Biking down a volcano (Mar. 10/09 - Ubud, Bali, Indonesia)

Our day started with breakfast at a restaurant perched on the rim of the crater overlooking the volcano known as Gunung Batur. Three cones and a large crescent-shaped lake sit within the massive crater, and the view was stunning. Homes, roads, and villages could be seen below, juxtaposed against the dominant black lava flows that once spilled from the lowest cone. The most recent eruption was in 1994, but the lava flows happened back in the 1920's. People still reside on green blobs of unharmed land right beside the desolate lava fields. A constant stream of dump trucks could be seen inching their way uphill, mining the hardened volcanic rock for use in concrete to build houses and temples. Steam was still rising from the lowest cone, making you wonder when the next sign of activity might come.

After breakfast, we were driven downhill a few minutes to a spice plantation, where they gave us a quick tour of the various crops, much like we did on Zanzibar. Their biggest crop was coffee, which is apparently reknown for its rich flavour. As a bizarre twist though, they actually had cages full of possums (large brown weasle-like rodents) that they feed coffee beans to. Apparently they pass through undigested, and some freak found out that if you brew coffee out of the pooped-out beans, the flavour is "amazing"! I'm not making this up! A small box of the beans sold for about $50. No thank you! We did get to sample some regular Bali coffee, rich hot chocolate made from locally grown cacao beans, and a variety of exotic fruit like tamarillo, snakeskin fruit, and rambutan.

By then, we were ready to grab bikes and head down the mountain, so we loaded up and pointed downhill. It was an incredibly scenic ride taking the traffic-less back roads that meandered past rice paddies, tiny villages, farms, and forests. Kids would run out to the road shouting "HELLO!!!" and holding out their hands for high fives. Ladies walked along the road wearing their beautiful traditional everyday clothes - a long sarong, sheet button-up shirt, and bright sash around the waist. It was neat to see the kids returning from school wearing their traditional clothes - girls in sarongs like the women, and boys in sarongs too with scarves tied around their heads. Power Ranger and Pokemon backpacks seemed to be a favourite accessory! Along the way, we stopped at a family compound to get a look at how Balinese people live. Each extended family lives within their family compound, and the small buildings within it are specifically arranged and oriented to conform to certain Hindu beliefs. The family temple is always at the northeast corner, a ceremonial open-air place where births, marriages, birthdays, and cremations take place sits at the center of the compound, and various bedroom, kitchen, washroom, and barn buildings take up the rest of the site. They do have some pretty strange customs though (to us!), like burying the placenta of a newborn baby under a rock in front of the parents' house, and leaving a dead body out in the open on a bed to "rest" for three months after death. We also learned about the various types of temples and the symbolism in their construction, marital customs, and typical family structure. He also explained some of the customs we've noticed, like the pretty little offerings that ladies place in front of homes, shops, and car dashboards every morning. This is one of Bali's elegant little cultural highlights, as each day ladies make palm leaf bowls and fill them with pretty flowers, fruit, and burning incense, which scents the sidewalks when you walk down the street each morning. On our way down the volcano's slopes, we stopped at a rice field where a family was busy harvesting. We were shown how it is cut, banged against a board to release the grains, sifted, and eventually dried and re-sifted to remove the outer bran. Our guide thought I was crazy when I asked him why they go to all the effort to remove the bran since that's where most of the nutritional value is (i.e. brown rice). He basically told me I was wrong - if only they knew how much good stuff they're tossing away!

After a quick stop to watch some guys carving amazingly detailed teak doors, our final stop was lunch. The big open-air restaurant had a huge buffet full of tons of Indonesian and Balinese specialties, including smoked duck and chicken, gado gado, peanut tofu, sweet chili tempeh, and of course fried noodles and fresh fruit. It was delicious and made for a fabulous conclusion to our day's tour. Unfortunately, something at lunch didn't agree with me at all, as at 8pm I started feeling not so great, and I was up sick all night with food poisoning. Not fun. Oddly and luckily enough, Ken was perfectly fine!