Ubud is a shopper’s paradise, and not just for souvenirs. Paintings, sculpture, clothing, furniture, and more are all available for sale, much of it locally handmade and at reasonable prices. Of course we don’t have extra room in our packs, so we haven’t really been in a shopping mood. Anything we buy either has to be small enough to carry, or small enough to send home. For the most part, we just take photographs.

The good news is that there’s so much for sale, it almost becomes an undifferentiated blur, which makes it easier to ignore. That is until the other day. I was walking down Monkey Forest Road in Ubud, and something caught my eye. It appeared to be a cow skull, like you might see decorating a ranch in New Mexico, except this one was adorned with intricate carvings. The centerpiece of the design was a portrayal of Ganesha, the Hindu god of knowledge, surrounded by decorative floral flourishes around the eye sockets and down the snout. I later discovered that the skull most likely belonged to a water buffalo (based on the distinctive horns).

It stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I soon went back to take a photo. I inquired about the price: 3.5 million rupiah, or about $350. Not a king’s ransom, but not a steal either. I was more concerned about the logistics of shipping it home. I talked to a specialized cargo company to try to get an estimate, but they said they couldn’t ship bone.

I tried to ask myself (and Stephanie) what I liked so much about it. On one hand, it’s completely unusual. I’ve never seen anything like it. I appreciate how it transforms a reminder of death and decay into something uplifting and beautiful. I like how Ganesha, the Hindu god of knowledge is juxtaposed against the skull of a buffalo, which, like cattle, are sacred to Hindus (in India at least). I like how this symbol of the American West is commingled with the exotic East. It just gets me on so many levels.

I found some more carved skulls in two other stores, ranging in price from 1.2 million to 2.5 million rupiah, but none were as delicate and sophisticated as that first one I’d seen. I tried to ask how I might ship one home, and though I came up against something of a language barrier, I got the sense that bubble wrap, a box, and the post office were the most obvious way to go. Apparently the horns can be removed for easier shipping, but still it must weigh 15-20 pounds. I can’t imagine what it would cost to send to the US.

I went back to the first store, figuring if I could talk down the price, maybe that would motivate me to foot the shipping bill, but they wouldn’t budge below 3 million rupiah. I also considered visiting the workshop of the man who carves the skulls (as it’s usually much cheaper to buy directly from the artist), but we already had plans to go to Amed, so I didn’t have time to arrange a visit.

Anyway, we’ve got a week left in Bali, so there’s a chance we could go back through Ubud and/or check out the workshop on the way to the airport. What do you think? Am I crazy? Is it worth pursuing?

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Last Friday, we finally left the comfort of Tropical Bali and ventured deeper into the island. We hired a driver recommended by the hotel to take us to Ubud (a little under an hour away), where we planned to spend the next week.

It took a leap of faith on both our parts to leave Sanur without knowing where we were going to stay that night. We knew there were dozens of homestays and hotels in and around Ubud, but we were a little worried about not having a concrete reservation in advance of the Christmas holidays. We jumped at the first place we looked at, as they had availability and a pool, but after committing, we immediately had “buyer’s remorse”: on second glance the pool looked a little scuzzy, and our bungalow was musty and not the cleanest. This weighed on us at first, but we knew that though we’d verbally committed to staying for ten days, nothing prevented us from seeking out another spot after we acquainted ourselves with the area.

When we hired the driver, the owner of Tropical Bali suggested that we use our trip to Ubud as an excuse to take a tour of the area. We said “Sure” without so much as a clue as to where we’d be going or how much it would cost. As it happened our driver Komang was young, well-spoken, urban-attired (fancy jeans, mirror shades, Billabong cap with a flat rim set at an angle, etc), and ended up taking us on an impressive and informative full-day tour of the sights around Ubud.

We stopped for a photo op at the terraced-hillsides of Tegallalang, learned about Hinduism and temple design at the Holy Spring Water Temple (Tirtha Empul or Tampak Siring), and had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the active volcano Gunung Batur. And then it started to rain—heavily. So much that the volcano completely disappeared from view.

The next stop was an agrotourism site where we saw all sorts of tropical plants, fruits, and spices growing in the wild, including cacao (chocolate), coffee, pineapple, cinnamon tree, clove, snakefruit, passionfruit, tumeric, lemongrass, ginseng, and more. But the highlight was seeing the famous civet cat, and its infamous product, Kopi Luwak, aka poo-poo coffee. I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

Kopi luwak is coffee made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet and then passed through its digestive tract. A civet eats the berries for their fleshy pulp. Passing through a civet’s intestines the beans are then defecated, keeping their shape. After gathering the scat, thorough washing, sun drying, light roasting and brewing, these beans yield an aromatic coffee with much less bitterness, widely noted as the most expensive coffee in the world.

Yes, we had a cup. It cost 30,000 rupiah (or $3) and it tasted like, well, coffee.

It was raining so hard that we ended up skipping a hillside temple (Gunung Kawi I believe), and went instead to the Elephant Cave (Goa Gajah). At that point we were pretty toured out. Komang deposited us at our bungalow around 4 in the afternoon. The price for seven hours of transportation and tour guiding came to 400,000 rupiah or $40, which seemed very reasonable to us. In the end we had little to worry about, and even the misgivings about our choice of bungalow lessened somewhat after a Bintang beer at the bar with access to our first free wifi in a week.

Panorama of the Tegallalang rice terraces after harvesting

Before arriving in Bali, we decided it’d be wise (for a change) to book our accommodation in advance—on the assumption that transitioning from New Zealand to Bali was going to be a bigger leap than from the container ship to New Zealand. Bali represented our first foray into the foreign and exotic, and given the twelve hours of travel time in getting there, the crossing of five time zones, and a significant ratcheting up of heat and humidity, showing up on the shores of Indonesia without so much as a care in the world seemed a little cavalier. (How I managed to rationalize hopping off the container ship without knowing a thing about New Zealand—and getting Stephanie to go along with it!—still amazes me.)

Which meant we had to take a crash course in Bali while we were still “winding-down” (read: wwoofing) in New Zealand, courtesy of Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, and WikiTravel. I’ll admit I was Bali-skeptical when Stephanie first mentioned the idea. My uninformed preconceptions screamed “tourist destination”, but the more she researched, the more excited she got, which eventually won me over (not to mention the fact that flying to Manila via Bali was significantly cheaper than flying to Manila directly from New Zealand).

We booked our flights to the Philippines at the same time (in the event that we needed proof of onward travel to enter Indonesia) so we knew we’d have three and a half weeks in Bali to play with. It seemed to make the most sense to spend at least the first four five nights not too far from the airport, while we were acclimatizing and acculturating. We initially looked at Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak, the original west coast tourist destinations, but the more we read, the more we were turned off by their overcrowded surfing, shopping, and clubbing scene. Interesting yes, but not what we had in mind to start.

So we shifted our sights to Sanur, the “sleepier” beach strip on the east coast. Eventually we stumbled upon the nine-room Tropical Bali Hotel on TripAdvisor. The reviews were unanimously positive in a way I’d almost never seen. It was a little off the beaten path, but we were fine with that. All we wanted was to be enveloped in our own tropical oasis for the first few days. A cute pool and breakfast on the terrace were bonus, not to mention the price: 400,000 rupiah per night, or about $40. It was perfect.

To reach Christchurch for our flight out of New Zealand on Sunday, we took the TranzCoastal train starting from Blenheim. The best part was the viewing car, which was open to the air on the sides—great for taking photos (and flaunting the rules).

One of the interesting coincidences of this trip so far has been meeting up with the passengers who stayed in our cabin on the Cap Cleveland (between New Zealand and Philadelphia) before we got on. We never met in Philadelphia—they got off the ship in the morning, and we boarded in the afternoon, but Jeoffrey (the third officer) recalled various stories involving the Mullins along the way.

That would have been the end of the story, had it not been for their Canadian friend who was coming to visit them in New Zealand. He googled for the Cap Cleveland, found my blog, and passed the URL along to them. They left a comment on my Tramping Rangitoto post while we were on the North Island heading south. There was a slight chance we could have crossed paths after the ferry to the South Island, but we didn’t connect with them over email until we were well south of Christchurch.

That would have been the end of the story, had I not been flipping through our Tramping New Zealand book wondering if there were any Great Walks we could do given our failed attempt at the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Key attributes being: accessible by public transport, not too strenuous, and high probability of good weather. All signs pointed to the Abel Tasman Coast Track—and in the back of my head I was thinking, who knows maybe we could meet up with the Mullins, who lived nearby. It was also an area we hadn’t visited on our campervan tour of the South Island, and it gave us a geographical region to focus our wwoofing search.

To make a long story short, we did finally meet up, and spent a lovely afternoon together waxing nostalgic about our time at sea. Since then we’ve seen Peter and Lorraine on several occasions, and they’ve been exceptionally kind in showing us around, whether it be to the start of the Abel Tasman Coast Track, to the World of WearableArt and Classic Car Museum, or to Blenheim, where were traveled with them last Tuesday, stopping at Nelson Lakes National Park on the way.