Drinking s**t coffee in Bali!
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Mon 23 Feb 2015 07:29
In the meantime, what have we been doing in Bali? Answer is not a whole lot. We realised when we got here that we had no idea at all what to expect with regards to the island itself, the town we were staying in, or hotel we had booked, (we had only had a brief glimpse in travel agents when booking and a quick look on the Internet afterwards), the people, culture, weather or anything. We have never travelled to a new and different country so unprepared.
We arrived early on Friday afternoon to a dark and dismissal Denpasar airport. Bali, as we now know is a province in Indonesia, and Denpasar is the capital of Bali. The country of Indonesia is divided into several provinces, each with its own government for day to day issues. Jakarta, in Java, another province, is where the main government has their office and they deal with the bigger issues for the whole country. The currency here is rupiah and the exchange rate is currently 20,000 to £1, so you end up with purses full of money. They don't have coins here in the tourist areas as they are worth nothing, but they are probably used in the outlying towns and villages where things are priced for locals. The average salary here for a primary school teacher is about £200 per month, and a hotel worker would take home about £100 per month. Bearing in mind that schooling for a child after primary school costs about £12 per month, small salaries have to go a long way!
Food here is relatively cheap, even in the expensive hotels, and we have had excellent meals, in fabulous restaurants, for far less than we would pay in England or Australia. Where you do pay is on the wine as it is all imported, although for some reason, the Australian stuff which has the least distance to travel is relatively the most expensive. Local beer is relatively cheap at about £1.50-2.00 per bottle depending on where you are. Anything that involves time seems to be cheap, you can get an hours massage for £5, and in the villages you can get your laundry for 4p per item, imagine how ripped off I felt when the hotel charged me 60p to have a dress cleaned and then added 15p as a service charge!
So, rather than just spend all our time on the beach, and bearing in mind the weather when we arrived, we booked a tour for our middle day, Sunday, as we thought we might need an alternative to the beach. This gave us Saturday free. After a huge downpour on Friday afternoon, the weather improved to a nice evening, not good enough however to see the sunsets that the area is famous for. Saturday was much the same, a fabulous morning, so we lounged by the pool, but mid afternoon, a huge wind blew up from nowhere! It howled at gale force through the hotel sending pool umbrellas flying and everybody running for cover. It eventually blew itself out and after another downpour things settled down again. We were told that the weather generally improves and settles down after Chinese New Year, which was last Thursday, although how the winds know when it is Chinese New Year is a mystery as it is like Easter - a moveable feast!
Our tour on Sunday was to the Ubud area. This is a pretty standard day tour offered by just about every tour guide and taxi driver and seemed a good way to get out of town and seeing the real Bali.
The first stop was a dancing show. This was a performance of traditional Balinese dancing. We were given a handout at the beginning explaining the story, but were really none the wiser for having read it! It was basically a story about a good spirit fighting an evil monster and, despite everything, good overcomes evil in the end. If this was their only source of entertainment, they must have been very relieved to get Sky TV!
The good spirit (tiger)
After that we were off to visit the various art and craft workers, such as silversmiths, artists and wood carvers that the area is famous for. The owners of the shops were obviously keen for us to buy something everywhere, but there was no real hard-sell as such. We did buy a small hand painted wooden egg, about the only thing that will fit in our somewhat overloaded car when we get back to Oz! Some of the paintings were very graphic and would have certainly been a talking point at dinner if you had hung them on the dining room wall!
As we drove around we passed through several villages, one of which was famous for stone carvings and I can honestly say I have never seen so many statues, there were hundreds of thousands of them! All sizes, all shapes, some religious, some downright frightening. I can't imagine who buys them all and if the stone carvers actually make any money at all as there are so many of them.
Just one shop amongst many selling statues
The next stop was a temple. Around 90% of Balinese are Hindu and worship three main gods, the Creator, Protector and Destroyer - The Trinity. These are colour coded red for creation, black for destruction, and yellow or white for the protector, and houses and temples are hung with cloth in these colours for good luck. Each day an offering is made to the gods which involves a small basket made of woven leaves and filled with various flowers, and sometimes it seems chewy sweets! Marigolds are especially important in these offerings and are always included, but why the sweets, I don't know. These are placed on the floor outside houses, shops and businesses for luck and protection and are burned in the afternoon. Another tradition to bring good luck is to stick dry rice grains to your forehead. This was explained by our guide on Sunday. We had seen this on Friday the restaurant where we had lunch. A lady came out of the kitchen to explain a meal to us with rice on her forehead - we just thought she was a messy cook and couldn't understand why no one had told her about it!
Outside the temple gate - built in 944 AD
So the reason for the title of the blog which I guess you are just dying to know! One of our stops was a coffee and tea plantation. The teas were actually fruit infusions of various locally grown plants, but the coffee was real arabica beans. Someone at sometime, although I don't know how and the evidence both scientific and logical seems sketchy to say the least, discovered that a small local animal, a luwak, was able to tell the difference between good and bad coffee beans and would only eat the good stuff. Further 'investigation' ensued, and again the evidence regarding this is dubious, and it turned out, would you believe it, that these animals could 'ferment' the coffee beans by passing them through their digestive system, thereby producing a blend of coffee far superior to anything else currently available! Imagine? So what did they do about this, well, each evening they let these little darlings loose on the coffee plantations, they sleep all day, so they can forage and eat until their hearts content. Once eaten, the coffee beans pass through the digestive system, whole, and are collected from their cages each day. These beans are then cleaned and peeled, thankfully, dried, roasted and ground into coffee. When you are faced with this kind of thing all you can do is grasp the mettle and taste it. Although we had about 8 tastings of tea and coffee that were free, the superiority of this coffee blend is such that they charge you £2.50 per pot. So of course we had to try it - when was the last time you had poo coffee? Don't worry though, even though we did buy some of the tea and coffee we didn't buy this particular blend, so if you are offered coffee at our house, I can assure you it is safe to drink!!
Looking worried about the luwak coffee!
Post lunch, it was time to drive home through the paddy fields. There are less and less paddy fields in Bali as more and more are being cleared to build hotels for the ever increasing amount of tourist who flock to the islands, so much so that rice is now being imported. The Balinese eat rice for every meal. What has been a bit strange for us is the breakfast buffet. Unlike in the west where we have quite fixed ideas about what should and should not be eaten for breakfast, and to some extent lunch and dinner, that idea does not exist here, so alongside the bacon, eggs and fruit for us anal western types, there is fried rice with vegetables, beef with cashew nuts and chicken curry! They basically just have one basic type of food, and rice, and this is eaten for every meal.
At work in the paddy fields
The local petrol station - wherever you go it is always Absolut bottles! No idea why!
Having had the coffee..... - no actually we didn't bother to investigate this one!
Our time in Bali is now almost at an end. We have really enjoyed the weekend and, despite the slightly unpredictable weather, we are sitting round the pool this morning while I am writing this blog, but it is very overcast and we have had a shower or two with more on the way and thunder forecast. We have had great food and service throughout, and people in general, apart from the dodgy money changer who ripped us off, have been friendly and welcoming. That said, I am not sure I would rush to come back here though and I almost certainly wouldn't pay what it would cost to fly here from the UK.
We have used the time usefully though and have planned our next stage, the drive to Uluru and we set off early tomorrow as soon as we land in Adelaide. Hopefully there will be some adventures on the way and we will see some of the wildlife that the outback is famous for such as emus and kangas, but hopefully not too many snakes or spiders!
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