Bali second impressions: Ubud
To get to Uluwatu, we hired a driver through a “tour agency” consisting of an elderly couple with a rolodex in a tiny office along an alley. These agencies are quite common, as they require very little overhead. On the way back that evening we arranged with the driver to get picked up by a shuttle bus and taken to Ubud. We gave him a 50,000 rupiah deposit, and he told us the car would show up at 11 the next morning.
Roxane and I both remarked how odd this was, to give money to a stranger and get only verbal assurances that something would happen. But the bus showed up right on time, and he deducted our deposit from the price of transit. In general we have found that although overcharging for tourists is common here, generally people are quite honest and reliable. There are also interesting differences in how prices work in different sectors. While buying a physical product, you might be expected to pay double the fair price if you don’t bargain. But transportation generally seems to be offered near the fair price, without too much room for bargaining. This likely refects the fixed costs, primarily fuel (which is subsidised and costs about 5,000 rupiah, or 50 cents, per liter).
So we got on the “shuttle bus,” really a minivan with two other passengers, and rode to Ubud. If Kuta is the south end of Bali’s tourist magnet, Ubud is the north. Everything is inverted in this cool interior town. Though there are plenty of men offering transport by taksi, or becak (bike taxi, pronounced beh-chak), they hawk their services in a subdued way, many of them simply holding up a sign saying “do you need transport?” as you walk by. The hotels are better value for the money, the tourists are older and more civilized, and the air is less polluted.
The big attraction in town is the Sacred Monkey Forest and the three small temples inside it. We walked there soon after arriving in town. I bought a handful of bananas, but at Roxane’s insistence I did not hide them in my backpack for later, but carried them in my hand. Immediately on entering the gate we had to pass through a gauntlet of monkeys and one of them snatched some bananas right out of my hand. Soon a few of his friends were begging, and I had to throw them the bananas or find a monkey climbing my leg.
I had procured croakies for Roxane and me, but they weren’t needed. Other than the banana incident, these monkeys were not aggressive like the ones at Uluwati and don’t seem to steal glasses and such. Not aggressive towards humans, that is. We did get to witness a turf war when a monkey from the wrong family was caught on someone else’s turf. A primate Romeo and Juliet story, no doubt. And speaking of Romeo and Juliet, we were also witness to a bit of “monkey business” between a pair that went from grooming each other to something entirely different, and then abruptly back to grooming. Down in the water temple another group of monkeys was having playtime, with pairs and triads everywhere mock fighting with each other. Altogether I found these monkeys much more interesting and agreeable than the Uluwatu ones. Roxane and I struggled to figure out why. The most likely answer is that the number of tourists at Uluwatu stress those monkeys. A secondary one is that I saw the Uluwatu monkeys eating all kinds of junk food, including a stolen bag of Doritos. Here I saw them only eating bananas and some root vegetable provided by the temple keepers. Bad diet can cause behaviour problems in humans, and I have no doubt it does the same in monkeys.
On our second day in Ubud I went on a bicycle tour of the countryside. We were driven to the top of Bali’s central volcano and ate a delicious breakfast at a restaurant on the crater rim, overlooking the lake that irrigates most of Bali’s rice fields.
Our first stop was at a coffee plantation where we watched traditional hand preparation of coffee beans in a kettle and then a roasting pan. They had a couple of civet cats here, also known as luwak or catfox. These nocturnal beasties eat coffee beans and poop improved coffee beans. Somehow improved by being digested, these beans are turned into what is called the rarest coffee in the world, sold in London for forty pounds sterling as “kopi luwak,” evidently a favorite of coffee connoseiurs.
All my life I have despised the smell of coffee so strongly that, as far as I can remember, I have never tried it. I’ve had mocha ice cream and espresso chocolate, even a coffee porter, but not, in memory, a simple steaming joe. But this plantation had a tasting room where the famous kopi luwak could be had for $3, so I figured I might as well start with the best. It was bitter and somewhat unpleasant, exactly as expected, but I managed to finish most of the cup. I also tried a cup of plain Balinese coffe, unadulterated by any civet, and I couldn’t really tell the difference. Both were prepared Turkish-style, with a heap of grounds stewing constantly at the bottom, so perhaps the divine experience would be more accessible in filter coffee or espresso. But for now I’m chalking up the kopi luwak craze to novelty-seeking. I will say one thing for coffee – I really enjoyed the caffeine buzz I got off it, more so than I usually enjoy tea. I guess this is how a coffee addiction begins.
We cleansed our palates with a fruit tasting – snakeskin fruit, sour passionfruit, sweet passionfruit, rambutan, mango, and another whose name I forget. Then there was the obligatory shop to stop at, the idea being that if you give tourists enough time in front of a shop, inevitably they will buy something.
Finally we were put on mountain bikes – maintained to the slim edge of acceptability – and started our long roll downhill. The Balinese countryside is quite beautiful and surprisingly dense, with only a few kilometers of rice paddies separating each village. As we passed, children would run out of shops or family compounds and shout “Hello! Hello!” or reach out for high-fives. One of them must have been an especially enthusiastic student in English class. He shouted out “Hello! My name is!” Many of the kids made a gesture I did not recognize with index finger, pinky and thumb. I asked Winia, our guide, what this meant and he told me “it means ‘metal,’ sometimes surfers stop here and teach this to the children.” I didn’t recognize it because they all held their hand backwards!
We stopped at a family compound known to Winia, and he explained more about the Balinese style of living than I could possibly absorb. In a nutshell, an extended family will live in one of these walled compounds, with individual houses built inside. Each compound has a family temple in the northeast corner, and because this temple is so vital to the family’s spirituality, compounds are never sold, only inherited. The houses of different family members are positioned in certain places according to status, and each immediate family has its own kitchen. All the cooking is done in the morning, so breakfast is the only hot meal, and food is eaten when it is convenient, not together at fixed mealtimes. An offering with rice is placed in front of the door to the compound afterwards, and in this way one can tell when a household has finished its cooking for the day.
Our next stop was at a rice field being harvested by a group of women. After speaking with them Winia said we could come over and try our hand at threshing – beating the grain off the cut stalks against a wooden platform. Nearby a woman was winnowing the rice grains by pouring them out of a basket held at head level, so the wind would carry away the chaff. Behind us a group of old woman chopped up the empty rice stalks. The volcanic soils here (and in Java) are very fertile and farmers can get three crops of rice per year with wet-field techniques. The fields are flooded while the rice grows, then gradually drained until harvest time, when the field is dry. All this is accomplished with the help of a pervasive and complex irrigation system, often running in deep ditches alongside the country roads.
Towards the end of the tour there was an optional forty-five minute uphill section. Naturally I chose to do it, as did most of the group. A couple of people changed their minds halfway through, though, and flagged down the sag wagon for a ride.
We all arrived thoroughly marinated at the lunch spot, an elegant pavillion overlooking a rice field immediately adjacent. We were treated to a fantastic buffet lunch and watched a farmer drive a flock of ducks into a dormant but flooded rice field. The ducks swim around, dig in the mud for scraps of fallen rice from the harvest, and poop, helping prepare the field for the next harvest.
After lunch we met the owner of the tour company, an Australian who married a Balinese and spends half his time here and half his time in Oz. I was a little surprised – for some reason I had assumed the operation was locally owned. Anyhow he described how he started operating eco tours because he was worried about the direction of tourism in Bali, and had been doing it for about ten years. Evidently Bali Eco Tours has spawned imitators who copy their itineraries and even their ad copy, but they don’t yet have their own web site! The problem, explained the Australian, is that the hotels and tourist centers which currently help promote his tours would be upset because tourists could bypass them and they wouldn’t get a commission.
And in fact it was through our hotel that Roxane and I first heard about this tour, although walking down the main drag of Ubud, we saw many little stores advertising the same tour. In Indonesia, anyone with a telephone and a pad of paper can be a booking agent. When I booked the tour yesterday it was in one of these small shops, and Roxane & I bargained them down nearly 25% off the initial asking price. For this reason, after lunch Winia pulled me discreetly aside and told me I received a very special price, and asked me not to mention it to the other people on the tour, and would I like to pay now? It seemed that everyone paid separately though, and I wondered how many “special prices” there were. The basline price of 360k rupiahs was common across all the agents, but it’s entirely possible everyone on the tour paid a slightly different price depending on their bargaining abilities.