Bali

Bali really lives up to the promised hype of being beautiful, mystical, and tourist-trodden. The streets of Ubud are lined with incredible Balinese architecture, which is basically to say that everyone's house looks like a crazy red and black Hindu temple, and you cant walk down the street without accidentally stepping on a perfectly arranged offering, usually an immaculately folded banana leaf with rice, cookie, flowers and incense burning, or a woman carefully placing one out on the sidewalk or upon a wall somewhere. It also smells like college- the comingling scents of clove cigarettes and incense pervade everything (and the distant dischordant sounds of Gamelon don't hurt either (Sorry y'all, Wesleyan in-joke)). Flowers spill over walls, and the people are some of the most genuinely friendly I've encountered anywhere. Sure, they want to sell you batiks and carved buddha figurines, but they are not in the slightest bit pushy about any of it.

Our charming Jati Homestay in Ubud, is pretty great. Our room is set on our own little palm-filled rice paddy, with its own flock of ducks, which generally wake us up when they start fighting with the chickens and roosters, which then wake up the monkeys, which awaken the Australians next door, and then us. The jetlag is fairly insane at 12 hours. Breakfast is decent and the grounds of the house are beautiful and fascinating to watch the Balinese traditional life of the women sewing and assembling the mornings offerings, the kids playing, and then men... smoking and tinkering with their motorbikes.

So we wandered down Monkey Forest Road to the Monkey Forest, where AGAIN I was immediately attacked by a monkey-

I swear, I have monkey attractant on (see last summer's monkey attack incident). This time I didn't even have any food on me, but the monkey climbed up my leg, hoisted itself up my shirt to perch on my head and literally do the

monkey-sitting-on-my-head-and-cover-my-eyes thing while he pulled ferociously at my hair and tried to eat it, which hurt like hell. Olivia helpfully got a few pictures of the incident, to be uploaded later...Rest of the day was more wandering, hiding from the crowds of Dutch and Australians, and trying to find charm in Ubud between the t-shirt vendors, Starbucks, and Ralph Lauren.

Day Two:

We found the charm in Ubud. It is found by leaving Ubud. Preferably by bike. We signed up for a bike tour, which turned out to be spectacular, and began at the rim of Bali's largest volcano, something close to 10,000 feet high. At the volcano outlook, peering out across rice terraces, villages and volcanic lakes, someone asked when the last eruption of the broken peak was, to which our guide responded 1986, before being whispered a correction. "I'm sorry it was actually last week, and killed all the fishes in the lake" oh well, glad we were now headed away from the mountain, and so our downhill descent back began.

It was an incredible ride, and not just because it was mostly downhill. We zipped through small villages, high-fiving little kids, outrunning stray dogs and chickens while narrowly avoiding topless old women laying out rice to dry in the sun, or balancing impossibly large baskets on their heads. We paused briefly to see a small home and learned explanations of the architecture, shrines and different living areas in the Balinese living compounds, where multiple interrelated intergenerational families shared meals and more, saw men training their roosters for the nights cockfighting festival (the winner lives to fight again, the loser... Satay), while women stripped bamboo and wove it into mats to make walls for their homes, spitting red betel juice out of their stained mouths. Through alleys and dirt paths we saw kids creating and flying incredible kites, filling the skies over the terraced rice paddies with kites ten to thirty feet long, and I managed to dodge two young men carrying a whole palm trees, 100 feet long down a small country road. Past the traditional occasional Asian gas station- aka a bamboo rack of absolut vodka bottles brimming with golden gasoline, glimmering in the tropical sun.

It was a great way to see village life, and actually felt a little more authentic than most of the tours I've been on. We also stopped at an allegedly organic farm in the countryside, where we saw the spices that first made these spice islands valuable colonies worth fighting over between the Brits, Dutch and Portuguese. Vanillapods and football size and shaped cacao beans were growing next to peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom, along with ginseng, ginger, turmeric and other medicinal roots. Coffee bushes were everywhere, and the small plantation even had it's share of caged civets to which they fed coffee. "why?" you might reasonably ask? To make the world (in)famous civet poop coffee, without the use of "poophunters" as our guide delicately explained. For those who don't know, the civet cat has an appetite for the coffee bean and certain enzymes in it's stomach that ferment the raw coffee in a way that allegedly enhances and complexifies (is that a word?) it's flavor. Their beans are not digested, sonthey are picked out of it's poop, thoroughly (allegedly) cleaned, roasted, and brewed for the pleasure of your author and his companions. A delicacy prized by coffee fanatics the world over. And the verdict dear reader? Yeah, tastes like coffee.

Day Three:

The next day, we met up with Tova and her mother, and enjoyed a long walk through villages north of town, far more pleasant than the endless Eat-Pray-Lovers and tourist shops selling all manner of bamboo crap, alternating storefronts with spas offering Bali massage, foot massage, Thai massage, hot stone massage, milk bath, spice bath, herb bath, tea bath even fish bath (in which you get in a tub with tiny fish that chew off all of your dead skin!) More amazing rice paddies, and the strange and wonderful pleasure of visiting with a friend completely out of context on a continent thousands of miles away.