Continued from yesterday”¦ The next stop was the Ubud Palace and Puri Saren Agung, which is a large compound in the heart of Ubud. The compound has several areas. One part of it is the temple with various ornate buildings and altars around a courtyard. From the temple there are a couple gates. One leads to a complex of low, decorative houses where the royal family lives, and the other to what looks like a community area with several open buildings and a kitchen. The first shot is the main part of the temple and the second is one of the royal houses. This is the traditional Balinese architecture we have talked about over the last few days.

Across the street from the palace and temple, on the south side of the street, is the main market. The market is huge, selling an assortment of tourist souvenirs, such as wood carvings, clothes, jewelry, and handmade soaps. Markets in Indonesia are overwhelming for us. Neither of us likes to be pressured by hawkers. We want to look in peace and think about what we would like to buy, rather than being pressured into buying something the second we glance at it. And every single shop keeper yells at you to buy this or that from them, often shoving goods in your face. We are also not very good negotiators. Starting prices on goods in Bali are much, much higher than Ende and Kupang (sometimes 20 times higher). We have learned the hard way that you can bargain them down to the prices we were used to seeing they simply start higher because they know most tourists are dumb enough to pay it. But, being as we don’t like to negotiate, we will often walk away rather than deal with the hassle of getting them down to a reasonable price. Often, when they tell us a price, we’ll say no, and the hawker will get irritated, telling us we are supposed to bargain and we need to make a counter offer. When we don’t, they counter offer for us, then counter themselves back. It is actually pretty amusing, but they never seem to counter offer on our behalf as low as we would like them to.

Across the street from the palace on the west side is yet another temple. We didn’t go in. There were lots of people busily working on building what looked like a stage set. An important person had just died and there was going to be a cremation ceremony. They were making large horses, decorating what looked like a cart, and making what looked like decorations for the door frames and walls in preparation for the elaborate ceremony.

We stopped for lunch at a nice restaurant called Murni’s Warung. The seating is on an outside deck over a lush river valley. It is absolutely beautiful, and quite peaceful. The food was really good. We tried duck with a Balinese sauce, which was yummy. It is a little hotter than the fairly bland food we have been getting in Indonesia. We had originally expected Indonesian food to be quite spicy and were surprised to find it really isn’t. We suspect most places tone down the heat because we are tourists. During lunch it started raining. We decided to head back and finish our sightseeing tour the next day. Wayan us dropped us off at the marina.

For dinner that night we went a restaurant in Kuta. Kuta is a surfing beach, and tourism began in Bali in the 70’s when surfers discovered this fabulous surf spot. Since it is the genesis of tourism in Bali, it is also the most crowded and touristy part of Bali. It looked close on the map, but turned out to be a long drive through scary, narrow two way streets not big enough for both cars, U turns off the roads into weird alleys and parking lots, and crazy winding roads that seem to go in circles and take you nowhere. We thought the first cab driver took us on the scenic tour to get a bigger fare, but the cab driver on the way back took an identical route. Lonely Planet had mentioned the bizarre road system in Kuta.

Ma Joly is a fine dining French restaurant right on the beach. It is at the end of a cul de sac and quiet. It is by far the nicest place we have eaten at in Indonesia (we don’t count Nusa Dua, which we consider America, not Indonesia), and the most expensive, with main courses costing up to $9.00 USD. Our meal ran us about $35.00 with drinks, appetizer, salads, and dessert. In the US it would have easily cost $100+. The food was excellent.

After dinner, we headed straight back to Kosmos. From what we read in Lonely Plant, Kuta is nothing but endless rows of shops, restaurants, bars, and hotels. It has a happening nightlife, is loud, and tons of hawkers pounce on you to buy their goods. We were sure it wasn’t the kind of place we would not enjoy.

The bummer about staying in Benoa Harbor is everything is far away and there is no public transportation that goes there, so you are stuck with taxis to get around. And when you tell the taxi driver you are staying on Benoa Harbor, they invariably think you are mistaken since there are no hotels there. They name every other part of town, helpfully trying to jog our memories, before reluctantly taking us to Benoa Harbor. Saying we want to go to Bali Marina just makes matters worse because they hear “ballerina” and think we are really super confused, since we won’t find ballerinas on Benoa Harbor, either.