Selamat Pagi!

Selamat pagi from Indonesia! We have finally made it to Asia :) We flew into Denpasar, Bali on the 19th and will be in Indonesia for 4 weeks. We'd already like to stay longer but our visa is only for 1 month and we still have Malaysia and Thailand to see after this. For now we plan to spend a couple weeks on the island of Bali and then, who knows - maybe Sulawesi to see the Tana Toraja area, or across to Java. Arranging transportation here is pretty easy and cheap so we don't have to plan too far ahead. Although we just heard that east Java is experiencing bad floods, so we might have to avoid those areas.

20Feb:
So far we've been really enjoying Bali. We spent our first day on the southern coast in Sanur, where we mainly ate lots of tasty food and walked along the beach (tough life!) The food here is great - I'm proud to say that for our very first meal, breakfast no less, we had mysterious fish head soup, fried fish and rice at a little street warung - and it was enak sekali (delicious!) I've been practicing Indonesian but I still can't say much :)

21Feb:
The next day we took a bus north to Ubud - another touristy area but more focused on Balinese arts and culture than just fun in the sun. We spent the rest of the day walking around town and I have arranged to take weaving lessons from a place called Threads of Life - an organization that promotes the use of traditional dying and weaving practices throughout Indonesia. Next week I'm going to get three days of personal training on how to use a backstrap loom - this is how they make ikat. If I have extra time I will also get to start learning how to tie ikat. For those of you who don't know, ikat is a special kind of weaving where the warp threads (the threads on the loom) are essentially tie-dyed with a pattern before the actually weaving.

22Feb:
Today we took a beautiful walk through rice paddies on a ridge along the Campuan river just west of Ubud. It was a hot and steamy day (of course) and we used our umbrellas as parasols :) it may look silly but it works!








We made our way north to a little village called Bentuyung where we were fortunate enough to find a food stand selling gado-gado (cold cooked veggies in peanut sauce). The woman running the stall was very friendly and we chatted a bit while we sat under her roof and ate in the rain. She also insisted that we try her lak lak (like a small crumpet with palm sugar and coconut) and pisang goreng (battered and fried banana pieces.) Delicious! Afterwards we got lost trying to find the right path home and after getting chased by a dog we had to backtrack and take the road home. There is so much to see here that just walking around is a treat. We passed a group of school boys using big leaves like umbrellas (straight out of Totoro!)

That night we went to a wayang kulit show, which is the balinese shadow puppets. This we really enjoyed - in particular we were amused by the "clown" characters.

next up, monkeys in the forest and a wacky spainard...