Bali is done! The summary of Bali is, that we were at least 20 years too late getting there. I know that if I (someone who hardly ever reads fiction and even more seldomly reads popular contemporary fiction) read "Eat, Pray, Love", then 98% of the people reading this blog have also read it. That book came out maybe 15 years ago? Well, let me tell you that the “Eat Pray Love" Bali is nothing like the Today Bali. There is still lots of beauty in Bali, but 50% of that beauty is in the art (which is awesomely everywhere) and the other part of it is now found not in the beautiful countryside, but in the grounds of fancy hotels. I dont know how many “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” moments I had, but there were a lot (i.e. when you look beyond the wall of the manicured and plush tourist areas with their koi ponds, gardens and infinity pools and see a cesspool of garbage). I kept comparing it in my mind with Costa Rica, which was spotless in terms of their environmental stewardship.
The complaints really just end with the environment though. The people were so gentle and welcoming and seemingly have a strong work ethic and strong commitment to their culture. No one seemed very educated— like you’d have a hard time getting an intellectual conversation out of anyone. They seem to just live simple down-to-earth lives and are content with that. Computers and cellphones exist here and people have them, but they stay in their place and you rarely see people using them.
Ok, so rewind to the Bali Silent Retreat.
The Silent Retreat was kind of a world of its own. Weird but great. Out in the rice farming area of the east side of the island, It was run by one guy, a chef, who makes amazing, unique, organic, vegetarian food with local ingredients and lots of it. My theory is that the guy wants a captive audience to eat his food in silence and focus on it completely. Which we did. We ate our asses off, or I should say back on, since we'd been losing a little weight up until that point. Good place to be on thanksgiving! (although in Bali you'd never even have guessed that there was a major holiday going on somewhere in the world. Thanksgiving and Black Friday was just another day.)
(Penny would like it to be known that she will do a separate blog entry on the food of Bali, including the food of the Silent retreat. She’s going to break it down for y’all.)
I should also mention that there was also yoga and meditation at the retreat (kind of a side-kick to the food) as well as a pretty good library and awesome open-air places to hang out and read overlooking the surrounding rice fields.
We would have stayed at the Silent Retreat forever, except that I had one more place I wanted to explore. I'd asked an american ex-pat that I met where we should go for some un-spoilt Bali experience and he recommended a town called Sidemen (pron: see-da-mon).
Sidemen was the equivalent of Italy's Tuscany or California's Napa, except that it was "rice country", not wine country. Its was absolutely gorgeous there. Im told its what Ubud used to look like 20 years ago. And the transformation from countryside to fancy hotels is already underway there too, and big time.
The rice terraces and the extensive views of them were extremely picturesque. The terraces themselves are pretty, but they are also dotted with colorful flags and streamers of different materials on the ends of long bamboo poles to keep birds away, so it looks like they're decked out for a party, and there's water flowing in rivulets and streams everywhere (since the paddies have to be constantly flushed with water).
The thing we didn't think about when we decided to venture out to Sidemen was food. We'd been so well fed up till then in the touristy areas that I think we took it a little bit for granted. It was somewhat of a food desert there. We could only eat so much Mie Goreng (fried noodles), Gado Gado (steamed veggies w pnut sauce) and Chicken Sate. We even rented a scooter to search a wider area for even a decent grocery store, but nada. When we asked the locals where to go to eat, they usually direct us to one of their buddy's restaurants and that hasn't proven to work out so well. Fed up and hungry, Penny did an extensive on-line search for places to eat around Sidemen and she used her intuition to narrow it down to this one side-of-the road place that we'd passed a bunch of times but which I'd probably never choose to eat at. We took a leap of faith and went there for dinner and its ended up being one of our best meals yet. We ended up ordering 4 meals of chicken grilled different ways, all of which were mouthwateringly good. We found our oasis in the food desert! So we did not starve on our final days in Bali and we also made Ida, the cook and owner of the place very happy by eating our last 3 meals there.
So today its off to Bangkok. And we dont know where to after that. We’re going to pick the brains of the hostel folks over the next few days to figure out our next move. Since we didn't make any pre-arranged plans after Ubud and are acting mostly on spontaneous decisions, the trip is turning out to be quite the exercise in decision-making skills, which is awesome, as I can always use a sharpening of those skills and one of Pennys goals is to work on her intuition. So we're certainly getting lots of practice!
