We were picked up early and driven out toward the town of Ubud for our bike tour. The first stop was a restaurant for a breakfast buffet, consisting of cold toast, cold fried eggs, warm banana pancakes and fruit. The view was spectacular, overlooking a valley of rice fields:
After fueling up, we drove about 10 minutes onto a back road. Very rustic and rugged. We stopped in the middle of the road where a van was located that was surrounded by bikes. We picked out a bike for each of us.
And off we went! The tour stayed on the back roads and was downhill the majority of the way. It was not necessary to pedal for the first half of the tour at all. Here we are starting out. The buildings on the right in the photo are Balinese Homes:
Along the way, we pulled into one of the Balinese homes where we learned a bit about home life. Each "home" consists of about 4 separate structures: the kitchen, a main bedroom, a secondary bedroom, and a temple. Each home has their own temple. There is usually a smaller structure used to hold rice as well.
We learned that the Balinese live in a larger family group. The highest ranking couple of the group gets the "nice" bedroom, one that has 2 walls. The rest are together in the secondary sleeping building. Each morning, the women make the daily meal. They cook one thing in the morning, and that is the food for the entire day. There is no dining room or dining area. Sitting down together for meals is not ever done (and seems different to them) Instead, they pick up their food when they are hungry and take it anywhere to eat.
In the back of the compound, the family has a garden. This was the most interesting thing! This family grew peppers, lemongrass, ginger, coffee, cocoa, coconuts, vanilla.....and more I can't recall. They also have a still where the family makes alcohol from Palm Oil. We tried some of the sweet palm oil drink, followed by the distilled palm oil liquor. Wicked stuff!
Some members of the family were there and I couldn't help but notice the small kids with no shoes, dogs running around (it is customary for families to have 2 dogs). Our family's dogs just had puppies and the boys enjoyed watching the puppies.
We continued the bike trek on the back roads of Bali, enjoying the scenery of rice paddies. Eventually we made another stop near a rice field. Here our guide, Bagi, taught us a bit about rice farming and pulled off a few grains to show us how it grows
Joe riding by more rice fields. The fields were in various stages of harvest. Some ready to plant, some just growing, and some ripe for harvesting. The climate is much like Singapore. It never changes. That is why the rice is always growing!
We made one other stop where we trekked down a large hill, through jungle, to a pretty waterfall and river. After this, John joined the crew in the chase vans. The trip from there became more busy with traffic and had a few hills.
At the end of the tour, we stopped at Bagi's house where his very pregnant wife served us a traditional Balinese lunch in their home. Here is their atypical "dining room" (one wall) where we ate satay, rice, noodles, fried soy beans. It was delicious.
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