September 09, 2009

Honeymoon in Bali Part Three

Back to: Part One, Part Two

Wednesday, September 9th

We woke up Wednesday morning excited to see the Saranam Eco Resort in the daylight. Here's the view of grounds from the front porch of our bungalow.

The grounds of the resort had all of these beautifully sculpted ponds and hills. The result of locals applying their rice-paddy hill-terracing technology to the purely aesthetic realm.

Taking the cable car elevator up the hill for some breakfast.

Here's a view of the bungalows down at the foot of the hill from the cable car.

The resort's restaurant is up on top of the hill and overlooks...

...a spectacular view of the terraced hillside below.

After breakfast, we went on a 3-hour guided tour of all the local farms. Me with our tour guides.

This is a flooded paddy field where rice is grown.

It was really interesting to see how the terraced paddy fields are carved right into the midst of dense forest.

We went through a bunch of local villages and watched how rice is planted by pushing a handful of rice "shoots" down into the flooded soil.

Local livestock pen.

meredith — Mer improvising some shade with one of our tour guides.

Climbing up a long hill...

...led to another great view from the top.

Dragonfly.

I almost walked face-first into this guy in the forest.

Later that afternoon, we hung out at the resort's pool.

Showing off the Edie shirt that I "borrowed" from Leigh.

An interesting read on HBS.

Meredith never fails to get great amusement from...

...my awesome tan-lines. Hahaha.

me, meredith — After some swimming and napping at the pool, we went up to the restaurant at the top of the hill...

...and I ate an entire plate of brown food from the buffet. Brownlicious!

Back down to the room!

When the sun sets and the land starts to cool, the entire area is blanketed in fog.

meredith — Nutella banana dessert pizza with a scoop of ice cream? Suuuuure.

Thursday, September 10th

After two nights the quiet, peacefull hills of Pacung (pronounced "pah-choong"), we decided it was time to hit the road and head somewhere new!

Awesome nasi goreng breakfast. Mmmmmmm!

meredith — A MINI-mini-van!

Here's a picture of the car we rented for our trip!

We choose Ubud, Bali's inland capital city as our next (and last) destination! The drive took about an hour and twenty minutes.

Waiting on a school to let out.

We parked the car in Ubud and started wandering around looking for a place to stay. While we were on the steps of a museum, this happy little stray puppy came over to say hi to us.

Seriously?

Iced coffee!

meredith — Meredith got something minty and boozy.

Papaya salad.

Pad thai.

Since it was our last few days in Bali, we decided to splurge and stay at a fancy place in Ubud. Our first choice hotel was booked solid for night, so we made a reservation for the following day and set out to find a place for the night. We ended up finding a rad place around the corner that had these cool two-story houses with wrap-around porches.

The porches were all set up for relaxing and they overlooked...

...the resort's rice paddies. (Bali has done a really nice job of integrating a lot of their tourism with their local agriculture).

The rice paddies were filled with huge flocks of ducks. The ducks protect the rice by eating pests, fertilize the paddies with their duck poop, and then after they've grown up eating bugs, they're cooked and served along with the rice.

Check out the carved-wooden doors that open up to the bedroom on the second floor.

me, meredith — After a day of settling in...

...we headed out to an Italian restaurant that was nearby and had an awesome pasta & pizza dinner.

After dinner, we retreated to the bed...

...to put some lotion on Meredith's poor sunburned back!

Here's a closeup! Her entire back was COVERED with hundreds of tiny blisters that had all dried up and her skin was started to slough off in big sheets. Ewwwwww!

Friday, September 11th

meredith — Friday morning we had a nice relaxing breakfast on our porch.

View from the porch.

Watching the ducks.

Snacking and reading.

meredith — Chiki Balls!

We cooled off with a quick dip in the pool, and then packed up our things and headed off to the REALLY fancy hotel we booked for our final two nights in Bali.

meredith — I totally forget the name of the 2nd place we stayed at in Ubud, but it was pretty insane. Here's Meredith like "Whoa" as we walked through the stone-walled maze that led to our bungalow.

meredith — Our bungalow had these crazy sprawling gardens and was walled off from the rest of the resort like some crazy feudal castle. Here are the "gates" to our room. Meredith laughing at the hanging gong people at the hotel would hit to announce their presence. WHAT?

meredith — Excited.

The bedroom was in a big pagoda in the middle of the walled garden. If you walked through the door in the back...

...it led out to an outside bathtub. Past the bath tub, you could walk OVER a koi pond to an outdoor shower.

meredith — Another neato carved-stone shower head.

Crazy, right?

meredith — The grounds in front of the bedroom were even more insane!

Gargoyle fountains flowed into the pool.

meredith — And there was an shaded pagoda in the middle of the pool.

I got a massage at the hotel and they gave me these weird disposable manties to wear. I decided to keep them on and surprise Meredith. Hahaha. (BTW, Right after we got back from our honeymoon, Meredith accidentally made THIS photo the featured photo; when I posted it, THIS was the photo that appeared in every single person's Facebook stream (including like 200 of my co-workers at Yodle. Errrr, sorry about that everyone!)

meredith — Later that afternoon, we set out to do some more sightseeing in Ubud. On the way out of the hotel, there's a bridge that goes over big, lilly-filled koi pond. They have a big brass bowl of fish food out so you can feed the koi.

It was fun to throw in few small handfuls of food...

...and watch the huge koi come to the surface to eat.

meredith — Ubud is the cultural and art center of Bali and has a bunch of great museums.

This painting looked a lot like Pacung.

Mustache and a dress. No big deal.

Lots of really interesting paintings like this.

And this.

Loved this.

And this.

This?

Not so much.

I liked the "sans ladder" version much more.

After the museum, we did a whole bunch of walking around...

meredith — ...and then had an awesome lunch at an Indian restaurant nearby.

The field next to the restaurant.

Check out the creepy, realistic scarecrow!

Later that afternoon, we decided to head off on foot to try to find one of the nearby archaeological dig sites described in our guide book.

Sign we saw en route. Sukses kaca!

Check out these two (Balinese equivalents of garden gnomes?) awesome statues we saw at a huge roadside statue store while looking for the road that led to a ruin site called Yeh Pulu.

About an hour and half (!!!) after setting out, we finally managed to find the road near the Yeh Pulu ruin. When we got to the end of the road, we met a super-friendly local farmer/tour guide who offered to take us on a tour of his farmland and show us Yeh Pulu. It was awesome to walk on the narrow grass pathways that separate all the rice paddies.

So pretty.

me, meredith — When our tour guide found out that we were on our honeymoon, he insisted on stopping every couple of minutes to take pictures of Meredith and I together. Doing things like...posing in front of the rice paddy! And...

me, meredith — ...pretending to take a nap in the little farmer's "nap hut" he showed us. Haha. And...

me, meredith — ...uh...presenting a hill!

Another field! (Check out the terraced hill in the background behind the trees).

After a twenty minute through a few acres of beautiful farmland, we arrived at the Yeh Pulu stone bas relief.

They think the carvings were done around 1400(AD). The site was rediscovered by archaeologists in 1925.

Carved right into the hill.

A woman holding the tail of a horse.

Two men carrying bear with pole (which is strange because there were never any bear in Bali).

me, meredith — Us in front of the wall!

According to the website above, this carving is "a man is carrying something with a pole on his shoulder. Looks like an urn of palm wine."

"A dwarf-like person with ascetic's turban which is the prototype of present day Bali priest's crown."

me, meredith — After we'd finished the tour, we stopped by our guide's house. He told us to wait outside because he had a surprise for us.

me, meredith — He wanted to dress us up in traditional Balinese wedding clothes and take our picture!

me, meredith — Hahah.

me, meredith — Here's us with our awesome tour guide!

me, meredith — One more for the road.

meredith — Later that night, we went to a really awesome vegetarian restaurant.

I finished the last of the books that Meredith bought me for my birthday. This book is a fun read. It's written by the guy who created the "psychopathy checklist." Here's Amazon's summary: "Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please...

In Without Conscience Robert Hare argues convincingly that "psychopath" and "antisocial personality disorder" (a psychiatric term defined by a cluster of criminal behaviors) are not the same thing. Not all psychopaths are criminals, he says, and not all criminals are psychopaths. He proposes a psychopathy checklist that includes emotional/interpersonal traits such as glibness, grandiosity, lack of guilt, and shallow emotions, as well as social deviance traits such as impulsiveness, lack of responsibility, and antisocial behavior. His writing is lucid and illustrated with numerous anecdotes.

The final chapter, "A Survival Guide," is especially recommended: as Hare writes, "Psychopaths are found in every segment of society, and there is a good chance that eventually you will have a painful or humiliating encounter with one."

Oh, you know, just a little light honeymoon reading....haha.

meredith — Had a quiet night reading...

..and back peeling! Eeeeewwwwww. Hahah.

Saturday, September 12th

meredith — On Saturday morning we woke up to the sound of someone hitting the tiny gong at our weird mini-palace gates! I went out to investigate and it was the hotel staff setting up the 8am breakfast we'd ordered the night before out on the little island thingy in our pool!

meredith — Awesome.

Probably the fanciest I'd ever felt during breakfast.

The sun burning up the dewy fields. The reason we'd gotten up so early is because we'd decided to go...

meredith — ...on a rafting trip! Haha. Here's Meredith all decked out.

meredith — Paddle!

A little before 10am and we were hiking through the fields on our way...

...the raft launch site!

It was super fun! We had 10 people split between two rafts.

Along the way we came across modern-day bas reliefs carved right next to the river.

We stopped to watch some local artists that were working on the wall with their hand chisels.

Back to rafting!

Towards the end there was even a nice waterfall.

The drop was pretty high.

meredith — Haha.

People took turns standing under the falls and getting PUMMELED by the water.

One of our Dutch raft-mates.

Check out the bridge made out of bamboo and vines spanning the river!

The view from the top of the huge hill we had to climb on our way back from the river.

meredith — We got back to the hotel around 3pm and relaxed.

meredith — Statues near our room. Mer posed with the female boar...

...and I posed with this handsome feller.

me, meredith — Later in the afternoon, we wandered around the town on foot. Mer did a bunch of souvenir shopping...

...and I went and got an awesome massage.

For our last night in Bali, we went to the Ubud Palace to see the Royal Gamelan Orchestra! "A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings."

The music is unlike anything I've ever heard. It's fast and frantic and filled with all sorts of ringing bells. There were a troupe of dancers that came out and did elaborate dances to each of the songs.

After the show, we went across the street to a vegetarian restaurant!

me, meredith — Last night as honeymooners!

Sunday, September 13th

meredith — Good morning, breakfast buffet!

I've come to stuff my face.

These two were fighting at breakfast and we pretended it was over his decision to finally wear his beret in public.

meredith — Then it was time to head back to our place and get packed up!

See you later, mini palace!

meredith — All packed up and ready to go!

We had to drive from Ubud back to the first hotel we'd stayed at in Seminyak in order to drop off our rental car.

Mission accomplished!

The hotel called us a taxi to the airport.

The other side of the statue we saw when we first left the airport.

me, meredith — Neck pillows? Check! Ready for the thirty-hour trip back.

Denpasar.

Bye, Bali!

I love flying because you have an excuse to read for hours. This book rocked. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

meredith — Six hours later, we landed in Hong Kong for a layover. Meredith started to feel like she was getting the flu! Noooo! We got...

...big bowls of hot noodle soup!

And some orange DRANK that we thought was orange juice.

Dear Minute Maid, Why does your orange juice drink contain FISH PRODUCT?

meredith — After we finished eating, we only had a little bit of time before our next flight. So we wandered around the mall of stuff-no-one-needs like this crazy head massager.

Haha.

Next up: 10h 46m to Vancouver!

Finished one book, onto the next! (I like to alternate between fiction & non-fiction!)

Refueling layover in Vancouver.

De-plane, boss. De-plane.

meredith — Getting comfy.

Monday, September 14th

Red eye! Wheels coming down over the Rockaways with the sun rising in the east.

Waiting for a cab at JFK.

Home!

me, meredith — Married folks!

The streets in NYC felt like they were a hundred yards wide after the narrow streets in Bali.

Meredith checking up on the pet rats back at the apartment. (Thanks to Lisa & Pauly who came by while we were gone to take care of our vermin!)

They even left us welcome home flowers. Awwww! Thanks, you guys!

4 comments

tcf16october 31, 2011
Been reading IKAD for 7 or 8 years, and the photos from Bali were probably the best looking pictures you ever took. The scenery, the vibes, everything. Really fantastic. It looks like it was a beautiful, amazing time. Congratulations!
ribbit5678november 15, 2011
I agree with TCF16. I never thought I would be interested in flying for 30 hours to go anywhere, but seeing your pics has me thinking differently! Thanks and congrats.
sofia hnovember 22, 2011
man i love you guys
kmeghandecember 10, 2011
Looks like an amazing trip! you guys are so adventurous!