We had a tiff with the "Bali Mafia," went to a cooking school and spent a day cycling through the country villages and hearing about Bali life from an exceptionally enthusiastic tour guide.
Negotiation is a way of life in Bali - at all the street stores and markets. In the department stores and upscale stores, restaurants etc, prices are fixed. In the world of tours the street guys ask high prices and then bargain down. To avoid that street negotiation we were purchasing tour tickets from the desk at the hotel, under the expectation that all hotel desks are equal. Not true, and leave it to Keenan and Loreen to sleuth out that we had been taken by the hotel or the desk clerk and/or the tour company and paid double for a tour that other folks paid. So after threats to go to the tourist police, (we had heard someplace that this threat might work!) and to talk to the manager of the hotel, and then canceling all the other tours and transportation booked at the hotel desk the difference in money magically appeared in an envelope in crisp new bills. Then we find out from some other hotel employees that they were really wanting us to talk to the manager about the one desk clerk, as he was part of the "Ubud Mafia", it may be because they had their own little price games going but things did get a lot cheaper for us afterwards.
Balinese food is great, and although you can get most every type of cuisine from around the world, we prefer eating the local food or international food with a local flavor. Bali food is mostly Indonesian with some Dutch, Chinese, and Indian influence. The foods are very flavorful and tantalizing to the taste buds. We started the day by going to the local market and getting an education in Indonesian spice and vegetables.
It is a very crowded market that sells everything including frogs, eels and snails that are pit lamped in the rice paddies at night. Then off to the cooking class where we stuck to fish, chicken and veggie dishes.
First up we made a basic spice paste, which combines just a whole bunch of things, shallots, garlic, 4 kinds of ginger root, chilli peppers, nuts, oil and on and on. It is spicy and you can govern the amount of spicy heat in your dishes by the amount of this you use. Rule of thumb is 25% of the size of the main ingredient for medium hot. Then we made Sayur Urab, a veggie/grated coconut dish, Tuna Sambal Matah, tuna with hot sauce - can be made with any fish, Tempe Manis, deep fried fermented soy bean, mostly tasteless and not my favorite, Opar Ayam, Indonesian Chicken Curry, this was similar to an Indian Curry and very good and then Bali Sate Lilit or Bali kebobs, made from seasoned ground pork and then twirled onto a stalk of lemon grass and barbequed. Loreen wouldn't do this one, would get your hands dirty don't you know, so the Chef and I had to make hers. Spoil sport! We finished off the day with a black rice pudding and a sweet Bali rice wine in gingerale, tasted kind of like cream soda. It was a good way to spend the day and we all went home stuffed with Bali delights.
We took a 25 K bicycle tour down in the vicinity of Mount Batur, which is an old volcanic mountain. I think it last erupted in 2005. The area is quite different agriculturally than the rest of the villages we had been through. Growing lots of market garden type crops, such as corn, cabbage, citrus and there were numerous produce stands that reminded us of the Okanagan in the summer time. We also saw some huge vegetable and fruit markets where they sell wholesale to the suppliers in the city and to other islands in Indonesia. After breakfast in a restaurant overlooking a lake and the volcano, we set off on our bike adventure.
Bali is a very religious culture and the people spend a great deal of the time engrossed in religious ceremony, and this is reflected in every village and family compound. We went through 17 villages on the tour and each village has a temple when entering and leaving the village, plus the main temple in the center. We went past a lot of temples.
Bali life revolves around the family, the village and the temple ceremonies. They have a ceremony for the new moon and the full moon every month, a ceremony for the motorbike, one for the automobiles and on and on. When asked, the guide could not put a number on the amount per year. Businesses have extra staff as they know that on most days some staff will miss work because they're at a religious ceremony. The culture is so deep that most Balinese would not move from their village let alone travel outside of Bali.
We were able to go through a couple of different family compounds and much like old European farms the animals are kept at the back of the buildings, pigs, chickens and ducks. Well the chickens and ducks pretty much roam at will. As the sons marry there are new kitchens built as it seems you can not have more than one woman in the kitchen, too much strife. Each family has their own trade, some work bamboo, make roof tiles, do wood carving etc. It seems all the families have a little warung or store, not sure who they sell to if each family has a store, but!
Everything here is done by hand and would drive a compensation board inspector into having nightmares. They load the trucks by shovel, dig ditches with pick and shovel, compact with their feet and a big square stone. Now get this - when they go into the ditch to dig or spread rock they take off their flip flops and go bare foot. I guess their feet are tougher than the flip flops. Yesterday I watched four women packing dirt to a construction site, they load up a metal basin, at least 20 inches in diameter and 8 inches deep, with dirt, balance it on their head and walk about 300 feet to the construction site. Dump and then repeat. I figure they could do a lease in about four years, but could only work summers as the flip flops might not be so good at minus 30. Black flies would not bother them too much and at an average wage of $100/month plus rice it might be a reasonable cost.
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