Today is a tender port, and since we are now Elite, we don’t need to stand in line for tender tickets, but can board any tender, whenever we are ready. A very nice bonus since we have a full day planned. (Of course, we didn’t find this out until we called guest relations, because we’ve had nothing in our cabin to explain our benefits to us – we’re just sort of doing things as we would on other cruise lines!)
So, we make our way down to the atrium lobby and sort of hang around the stair case by the tender sign. No announcements are made, but we see a whole host of people coming down the steps – tours! We’re on! We just zipper our way right into the line and make our way down to the tender. The ship turns out to be a local vendor, so we have a moment of fear that all these folks are going on a water cruise tour of some sort – but I ask the lady behind me, and she says we’re all going to the same place – shopping! Well, great then. LOL. We’re not going shopping, but that means these folks are surely not staying on the boat and sailing around the Java sea.
The tender ride is smooth (it is like glass out there) and not too bad – about 15 minutes. We are let off on an old working type pier and escorted into the terminal building where we have our bags scanned. Then out the door, where everyone is really nice and respectful when we say we have a driver waiting – no hassling, bothering or haggling – they just point to the exit and explain where to look for our guide Nice to be hassle free.
In the parking lot there must be 50 or 60 guides all standing in a roped off area. As we exit through the fence gate, they all get excited and start waving their signs – we find Wayan, our driver right away, and everyone else either groans or cheers. We’re the first passengers out there – so some of the drivers congratulate Wayan on being the first to leave. It’s like we won a prize or something! And in a way, we did! Wayan is great, and being out so early gave us plenty of opportunity to do everything we wanted and more (except Besakih, which we knew was out already).
Wayan gets us settled in his very nice Toyota van, and off we go to explore Bali. We begin our drive north through Depensar, skirting around Ubud as we make our way toward our first destination, the rice terraces of Tegallalang. Along the way, Wayan gives us tons of information about the Balinese culture, the different religions, and the statues and monuments we pass on our way. Seems at virtually every major intersection there are massive monuments to one thing or another. One massive monument – which we’d never get a photo of, even if we could stop the car, has monkeys and elephants and all sorts of different figures on it, plus a massive monkey/man thing in the center. Wayan explained the meaning of it – and of course I’ve completely forgotten what it stands for by now (I wasn’t good at taking notes today), but I think it had to do with some ancient God or King or something like that.
As we move further north, the roads become much smaller and narrower, lined with houses and shops and lush green trees crowding the lanes. And there are temples everywhere. Turns out these are all family temples – every family has one – some are huge and ornate, some smaller and basic, but every other structure on these roads is a temple. And since the New Year and full moon just happened, it is a good time to get married, so there are also wedding decorations on quite a few of the temples and we pass many participants setting up for the celebrations.
Approaching the rice terraces, we pass through a 3 KM stretch of road lined with nothing but artisan shops. It is an amazing street with everything you could ever imagine – wood carvings, paintings, pottery, recycled wood turned into furniture, traditional furniture, lava rock and concrete statuettes, these totally neat glass bowl aquariums mounted on driftwood or tree trunks. Totally incredible. You could spend days just walking up and down this road – and it would be entirely too tempting because, honestly, there is so much you’d want to buy, but getting it home would be exorbitantly expensive. Nice to think about though!
After a little more than an hour into the trip, we arrive at the Tegallalang rice terraces.. These terraces began thousands of years ago when farmers began carving out the steep hillsides by hand to grow rice. The rice grown here today is still cultivated by hand and is the most expensive rice on the island. It has small, short little grains and is sweeter than traditional rice as well. Wayan parks the van in a lot and we walk down the hill to the ticket booth. Huh? It is 10,000 IDR each to get in (which is like .74 cents USD), cheap enough, but not at all what I expected. I didn’t expect an entrance fee, nor did I expect we’d walk down a commercial road, past souvenir shops to reach a viewing area above the terraces. When researching the terraces, all the accounts talked glowingly about the gorgeous green terraces stretching as far as the eye could see, the pastoral settings and either I inferred, or the articles I read specifically mentioned driving through the area. Hmmm…not here!
Wayan escorted us across the road and down a few steps to a concrete viewing platform overlooking these particular terraces. And even though this was totally not what I expected, it was still stunningly gorgeous.
Incredible. There are houses dotting the landscape, and farmers tending to their individual fields. Right up close to the viewing platform are new rice sprouts, still “floating” in their water, waiting to be replanted in the fields.
You can go trekking through the fields, paying each farmer a nominal fee to trek through their land, but we decide to pass on the trekking for now – we know we have a lot of steps ahead of us at the temples, so we want to reserve our strength for that rather than expend too much energy here. The view from above is enough for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment