Elevated - April 3

This morning we arrived in Bali. It is an island with a population of 4.2 million.  Bali is one of the 17,000 islands that comprise the Republic of Indonesia.

We tendered ashore in the port of Benoa at 8:00 and it was already starting to get hot. Not to mention humid.

At the dock

Our guide, Naranaya, met us and escorted us to our motorcoach. He was wearing traditional Balinese dress - a calf-length sarong and a headwrap or turban. 

The streets were narrow and congested. The motorbikes and motorcycles outnumbered cars by about 3 to 1. They were all daredevil drivers.

I had to keep reminding myself I was not in Mexico. It was similar in many ways. The heat, the construction (though not the architectural style), the disrepair, the numerous tiny shops and food vendors, the labor-intensive jobs being performed everywhere, the dogs wandering in the road oblivious to traffic, the hubbub.

Indonesia is 80% Muslim, but Bali is 80% Hindu. Every house has a temple within. In addition, there are larger and smaller temples everywhere. I would say at least one large one on each block, and and several small ones, that could be a nook in a wall or a post at the side of the road. The people bring DAILY offerings to their temples. Each offering has 25 flowers. I have no idea where they get this many flowers from. 4,200,000 x .8 x 25 = 84,000,000!!! Can this be possible? Let's say it's just one offering per family and there are 10 people in a family. That gets us down to 8.4 million flowers. It didn't look to me as though there were 25 flowers in an offering. Let's say there are only 5. So, 1.68 million. Round it down to 1.5 million flowers per day. I think something got lost in translation between Naranaya and me.

A typical offering

On the other hand . . . we have the stone carvings. As we left Benoa we passed hundreds of small roadside shops. Each one was selling a variety of stone carvings, from the size of a garden gnome on up. Animals, temples, flowers, geometric shapes, etc. Each shop had dozens. The shops were lined up one next to another for miles. We drove for an hour before we came to the end of the urban area and the end of these shops. There are really a lot of these little stone carvings here. Maybe they need so many because they have so many offerings to place before them. Can there possibly be a demand for this many stone carvings?

Two shops. Imagine this going on for miles.

Two temples, or at least, places where an offering would be left

Eventually the urbanization ended and we passed rice paddies and other fields. Then we began to climb and the occasional house was surrounded by jungle. After 90 minutes on the bus we reached the Elephant Safari Park.

I want to say upfront that this was a fantastic place and I loved it. Goodbye kangaroos and koalas, hello elephants, you are my new favorite animal.

The Elephant Safari Park takes pains to point out all the things they do that are green and contribute to the welfare of elephants. They said that the elephants are not forced to do anything, that they do what they do because they want to. The land where the park is located was not previously a forest and they did not cut down trees for the park. It was a rice paddy. They planted trees to create the park. The grounds are very beautiful. There is even a luxury lodge on the property. Apparently some members of the Saudi Royal Family were staying there.

There were about 6 buses from the ship, plus other tourists not from the ship. They had it pretty well organized so that everybody wasn't trying to do the same thing at the same time. Our first activity was feeding the elephants. They gave us pieces of bamboo to feed them. This was basically like eating wood, but the elephants seemed to like it. They are rather bristly to the touch.

When it was our turn to ride an elephant we climbed onto a wooden seat. The mahout nudged the elephant behind the ears, and off we went. Our elephant was named Bari or Beri or Bewi or something like that. He was 32 years old.

(Insert link to Elephant Walk song)

The chair moved with the elephant's shoulders in a slow rolling motion. It was not jerky or bumpy. We followed a path through the trees for almost 30 minutes. At the end we handed down our cameras to some of workers and they took photos while the elephant posed in a pond.

After our exciting ride we were directed to a nearby pavilion for a delicious buffet lunch. Then it was time for the elephant show. It was intended to show us how smart they were and was not meant to be a circus show. The elephants did all sorts of cute things while the difference between Asian and African elephants was explained. Our elephants are from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. They are not native to Bali. One of the interesting differences is Asian elephants have one "finger" in the tip of the trunk, while African elephants have two.

Playing the harmonica

Spraying the audience

We took a quick look at a very small elephant museum. The museum included a complete woolly mammoth skeleton from Alaska. Just as it started to rain hard we reboarded our bus, while other people were forced to wear plastic ponchos and hold umbrellas during their elephant rides.

:) :?

Me smiling while riding on an elephant - Just made that up

We continued our journey to Ubud. It is a town known for fine arts, music, dance, and arts and crafts and for its "famous market." We only had 70 minutes there and didn't come across any fine arts or performing arts. The famous market is way overrated, unless you want really cheap crap made in China or wooden penis-shaped bottle openers and keychains. The market alleys would have been very crowded without all the motorbikes zipping up and down. But some people just can't resist a challenge.

We took some time out from our busy Ubud shopping adventure to look around the King's Palace. I didn't ever find out the story behind it. I asked the guide and he thought I said "King's power" and spent a lot of time talking about the king's power and the end of the monarchy and so on, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that that wasn't what I meant.

At the King's Palace

We took a different route for part of the way back and passed shops selling carved wood instead of carved stone. Many shops displayed shelves of wine bottles with a yellow liquid inside. Apparently this is how they sell petrol. Yikes.

By the time we got back to the tender pier we were completely wilted from the heat.