Thursday, January 25, 2007

Ubud

22nd January - 28th January

After our gruelling rescue diving training we headed back to Bali and decided to head for the hills, chill out amongst the rice paddies with the aim of doing nothing but eating well and reading a good book.

Ubud itself seems to be very spiritually inclined, even by Balinese standards. A Hindu temple on almost every corner and most of the old houses were indistinguishable from the temples. Here's a more ostentatious example...
...and one of the more basic doorways...(for those of you who don't know, the swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol)

The pavements are strewn with offerings that the Balinese put out every morning. Sometimes just rice but often flowers in banana leaf baskets with incense.
This lady goes through the offerings ritual for the entire street...
We did take a few trips around however, the first to the local monkey forest. More like a jungle with some frightening sculpture...
No photos of monkeys this time, they steal everything and if you fight them for it, they'll bite you. Here's a more tame variety...

Another of our jaunts was a walk around the local countryside (read rice paddies)....

We witnessed some back breaking work done by the farmers. This crafty lady however was making a killing selling coconut milk to passersby...

......and proceeded to rip us off with the old "no change" routine, what was to become a typical Indonesian encounter.Bali is beautiful but towards the end of our travels we are tiring of the bullshit, hassling and scam artists plaguing tourists. Where else can we go but back to Malaysia for some lazy and familiar comforts as Bali waves us a goodbye...

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