Here are some resources to help you plan your own “travels with two” to Indonesia.
Tips on Traveling in Bali
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Here’s a map of Bali so you can see the island’s main attractions.
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A Balinese Way of Life
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Young people in Bali are expected to marry young, have as close to four children as possible (one for each element), and stay in the village where they were born, working at/for the business of their parents.
We met one young woman of about 22 who was working in a dress shop geared towards tourists, but hadn’t left her village in three years; that trip had been to a beach town 20 minutes away.
Travel is unexpected in a culture that demands a strict adherence to ritual. Access to a vehicle isn’t always a given, either; every road is full trucks with multiple loads and of families (with both babies and small children) on single motorbikes. [Read more...]
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Ubud, Bali
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Continued from The Heart of Bali: Part Two
Our last destination in Bali was the artisan town of Ubud.
This increasingly tony tourist village was discovered by wealthy expat Europeans in the 1960s, and rediscovered by scores of devotees of Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow-your-bliss memoir, Eat Pray Love. Surrounded by the jungle and a wide river, here you’ll find both solitude and crowds, little gem hotels, some wonderful restaurants, a large shopping district, a holy monkey forest, and a royal palace. In almost every storefront you can find handcrafts that range from jewelry to stonework to wood-carving to oil painting.
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The Heart of Bali: Part Two
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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.
