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  • Bali - day 48

    May 29, 2019 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 23 °C

    We were up early, nice breakfast at the hotel which is called Fourteen Roses Beach Hotel. We have separate rooms and breakfast is included for $50 per night. It also has a lovely pool which we have been using a bit, nice to cool off before bed. Our driver – Warren - picked us up at 8am, and we were off on our big day. First stop was a silver factory. It was fascinating watching them make individual pieces by hand. Such steady hands and good eyesight. Apparently ,they work from 7 to 7 with a break for lunch. I think it would be heard to concentrate that hard for that long. Then we went into the shop which was really huge. We must have spent at least an hour trying to see all of the different stands full of jewellery and may have bought some. Most of the pendants were about $20 to $30 and when we had just seen the work that went into creating them, they were extremely cheap.

    Then we went to a temple which was interesting, but not that much to see. The next stop was the butterfly house which was amazing. There were loads of different colours flying all around and settling on leaves close to us. I could have watched them for hours. They also had an enclosure for big moths – I think called Atlas moths. They have a life cycle of 5 days, and have no mouths so basically hatch out of their crysallis, procreate and then die. There were guides in the enclosure who would put as many moths on you as you wanted, and they just stayed there until they were moved again. Apparently, they fly around at night.

    Then back into the van again to our next stop which was a waterfall. It was quite a lot of steps down and up, and it was pretty hot. They had cool baskets that we posed in for pics, and it was fun watching the people at the bottom of the waterfall posing for pics. At the entrance there were lots of shops, and all of them were advertising their toilets. I bought a roasted corn cob from there which was rather tasty. Then Warren took us to a restaurant by a rice paddy field for lunch which was very nice. There was a breeze coming in the open window which cooled us nicely.

    Then we went to another temple which had a purification ritual which many people were doing. They put on a special sarong, entered a pool of water, and dunked their heads under the flowing taps. There were maybe 15 taps along one side, and people moved along the taps, dunking at each one. Warren was surprised that we hadn’t done this ritual – apparently many people go to that temple just for that reason. Our next journey was to the rice paddy terraces. By this time it was getting later, and the terraces looked pretty steep so we just took some pics from the car. The road we were driving down is apparently 10kms long and looked amazing for shopping. It was probably a very good thing that we had stayed in the car. Then it was a 1.5 hour drive back to our hotel. I was pretty sick of driving through Bali by then – it is not a quick exercise!

    We got back around 6pm and had a wee rest before dinner. We went to a place which had a lady boy show which was very entertaining. The first guy that was targeted really didn’t cope very well and left the entire restaurant while muttering under his breath. Some of the other guys were very good sports, and as there were only around 20 people in the restaurant some of them were targeted more than once. I was pulled up to have a dance with one of them which was fine, but I missed out on the entertainment of Jody being up there as I went to the loo. It sounded like it would have been a good thing to have videoed! So back at the hotel we had a swim in the pool until 10, and then went to bed. The pool was pretty cool, but outside was maybe 25 degrees so nice to cool off.
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