Archive for October, 2007

Ubud is known as the cultural center of Bali.  When I visited here in 1996, it was a fairly quiet town with a few restaurants and shops.  Since then, it has grown dramatically.  However, it hasn’t lost its charm – dozens of art galleries and woodworking shops are scattered thrroughout the town and rice paddies are less than a mile away. 

We decided to stay in the city instead of at one of the many hotels built directly in the rice fields. 
monkeying1
This has allowed us to explore the city, but hasn’t allowed us to see much of the surrounding area.  So, yesterday we rented a motorcycle (ok, it was more like a moped, but no one wants to admit to riding one of those).

Within a few minutes, we were in incredibly green rice fields where the local farmers were harvesting the rice.  I haven’t been able to properly photograph the “greenness” of the fields, and I’m not sure any cameras are out there that can really capture it.  It is striking.  If there are any photographers reading this, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

While driving through a small village, we came upon a large group of men and women in the middle of a Balinese ceremony.  They were wearing traditional dress and playing music as they walked along the village street.  We never did find out what the ceremony was all about.  It was a little awkward photographing their ceremony, but they didn’t seem to mind. 

Next, we came upon the Sacred Forest Monkey Sanctuary. 
Sacred Monkey Forest Ubud
My first thought was – tourist trap.  You’d walk in the forest and maybe see 1 or 2 monkeys.  Wow – was I wrong!  Within a few seconds, we were virtually being attacked by scores of the dirty animals.  Many of the tourists buy bananas and other fruit to feed the monkeys, so they assume that all the visitors have something to give them. Thus, each of them runs up to you, gives you a once-over and decides if you’re worthy of their attention.  We had no food, but we did have a camera which one aggressive monkey took a shining to.  As he approached my leg to start climbing up to grab the camera, I gave a quick kick in his direction, barely missing his chin.  He quickly realized that this big American man wasn’t going to give in easy.  Then, I ran away…  So much for bravery.

While it goes without saying that we’re loving every minute of our luxurious hotel stays and our incredible meals, we haven’t forgotten that one of our goals for this year of travel is to spend a significant amount of time doing community service work.  Internet research has uncovered some very viable service options, but we’re still in search of some reputable places to lend a hand–far too many websites offer the opportunity to assist “Real, Live, Impoverished Asian People” if only we’re willing to pay $300 a day to do so…

We head to China in less than a week.  We plan to spend about six weeks there, traveling around the country, and we would really like to do some volunteer work. Here’s where we’re hoping that someone reading this knows someone (who knows someone who knows someone) who can point us in the direction of a good Chinese service project.  And, if you know of a good project someplace else along our planned travel route, we’re all ears.  This past month has been an amazing reminder of how lucky we are to be traveling like this, so now it’s time to switch gears a bit to start trying to be of some service. 

From Brunei, we headed (via two long ferry trips and one rescheduled Air Asia flight…this seems to be the norm with Air Asia) to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city.  I miss big cities when I’m away from them for too long, so I was happy to see that KL, as it’s called, is a busy metropolis whose night markets were still bustling at 11:30 p.m. on a Monday night. We spent Tuesday morning exploring the city and, thanks to my new arch nemesis, Air Asia, passed Tuesday afternoon in the KL airport. 

It was near midnight when we finally got to Bali, but we still found time for dinner and drinks in Kuta, a busy, beachside town popula
Sufer at Sunset
ted predominantly by Australian surfers and 20-something backpackers.  Kuta was the site of the 2002 terrorist bombings that took 300 lives and decimiated, for awhile, this island’s tourist industry.  We visited the memorial to the victims, which listed their names in long, stately columns.  It stood in sharp contrast to all of the debauchery taking place just next door, where partiers danced the night away in rebuilt versions of the clubs that had been bombed.

We spent the night in a very nice bungalow in Kuta.  And then we checked into paradise (which is, as it turns out, technically called Sesari Villas) in the nearby beach town of Seminyak. 
Seminyak
I think that all I need to say by way of a description is this: as i write this, I’m sitting on a lounge chair next to our private pool.  I can hear a Jack Johnson song over the gentle sounds of the waterfall that trickles into the pool.  In front of me is an outdoor room composed entirely of marble, carved, wooden furniture, Balinese art and, oh yeah, our private kitchen (where 2 chefs come to make us breakfast in the morning). 
Sesari
I’ll cut myself off here so that I don’t draw the ire of everyone reading this, but suffice to say that, if anyone’s in need of a romantic vacation (that is shockingly affordable, thanks to the strength of the US dollar against the Indonesian rupiah and the fact that this is Bali’s low season), this is the place for you!

Our days have been spent on the gorgeous beach a few minutes away from our villa watching the surfers ride (or, in many cases, attempt to ride) the big waves here.  After watching the incredible sunsets, we’ve been sampling the fare at the many restaurants in the area.  Not a bad way to spend a few days…

Going to Brunei was a last minute decision. We had a flight leaving from Kota Kinabalu (in the Sabah part of Borneo) and, to get there, we either had to fly or go through Brunei. I’m glad we chose the latter.

Brunei is a tiny country sandwiched between the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah in Borneo. It almost joined with Sarawak and Sabah in becoming a part of Malaysia a few decades ago, but withdrew at the last minute when it discovered that it was sitting on vast oil reserves and didn’t want to share.

Those oil reserves have enabled Brunei to become a very wealthy country and has personally enriched the Sultan of Brunei to the tune of about US$40 billion, making him one of the richest men in the world.

The riches have enabled the country to provide free education and free health care to all of its approximately 300,000 citizens. It has also produced some impressive buildings, including a huge mosque in the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan and one of the largest residences in the world – the Sultan’s palace (which has over 1,700 rooms and over 200 bathrooms!).

We were able to enter the mosque briefly before prayer time to see the huge interior and impressive carpets and stained glass. When we went outside to look (ironically) at the fake boat that the sultan has placed in the fake lagoon next to the mosque (too much money makes you do some funny things), two Muslim men approached us. Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect because we sort of got in trouble in the mosque when we overstayed the 5 minute time limit imposed on non-Muslim visitors to the mosque, but they ended up talking to us about the mosque and giving us some sweets they were preparing for a Ramadan feast that evening.

Before sunset, we hired a boat to take us on the nearby river to see the Sultan’s palace (evidently, he opens it up to the public once a year – but we were about a week too early for that) and to ride around the Kampung villages.

The Kampung villages are built over the water on stilts and have been in Brunei for several hundred years. The government has offered to build the inhabitants new houses for basically free, but they refused the offer because they don’t want to leave their village (and the closeness of their friends and family) regardless of how impractical it can be at times. Instead of building new houses on land, the government decided to build new schools and even a fire department alongside the stilted homes.

There is one Brunei scandal worth mentioning. The brother of the Sultan went on a huge spending spree for several years, building extravagant mosques, government buildings and hotels, purchasing several hundred luxury cars for himself and building one of the largest yachts in the world. The spending became so excessive that the brother was eventually banned from the country and now lives in London. As additional punishment, the Sultan reduced the allowance of the brother to a mere US$300,000 a year month. Poor guy. Hopefully, he’ll be ok!

While Leech Boy and I were on the side of a mountain in the Bario jungle, we promised ourselves that, as soon as we got back to Miri (the transportation hub of the area), we would (1) check into a nice hotel; and (2) seek out a Pizza Hut (which, along with KFC, is strangely ubiquitous in Malaysia). 

Check and check. An hour or two after our arrival in Miri, we had checked into the Marriott and had devoured a large, pepperoni pizza with extra cheese.  We had also recruited a local guide to take us to the nearby Niah caves the next day.  He was a very congenial man named Stephen who, in an incredibly small-world (particularly given that we know almost no one in Borneo) turn of events, happened to be the nephew of Jaman (from Gem’s Lodge in Bario).   

Stephen picked us up in the morning and drove us along the coast of the South China Sea to Niah National Park, where we paused at a small museum to
Pizza Hut in Miri
learn more about the park’s caves and to see a 40,000 year-old (!?!) human skull that had been discovered in one of them.  Then we set off along what was, for the first 45 minutes, a very nice, wooden boardwalk.  1/3 of a mile or so before the first cave, the boardwalk was transformed into a Walk of near death/serious injury.  As Stephen explained to us, the boardwalk was under construction and, beacuse the detour set out by the park was too long and too muddy to warrant serious consideration, we would instead be walking along the 18-inch wide cement framework of the boardwalk-to-be.  Err.  I think it would’ve been less scary if, at times, it didn’t cross over rivers and rise 20 feet above the rocky ground below.  But it did. 

Happily, we arrived
Shanna on hike to Niah
without incident at Trader’s Cave, so named because of the birds’ nest (they’re a Chinese delicacy) and guano (i.e., bat dung – which is used as fertilizer) traders who collect their wares in the other caves and then conduct their business there.  Next came the astounding Great Cave–one of the largest cave openings in the world.  We were overwhelmed by the cave’s vastness and, even more so, by the uninterrupted column of light that streamed down through an opening above us. 

We climbed along immense rocks and then followed a rickety, wooden walkway (complete with cave centipedes and gigantic crickets) into the pitch black of the inside of the cave.  Happy that we had remembered to pack our flashlights, we followed countless flights of stairs to the Painted Cave, where we saw faded drawings and remnants of the “death ships” on which the cave’s ancient dwellers had once set their dead afloat.  
In Great Cave in Niah National Park
Throughout the caves, we came across flimsy-looking, wooden poles that spanned the hundreds of feet from the caves’ floors to their roofs.  Cave CricketBirds’ nest collectors scale these poles, which are no more than 6 inches in diameter, every few months to gather the valuable swallows’ nests above.  A collector who falls from his perch encounters no safety nets or harnesses, just the hard rock below.  As I have so many times on this trip already, I felt an overwhelming appreciation for the plushness of my day job.Â