North Bali

Today we went to North Bali. We changed our original plans and it is going to work out much better.

We started by visiting a garden temple that we hadn’t planned on. It was truly in a garden setting and quite nice.

After that, we visited the Bali Botanical Gardens. They have hundreds of acres set aside for this garden and our driver was telling us that he brings his family there on Sundays to visit and they have soccer games, tennis, ping-pong, etc for people to do. It was a pretty impressive setup.

After that, we went to Danau Bratan, which is a large lake. At that lake was another temple and it was probably the most impressive temple yet. It is set literally on the lake and has a great view. There were some added bonuses to it:

They had a Hindu ceremony going on while we were there. Per usual, everyone brought a gift / sacrifice. Well, in addition to the usual fruit and flowers, we had animals this time! They had two chickens and a duck. Rachael went to the other side because she didn’t want to see the animals get sacrificed. Of course, I stayed to watch. I thought at one point they had killed the chicken, but they were just tying it up. They took all of the animals and the fruit / flowers into a boat and were taking them to the middle of the lake to drop them in the water.

One of the shrines had a number of frog statues that we had to get a picture of for Brandy. Apparently, frogs have some significance in their religion. Who knew?

They had other animals there for the tourists to take pictures with (for a fee of course). They had a huge python (no desire to get close to it) and a mongoose. Rachael wanted a picture with the mongoose, so we paid to get a picture. The mongoose looks remarkably like a ferret, especially the younger ones. Of course, all day long after that, Rachael kept saying that she “smelled like a mongoose” from holding it!

They had a garden / park for the temple that was also very nice.

After that, we drove (for what seemed like forever) to a waterfall called Gitgit (got to love the names). All day we were driving through the mountains and, frankly, getting a little carsick all day from the twists and turns. Not that fun in the car, but the sights were great!

The waterfall was very cool. It was quite the hike there – about a quarter of a mile. It was all downhill going to the waterfall, which meant all uphill on the way back.

The last area we saw was a holy hot springs. They had a number of folks that were swimming in it. We switched our plans and weren’t expecting to be there that day, so we weren’t prepared and had to settle for wading in it.

We then had a three hour drive back to the villa (more turning). We passed some absolutely incredible scenery on the way back that made it a good trip and a great day.

They have more mopeds here than I have seen in a long while. One thing that I find incredibly funny is that many of the people riding on the mopeds will have jackets and gloves on – not just windbreakers, but full blown down jackets! Keep in mind that it is 85 degrees everyday! Our drive says that some of them get cold driving for long distances.

That’s it for today.