Monkey Forest Road in Ubud terminates at the Monkey Forest Reserve – well actually it doesn’t terminate, but joins Jalan Hanoman (the monkey hero of the Ramayana) and swings back into town. But at this southern end of the town you can enter the reserve, paying a modest price to do so, and with the […]
Ubud is a nice town. There are a few main drags, mostly named after characters in the Ramayana: Dewi Sita, Jalan Hanoman, and so forth. And if you walk along these streets and look up, or sideways, you can see all kinds of interesting things: Rice paddies behind a cafe, for instance, with tiny frogs […]
In Ubud, you can go to a different dance performance every night of the week. They’re given in the public spaces of the temples, and are sacred, but that doesn’t mean they object to selling tourists tickets. The dances seem to be generally concerned with retelling the Ramayana, or parts of it, so they’re intimately […]
There’s a lot of sculpture in Bali, especially in temples and palaces. There are a lot of wood and stone carvers, and the road between Ubud and the airport is lined with their shops and outlets for their wares, so on your way to the airport you pass armies in volcanic rock that rival the […]
After a few days at the beach we went to Ubud, which is supposed to be the cultural hub of Bali. There are temple dances of several flavors offered every night there, and extensive arts and crafts shopping. There are also art museums, but some in our party are generally opposed to them so we […]
We didn’t try “taking and joking” with Baba, but we followed the sign and found the Good Karma Bungalows and Restaurant. They are thatched bamboo bungalows right on the beach at Amed. You can hop out your front door and into the water (having run the gauntlet of fishing boats that are parked on the beach […]
This place was built in the 1940s by a king of south-central Bali – several sculptures are dated 1948. It’s name means waters of the Ganges, and although it’s remote from India the water did seem pure and plentiful. I don’t know if it’s source is springs or rain. At any rate it’s not a […]
Like so many Asian countries, one of the wonderful things about Bali is that people wear traditional costumes as well as the ubiquitous T-shirt and jeans (or shorts). Herewith, some pictures of people in Balinese garb: This man is wearing the Hindu turban (as opposed to the Indonesian muslim skullcap), with a peak at the […]
These are cheery Balinese cows, in their little shelter about 50 feet from the beach. All the cattle we saw were these smallish red ones. There are little huts all up and down the precipitous slopes of East Bali, and I think they just move the cows to the ones with the lushest grass every […]
We stayed in two hotels in Bali: One was a 3-month old penthouse suite overlooking the ocean (in Bali, even we can afford such a thing), and the other was a bungalow in the small city of Ubud, adjacent to the Saraswati Temple there. Both advertised themselves as bungalows, although they were adjoined to one […]