Travels with Andi – A Two Day Roadtrip on August 27 to August 28, 2017
The “tours” I booked essentially meant I paid for a driver for a few hours and he’d take me around to places. I’d pay admissions, parking, tolls, meals, etc on my own. My driver’s name was Andi. His English wasn’t great and my Indonesian was as I’ve said before less than zero. It made asking questions difficult so while I got to see some things it was usually without much context or comprehension on my part other than, “hey, this is something to see whilst in Bali.” I could try and google information and details as and when I had a connection but, well, imagine a kid of today being told to use CompuServe or AOL dialup to access the internet. It would be… frustrating. Times have changed.
Anyway, the half day tour consisted on this program.
Andi kept to this programme more or less, more so on the half day and less so on the full day one (more on that in a moment).
The first stop was Taman Ayun Temple. It would be one of several temples I would visit during these tours and unfortunatel due to a language barrier I never quite got the context of WHAT I was seeing and I certainly lacked an understanding over the MEANING. But it was a pretty, tranquil place to be sure.
Alas Kedaton is the Monkey Forest. Home to 1,000 monkeys (give or take) and, um, more bats than I want to think about, this local guided tour consisted of a shopkeeper showing me around and shooing aggressive monkeys away with her bamboo walking stick. But if you paid 2000 rupiah for some peanuts, you could feed the monkeys and you could get some great selfies.
The forest is as I said also home to bats. I was too scared to hold the bat for a photo (only 60,000 rupiah, my guide would tell me). Honest, it wasn’t the money (US equivalent of $4.50). It was that I was really, really freaked out by the bats. I think the selfies I took NEAR the bats convey the emotion nicely:
Leaving the monkeys (and bats) behind, Andi took me to Tanah Lot, a popular tourist spot to see seaside temples and watch the sunset. There were a batch of clouds at the horizon so while we got a great light show we didn’t get the sun dissolving into the ocean at the vanishing point. No matter, it was a beautiful place… even with all the people scurrying about trying to get their social media shots.
Post sunset, Andi suggested I take in the Kecak Fire Dance show. This is where I caught a cold. But I’m still kinda glad I saw it. Fortunately just before the show started, Andi slid me a mimeographed synopsis. Even reading it a few times, I’m still kinda baffled. It made more sense than my Tokyo Kubuki viewing… but I did find myself mentally writing my own story as things played out on stage, a RunKevinRun version of “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”
A late night dinner at Bamboo and a long car ride home had this guy pretty tuckered. I had gotten up at 1:45 am this morning. I’d run a marathon, found my way back to the hotel, and had now done a half day tour. As I unlocked my vampire hotel room door and fell into bed it was 10:15 pm… so Andi understood why I’d been a bit tired on the car ride back!
***
On Monday morning, I had packed (mostly) before heading out in the tour. The package of sights I wanted to see was apparently impossibly long distances according to Andi so he kinda made things up in the fly. That included the car breaking down as we pulled away from the Clamonic House Hotel’s curb. He eventually got it running again, at least long enough to get us the 5 miles to the depot where he could swap cars. So here’s a sight not a lot of Bali tourists get to see:
The itinerary Andi and I settled on then was this:
- A different Bali Dance show
- A visit to see how silvermaking works
- Some more temples
- Kitimani Volcano
- Another temple
- Ceking Rice terraces
- Back to the hotel so I could do a few things before my flight tonight/tomorrow morning at 1:06 am.
As I’m writing this waiting to head to DPS airport (Editor’s Note: This would be August 28, 2017, at 7:30 PM), I’m going to make this a truncated overview with some occasional detail detours. Hell, most of this is just for me anyway. If you’re reading this regularly you know I don’t know what this blog thing is or who it’s for so we all will just merrily run along, yeah?
Ultimately this day’s tour was a bit of a letdown. Part of that is the disparity between sights being seen today versus yesterday. And part of it is this slow, steady decline into a common cold ickiness. But we have to call an underworld demon an underworld demon.
This is the synopsis of today’s show, a Jambe Budaya.
Yeah, that’s some batshit crazy but I liked it. It wasn’t as good as last night’s show but I was intrigued at the I guess standard costuming for some of the players. The guy who looks like a refugee from Beetlejuice is the demon of choice in the Bali tales… or such is my expert opinion having seen TWO Bali-wood productions (that’s a special shout out joke to a classic girlfriend).
I didn’t get any decent pics of the show – too much backlighting for the crappy iPhone camera lenses and I had left my Canon in the car. But here’s a shot of me with a dancer pre-show and a selfie with them post.
Better or worse than my demon and monkey shots from the previous evening? I’d put an online poll up but can you have a margin of error on a sample size of… gosh, WordPress says I have 7 viewers!
Here’s where things start off the rails… and I mean more than a car breaking down thirteen feet into a day long tour.
I didn’t even take a photo of the silvermart. This truly was the quintessential tourist con of claiming to show you something when in reality it’s just a means to get you into the showroom to buy something. I think we were there for all of three minutes before I had Andi back in the car driving me to the next stop.
And it’s at the next stop where I do something I’m not proud of. We stopped at another temple, this one called Batur Temple. Here I drew a line at the nickel and dime fees piling up. The temple was 35,000 rupiah and then after that I had to rent a sarong to enter the grounds… or I could buy it. To rent was 50,000 rupiah and to own was 200,000. And when the woman kept telling me how many colors she had and what a deal it was to buy I kinda threw up my hands. Not figuratively but literally. It was all too much. And yet, really, I was being a jerk about having to pay $3.75 to rent a sarong. As I paid the money and Andi helped tie it around my waist, I felt ashamed of my first world problems. I was soured, but only partially, on the Bali tourist experience. I was more soured on me.
I did try and rally and got a shot of me and Andi.
And the temple was pretty, and though touristy, had some tranquility. But again this makes me a bit of a jerk. You’ve seen one temple you’ve kinda seen them all. I think this about cathedrals too. And how awful am I for discounting seeing another island full of penguins when I was in Antarctica for several days? There are any number of other “types” of sights or sounds that fall into this repetition breeding nonchalance. Sometimes it all just blurs into, “ugh, really? I get this one is different in some ways but really it is still just, ya know, the thing I saw earlier.”
I’m a jerk. On so, so many levels.
Batur Temple is presumably named for nearby Mt Batur. It’s part of the Kitimani Volcano viewing that followed.
The restaurant Andi dropped me at had stunning vista views and thus doubled as my sightseeing stop for this currently dormant volcano.
I also ate way too much at lunch. Buffets are dangerous things. Plus, while bananas aren’t my favorite, you deep fat fry them and well… bring ’em on!
One last vistas before we part…
Andi felt badly about my Batur Temple visit so took me to one last one with free sarongs. I still paid an entrance fee… and a parking fee… and a donation to make the world a better place. But the sarong WAS free.
My final stop of the day was the Ceking Rice Terraces.
It’s an impressive thing to wander about… and I DID pay 5000 rupiah for a shot of me on a swing overlooking them. I even got the nice girl who took my “donation” and snapped my photo to pose for a selfie. I did not however deign to buy her packet of postcards despite her pitch that it would help pay for books at her school. If it really was that, I feel bad I didn’t just give her some rupiah. But it felt more like Orlando Jones’s door-to-door magazine subscription pitch from “Office Space.” Good photos though. And for USD 37 cents, well, that’s not too bad.
Still, this photo opp also underscores the “show for foreigners” nature of the Terraces. These were all neat things to see but amidst all the tourists and the souvenir hawkers, it all felt like a feint.
Like a theatrical setpiece or dramatization of a rice field. Hell, there was even a Rice Titanic you could get your photo with and be “King of the Rice Terraces.”
On top of that, there was a donation “toll” of 10,000 rupiah every level of the terraces, supposedly to support the infrastructure and tourist site for years to come. But it may have just been industrious con artists fleecing the suckers. I paid each time but there were more and louder grumbles at each station… and not just from me.
All in, we were back to the hotel by 6 PM so I could pack up and head to the airport for my 1 AM flight home. Given that one of my big regrets from Bali was that on the return trip we didn’t go back past this one particular storefront so I could take picture, I’d say I did pretty well seeing things.
It had a giant Rowan Atkinson display. I wonder if he gets paid a fee for that? If not, he should absolutely look into opening his own chain. I’m not sure how big the bean bag chair market is, but I feel like he could really dominate in brand awareness.