, chocolate cake, grilled cheese and other Western delights in addition to mild curries and noodle dishes. 

Luckily for us, being in Ubud did not turn out to be all about the food.  We happened to land there during a once-in-a-generation ceremony at the main temple in the Monkey Forest (for which Ubud is famous) and were treated to processions and gamelan all day every day and late into every night as the local villages brought offerings to the temple, showed off their own gamelans and generally worked hard (it appeared) to bring order and harmony to the temple, the village, and oh yes, the Universe.  It was essentially a turning over of responsibility for the ongoing life of the temple to the next generation, and it was quite elaborate.  Given the abundance of fairly tame monkeys in the Monkey Forest, we never had difficulty getting Ari to agree to walk through there – where we could feed the many macaques bananas and pieces of coconut – and although we were not allowed into the temple because of the importance of the ceremonies, many of the gamelan performances took place outside of the temple in the main courtyard, and we could even hear them from our guesthouse down the road. 

   
We also lucked into an amazing place to stay, recommended by a neighbor in Seattle who had stayed at a sister guesthouse and loved it.  After getting the last room at any of their various guesthouses, I started looking at TripAdvisor to get ideas for the next leg of our Bali journey and discovered that Alam Shanti was the #1 rated place in Bali on their site.  Not without reason – in addition to being incredibly lovely and extremely reasonably priced, the level of service was outstanding.  We could probably have sat on our two verandahs and read and played Playmobils, with an occasional trip to the swimming pool, for our entire stay in Ubud.  But rice fields and walks and temples and elephants beckoned, and so we contented ourselves with a mixture of exploring and relaxing.  Ari befriended all of the geckos he could find, and there were many.  I hadn’t known before that the word “gecko” comes from one of the sounds they make, or that they are the only member of the lizard family to make noise.  We found their presence in our house quite reassuring every night, as we pictured them eating bugs and keeping us safe in our sleep.

Of course, our enjoyment of gamelan was not restricted to the temples or local performances that we saw.  Breakfast gamelan was a highlight of our mornings, after we finished lovely muesli, crepes and jaffles (filled sandwiches toasted in a jaffle or sandwich iron), coffee and juice, the empty plates and partly-filled cups could be put to good musical use.  For example:

Our one day trip away from Ubud was the typical tourist story – we set out for a temple at the edge of a large caldera, flanked by the cones of two volcanoes, and said to have fabulous views of the lake in the valley below, and we encountered low-hanging fog, rain and colder temps than any we had had so far in Bali (and for which we were not equipped clothing-wise).  We haggled with a group of temple-watching women who charged us exorbitantly high prices for the “rental” of sarongs and sashes.  Of course we had our own that we had left back in Ubud.  Our driver nicely ran after us to make sure we at least had umbrellas, and so we wandered through the fog without really knowing what we were seeing, or having any perspective as to where we were.  At least Ari’s hot pink sarong made a beautiful contrast with the gray mist all around us – a couple of photos of him there are gems. 

After the temple it was off to the elephant safari, which continued on the “exorbitant price” theme of the day.  Had Evan and I been there without Ari, we would have said “oh well, we’ve ridden elephants in India and watched performing elephants in Thailand – we can skip these.”  Not an option with a kid in tow, especially one that you've brought on a long car ride to see (and not much of that in this case), a temple.  Fortunately, the elephant experience was a good one and it was fun to get to chat with the mahouts and their charges as we rode along.  We discovered that the park is the first to employ 2 female mahouts, which was cool.  Of course, now that logging with elephants is outlawed in Indonesia, there aren't really more elephants to "rescue" from Sumatra -- so now they are working on a small breeding program.