Ubud: Art Abounds

Bali is a really special place and we have loved being in Ubud. Ubud has a small village feel where art is infused in many aspects of the culture. The tall bamboo poles are ritual offering flags, which appear on most streets.



While the few main streets can be packed with tourists, shops, and some crazy traffic, but most of Ubud is surrounded by and infused with scenic beauty.

   



These leaf plate offerings are made twice a day at temples, homes and businesses. We enjoyed watching women make these offerings. She seems fully present as she conducts a beautiful ritual that include dipping a flower into water and shaking the water drops onto the shrines, the earth and onto herself.



We had heard that Ubud is very touristy, so we opted to stay five miles outside of town and rent a scooter to get around. These are photos of the jungle-like environment surrounding our hotel and the beautiful pool right outside our room.

  

We visited the Sacred Monkey Forest, which is both a temple complex and a nature preserve. Like all Balinese temples, the temples here are open air places of worship within enclosed walls. This is a shrine at the cremation temple.



We donned sarongs and sashes before going into the Dalan Agung Pedangtegal temple. Pete is standing in between a candi bentar, split gateway, with a huge banyan tree behind him.



This is a lion barong, the king of the good spirits. Barongs can be lions, boars or dragons, and they always seem to have huge teeth and look fierce. They are like guardian angels. Many of the stone sculptures and carvings we saw are made of volcanic stone and have moss growing on them - they look really old, but instead they just age quickly in this lush jungle environment.



It's called the Sacred Monkey Forest because there are hundreds of macque monkeys that live here. We read that there are four different monkey troops, and that fights over territory are common but we didn't see any skirmishes.



We had read not to bring any food or the monkeys will grab it. There was a woman selling bananas, so the monkeys seemed to be pretty well fed.



The little ones are about 6 months old and so cute with their black mohawks!

   

Separated at birth? We don't know this man, but he seemed to be taking a risk by letting the monkey climb on him, since there has been a rabies outbreak here.



Here is another barong, which is part of a beautiful shrine at a house. Since Balinese Hinduism is such a huge part of people's lives here, it is very common to see elaborate shrines at people's homes.



Bali has a long history of art extending back to the 16th century when there was a mass exodus of the Hindu elite from Java to Bali. The tradition of giving high status to villages with artistic talent continues today. We enjoy visiting museums, so we checked out three different ones in Ubud. Here is a carving of Ram and Sita at the Puri Lukisan museum.



This is a painting of a barong by I Gusti Nyomen Lemped. Lemped was a stone sculptor and architect, as well as a self-taught painter. He chose to make paintings with themes from Balinese mythology and folklore. While his birthdate was not recorded (which is common here), it is thought he lived to be 116.



Not only did we see interesting paintings and sculptures in the museums, we also saw beautiful grounds.

   

This guardian statue has been draped in and shaded by checkered ritual cloth called poleng. Each day fresh flowers are placed behind the statues' ears, and the men here often have a flower tucked behind each ear, too.



At the ARMA museum we watched kids learning Balinese dance. The classes are free to encourage the younger generation to learn this important art form. All the kids were very engaged and excited about learning to dance.

   

These backbends were so graceful.



One evening we went to a dance performance. The main dance was from the epic Hindu story, the Ramayana. The dance begins with these men singing and dancing. Their singing is the only music for the dances, and it included interesting sounds like monkeys chattering.



In this scene Ram is lured away by this golden deer, leaving Sita alone and vulnerable. We loved this young woman's performance.



Sita, the wife of Ram, is about to be kidnapped by the evil king Ravena. He imprisons her in his kingdom on Sri Lanka.



Hanuman to the rescue! The monkey king gives Ram's ring to Sita and promises to return with Ram and his monkey army to rescue her.



We also saw a trance dance by these two young girls. They dance with their eyes closed, but their movements were perfectly synchronized.



And the finale was a fire dance. Here the main dancer is kicking the burning coconut husks around the stage.



One evening we rode our scooter to a nearby village named Petulu. We saw thousands of herons fly in and roost on the trees. This has been happening here since 1965, and the locals consider the herons to be good luck.

   

Birds weren't the only flyers we saw in the Balinese skies. We frequently saw kites, with ones as beautiful as these to homemade kites made from scrap.



Walking through Petulu, we also came upon this cremation tower being readied for an upcoming ceremony. The number of levels signifies the deceased's status: the more levels on the tower equates to a higher caste or greater social standing. Clearly this was to be the cremation ceremony of a significant person in Petulu.



We found good yoga classes in Ubud at a lovely studio.



We took three classes, including a workshop with Simon Park (who studied Flow with Shiva Rea). We haven't taken any yoga classes since January, so it was a great treat. Here Simon is demonstrating a back bending pose.



We tried the local cuisine via a tasting menu. Starting at 11 o'clock and going clockwise are egg rolls (lumpia), duck cooked in banana leaves (bebek betutu), fish cooked in banana leaves, shrimp chips, chicken (ayam betutu), water spinach, chicken satay, and beef randang which was like a spicy beef jerky. In the center is rice garnished with fried shallots.



We have found the traditional Balinese food to be well-seasoned with nice flavor, but consistently so over-cooked that the meat is dry and tough. We sought out some hippy organic food in Ubud and enjoyed komboucha and smoothies. Our favorite drink here was called "one love" and was a blend of passion fruit juice, cashew milk, honey and vanilla - yum! The flowers in the restaurant were beautiful!



Here's a photo of the full moon over the rice fields. We are sad to leave Ubud, but we plan to return in a month.

Tulamben: Seeing Beauty Under Water and On Shore

We traveled to northeast Bali to stay at a small town called Tulamben so we could go scuba diving. We were PADI certified last year in Hawaii, and we really liked our diving instructor Alexia Benrezkellah. We kept in touch with her and she gave us tons of great suggestions for diving, including this quote "you must dive the USAT Liberty wreck off Tulamben. It is amazing!" Here's a painting of the wreck we saw in a dive shop here, showing that the boat is lying on its side. (There are scuba booties on a shelf under the painting.)



The Liberty was a 400 foot long cargo ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese during WWII. Trying to salvage the cargo, the ship was towed towards Singapore, but it took on too much water so was abandoned on the beach at Tulamben. There it sat until 1963 when the Mt Agung volcano erupted. Lava dragged the wreck 40 feet offshore, breaking it into 3 pieces. Since then coral has grown all over the submerged ship and many types of fish have made it their home. Here’s a photo of sunrise close to the wreck.



In this blog post we'll share underwater photos and our best guesses as to the types of fish we saw on our dives. One morning we got up early so we could be in the water close to sunrise, as this is when the daily gathering of the Bumphead Parrotfish takes place at the Liberty. We saw over 30 of these 4-5 foot long fish. They use their foreheads to break the coral, then chew the coral with their huge teeth, spitting out the leftover sand.

  

Here you can see the mid section of the ship, with what's left of two ladders. It was so interesting to see how the salt water and currents have transformed the ship.



This Emporer Angelfish was about 15 inches long.



We saw two Blue-Spotted Stingrays. The one on the left was smaller and his blue spots were quite pronounced. The other had a body about 20 inches long and was swimming along the sandy floor at a depth of about 75 feet.

  

Here is a Bignose Unicornfish. We liked his long dual tail. Behind him you can see the wreck.



These are Lunar Fusilier, which are neon blue fish, swimming in a large school at the wreck. This photo was taken during a mid morning dive.



During an afternoon dive we saw this turtle on the wreck. The only bad behavior we saw by other scuba divers was when one guy tried to hold onto this turtle for a ride.



During our three days of diving we had Mega as our guide. He has made over 500 dives on the Liberty!



We rode in the back of a truck for a short distance to get to the Coral Gardens dive spot.



Probably the hardest part of scuba diving is walking from the rocky shore into the water with 50 lbs of equipment and weights strapped to our backs! Here we are getting ready to go under water.



We loved diving at Coral Gardens and made two dives here. It was shallower than the Liberty (20-40 feet vs. 60-80 feet), which made it easier to see and photograph. There were so many small fish hanging out around this metal "cage".



And there was a school of Anthias swimming above these metal rods.



This fish looks like Nemo, who is actually a False Clown Anenomefish. These fish have a symbiotic relationship with their anenomes, and have developed immunity to the anenome's stinging tentacles.



This Clownfish first swam at Pete somewhat aggressively then retreated. We wondered what he was doing so far away from his anenome.



We didn't see any Blue Tangs (like Dory in the movie Finding Nemo), but we did see a lot of Moorish Idols flitting around.



Kristina is posing next to a stone statue of Tara, who is said to be the mother of all Buddhas. In Tara's lap there is a bubble tip anenome, but we didn't see a Clownfish. In Coral Gardens there are other statues, including a Buddha, a guard lion and lots of lanterns. We found it beautiful!



This is a school of jack fish named Bigeye Trevallys. We saw them on both dives. The school was quite large and probably had more than a thousand fish in it. Mega banged two rocks together to get their attention, and the school swam close to us. It was awesome!



This Raccoon Butterfly is named for its mask. They usually travel in pairs. We found the yellow colored fish to be the most photogenic.



This Diagonal Banded Sweetlips had scales that looked like fur.



It's a bit hard to see these Spotfin Lionfish. They had impressive white spines and were about 6 inches long.



The Day Octopus is the most common octopus in the western Pacific. Mega prodded this shy creature to come out of his hiding spot so we could get a good look. The octopus was disguising himself to look like a white rock so he blended in, then he changed into this dark color and quickly swam away and into another hole.


We saw this vibrant Coronation Cod on our way back in towards the shore.



Since Tulamben exists primarily for scuba diving tourists we didn't expect to get authentic Indonesian food here and our meals have been bland but healthy. But we did some research and found a place just outside of town that got good reviews. We were greeted by the owner named Wayan who made a fire in the garden and grilled snapper for us. It was served with a delicious Balinese barbeque sauce that was quite hot, so we drank beer to cool our lips and mouths.



The name Wayan means first born in Indonesian, and we have met many people with this name. We even met a Wayan Bon Jovi (who we assume added the Bon Jovi out of love for the musician). It took a while to cook the fish, so we had time to enjoy views of Mt Agung and the sunset. Rising to a height above 9,000 feet, it is the tallest mountain on Bali.

  

After three days of diving we were ready to look at sights on land. So we rented a scooter and headed south, enjoying beautiful view of rice terraces.



We saw a procession that is part of the Balinese Hindu tradition when someone dies. First in the parade were women carrying offerings. Next were these musicians who were playing music. And at the end were the men.



We visited Pura Lempuyang, which is a temple complex of five temples located on Mt Lempuyang, and is one of 9 key temple complexes in Bali. The temple represents the East direction. Here is the gate to Penataran Agung temple, the most elaborate of the five temples.



The temple name (Penataran Agung) indicates it has a view of Mt Agung. The mountain is hugged by clouds, but the top is visible through the split gateway. Split gateways (called candi bentar) are a common feature in Balinese temple architecture.

  

At the middle Temple, Pura Telaga Mas, a priest was blessing people with holy water.



We climbed up 1,770 steps through cloud and mist to reach the top temple, Pura Lempuyang Luhur, often seeing Balinese people with offerings climbing up to the top. Unfortunately the top was covered in clouds so we couldn't photograph the view. Here's a look from midway down the mountain looking east.



We also rode the scooter to Jemeluk village to go snorkeling.

  

We liked this painting on a wall, which we think is inspired by scuba diving. We are seeing all kinds of beauty in Bali!