Continued from The Heart of Bali: Part One
At lunchtime, we stopped at the hilltop Puri Lumbung Cottages, in the Balinese jungle village of Munduk.
Here, in a small stone room with a view of the rice paddies below, we took a private and deeply informal Balinese home-cooking class with a young man and his tiny great aunt. There were no recipes: just verbal instruction, small bowls of ingredients like ginger and chili, a mortar and pestle, and a single iron wok-like pot over a table-top, wood-fired flame.
True Balinese food is rarely found in restaurants, so this was a real treat.
Chicken had been freshly cleaned that day for our class, as is the custom; most Balinese homes don’t have refrigeration. We were told that in general, one large meal is prepared each day and the entire family eats this in small portions from morning to night.
Our class, on the other hand, taught us how to make seven dishes, each large enough for four people. It was all delicious — long beans with crunchy fern shoots, gingery chicken — but we decided that begedel, a spiced, fried potato cake made from already-fried potatoes, is pure genius.
After eating for what seemed like hours, we explored more of Munduk, renowned for its lush jungle waterfall.
A knee-deep irrigation creek runs alongside the walking path down to the falls, and the water is freezing cold despite the jungle humidity. On the way back up, we heard a terrible piercing alarm that went on for several minutes – and turned out to be the mating call of a male tree beetle. Guess it’s not always a peaceful island.
This beetle was not, by far, the only amazing insect on Bali. We visited several gardens where colorful and fearsome spiders (called laba laba in Indonesian) the size of our hands were hanging from webs three feet across.
We visited a butterfly (kupu kupu) and insect park, where we saw a huge Sumatran butterfly an hour after its birth, and strange Balinese bugs that looked like sticks and even orchid petals.
We also saw birds along this leg of our journey, at both the Bali Bird Park, a spectacular and conservation-minded zoo full of birds we rarely see in America, and in Petalu, where at about 5pm every day, hundreds of herons come home to roost on every tree in this tiny neighborhood.
Personally, as much I enjoyed seeing so many birds all at once in Petalu, it would drive me crazy to actually live next to the incredible din, blanket of droppings, and occasionally, broken-necked babies who’ve tragically fallen from their nests, However, the villagers consider these birds sacred; Petalu has been this particular species of heron’s nightly habitat for the past 500 years.
* For more photos from central Bali, click here.
Continued in Ubud, Bali
[...] Continued from The Heart of Bali: Part Two [...]