Taro's Travels

Bedugul, in the mountains about halfway between Ubud and Lovina, was like another country yesterday:

1. Get out of the bus at about 12:30 pm; look around futilely for people to suggest places to stay.
2. Wander down hill with Ian from Edinburgh who's been working in Sumatra on the Tsunami relief effort, and don't get one suggestion about needing a taxi/motorbike/room
3. Wander past various warungs and don't get asked once to buy food or a drink.
4. Ian looks for an room further round the lake. I wander back up the hill in search of something cheap, and still receive no offers, even at the market.
5. The cheap area is on the road the botanic gardens. I look in a hotel, price is a bit high, I say "no thanks" and leave, and there's no pursual, no counter offer. Nothing.
6. I find a place and wander up to the botanic gardens. It's grey, and cool, and occasionally there's a minute or two of drizzle. Occasionally a little mist rolls across the path.
7. The botanic gardens, are lovely, spacious, spacious, spacious, and pretty much deserted - there were some people in the lakeview area and in the adventure rope climbing area, but elsewhere there were many places where you could walk for 5 minutes or more in solitude. I took a walk up the mountain path at the back - and kept on walking. 20 minutes later I decided to turn around. I'd seen three very cute pups (and no other mammals), and kept having visions of packs of feral dogs slinking through the trees. If you are travelling with others, I can wholeheartedly recommend the botanic gardens for a day or two.
8. Ask around for a tourist office. A couple of people suggest Denpasar might have one.
9. Wander through town. Lots of halal warungs and women in headscarves.
10. Go and have some dinner. Try and work out why the Lombok style chicken (~spatchcock size) has four wings, then realise that two of the wings are its legs. Then attempt to dismember the thing using a knife and spoon. (It was delicious, though).
11. There's no internet.
12. Leave, and notice that the town's signpost has a statue of a rampant cob of corn extending from what may be veined cabbage. Wonder if the it was created by a Hindu.
13. Call for prayers goes out as I walk home in the gloom. Shops start closing.
14. Sit in my room with my little phrasebook and try to work out some Indonesian morphology (how affixes attach to root words). Work out a couple of things about the meng- prefix but make no real progress on what exactly the -kan suffix and pen- prefix (assuming there's only one) actually do [if you know, please don't spoil it for me], nor for that matter why there appears to be both pe- and pen- prefixes that do the same thing.
15. At about 8:30 pm(!!) decide to go to sleep and then notice just how strongly the pillows smell of ?mothballs?. Move pillows to other side of bed, then other end of bed, then the bathroom. Spend an uncomfortable night on an inflatable pillow.

This morning the temperature was much warmer and things started returning to the expected.

I wandered out to the street just in time to see lots of kids on bikes riding/being pushed up to the gardens. The bikes were heavily decorated, being done up as planes, boats, choppers (heli and Harley), butterflies and a few being done in the more traditional style, bearing vegetables. It's an agricultural area on volcanic soil, growing lots of products including coffee, corn, strawberries, root vegetables, etc. The temperature is generally cooler particularly at night, and the vegetation is also different from lower down - no coconut palms but lots of ferns.

Then I went down the hill to the lake (the area's a caldera in a long-inactive volcano). People came up to me with offers of boat rides. Not much further, outside the lakeside temple Pura Ulun Danu Beratan, vendors offered me drinks. In the temple gardens was the largest figtree I've ever seen - many metres in diameter, with many buttress roots, and colonies of ferns and grass and vines growing on its branches - and some men who offered photograph opportunities with a python, bats with holes punched in its wings, or a macaw with its tail feathers clipped. Though the temple could not be entered, In addition to the restaurant and the boatride seller, there were also a couple of temple pavilions not far out on the lake - one with frog statues, the other unadorned.

On my way back to my room - I needed to pack in order to catch the bus - I wandered through the market where shopkeepers called out for me to buy things.

-T, in Lovina
(At the Rumah Makan where I ate, I greeted them with "selamat sore" as i entered. The host brought me an Indonesian menu, saw my Lonely Planet, grabbed the menu back and brought me an English one, so my accent must be getting better ;-)