Ubud Part 2: Rice Terraces, Volcano Sunrise, Couchsurfing Fun, and Bali Belly

Originally published April 2018.

I woke up the morning of March 30th and went to Seniman Coffee shop, which I think takes the cake for my new favorite coffee shop in the world. Beautiful pour overs, siphons, and slow cold drips line the bar as if it was a high-end chemistry lab, steaming and brewing the most heavenly aromas that hypnotize you when you walk in, or up, because there aren’t really functional doors at most places here.

I took a seat at the bar so I could watch the magic happen, and began journaling. After a few minutes an Australian man walked behind the bar and started making a siphon brew. A couple from the UK walked up next to me and started asking him questions, and through listening to them speak for a while, I found out that the man is the head coffee director for Seniman Coffee, and this man has been studying coffee for years. Soon I join in the conversation because I just can’t help myself, asking questions and listening to this man talk about coffee like it was his wife of 50 years. Then soon I am offered a cup of his favorite siphon brew, a Rwandan bean that created the smoothest coffee I’ve ever had. The more I travel, the more I learn that all it takes is smiling and looking people in the eye for unexpected connections and opportunities to present themselves.

I finished my nitro brew and the rest of my cup of smooth Rwanda and then made my way back to Ryan’s because we were planning on going to the rice terraces. I hopped on the back of his motorbike, and despite the gray clouds looming on the horizon, set out to drive through villages getting smaller and smaller until we reached Tegallalang.

There are always guys trying to sell you fake tickets to everything here, so you have to be careful to not buy something you aren’t supposed to. There were guys selling tickets to walk down to the rice terraces, which were about a five minute walk from the actual place where you pay. Clever, but definitely a scam.

We smiled and said no thank you, that we would pay at the bottom when we went in, and they went off to find the next ignorant tourist. We sat at a cafe that overlooked the rice terraces and grabbed a couple drinks to sip on while we sat. I had a carrot juice (there is fresh squeezed juice everywhere here) while naturally @carrotsontheroad came up and I had to explain, and Ryan and I split my first coconut, where you literally drink the coconut water straight from the coconut with its top chopped off. The coconuts here are green coconuts, not the brown stringy ones you see in most pictures or depictions of coconuts elsewhere. There was way more liquid than I thought, and it is so refreshing. Then you can scoop out the slimy white meat with a spoon when you’re done. We sat and talked forever, continuing the profundity with laughter at obnoxious selfie takers next to us mixed in.

We eventually made our way down to walk through the terraces, passing a mixture of fresh young locals bounding up the steep stairs and the sweating out of shape dads who you can tell don’t move very often. The terraces were beautiful, but there were a ton of tourists, so we did our best to keep taking side trails until we got away from most of them. Thankfully the weather worked to our advantage, and the start of the slow drizzle of rain shooed away those who were just there for pretty pictures.

We weaved our way through the trails and steps, and once the rain picked up we ducked under a bamboo hut for some cover. There was a little drink stand there, a farmer and a few of his friends or employees. You can never really tell who is in charge here. They were selling Luwak coffee (the cat poop coffee), and Ryan hadn’t tried it yet, so he ordered a cup which came with a similar tea and coffee tasting that the K’s and I had at the coffee plantation the day before.

The farmer came over, saying hi and asking where we were from, and we quickly dove into an hour of conversation about rural Balinese culture, rice terrace farming practices, and the medicinal properties of the plants he was growing in his garden, all of which are described in detail, written in the native Sanskrit in a papyrus-bound book held by the village’s medicine man. We had a million questions and were soaking up any answers Nyoman was willing to give, which were endless. He was all smiles and happy to be practicing English with people from America, as are most Balinese people.

I find it easy to find ways to thrive in most situations, but talking to a rice farmer in a tiny village about the importance of the land and the gifts it gives us as water is falling from the sky and landing on the most beautiful rice fields is a situation where my thriving is a given.

We took a different way back to Ubud, winding our way through roads mainly used by the locals, stopping by a random night market in a tiny village where clothes were spread out on giant tarps on the ground and shoes were sold mixed together in buckets. There were hundreds of people there, and I think we were the only two that were not Balinese. Most people cringe when they know all eyes are on them and you know everyone is asking why you are there, but something about it is invigorating to me. So long as you enter with humility and make eye contact and smile, saying hi and asking how people are doing, everyone sees you’re not a threat to the community and is way less likely to be on edge about your being there.

We made it back to Ryan’s, and while he worked on stuff for work, I wandered the streets of Ubud for a while with nowhere to go and nowhere to be, the external sights and sounds a perfect background to the thoughts in my head.

The next morning I went back to Seniman and had another nitro, because, I just had to.

Then I bought a classic tourist pair of flowy pants which might be my new favorite pants ever, because again, you just have to.

I eventually said farewell to Ryan, wishing him the best and welcoming him to stay at my future home back in America if that ever happens, mentioning that we might meet up next week after I get back from Nusa Penida, but if not, hoping that our paths would cross one day,

and then I left to meet up with Reza, my next couchsurfing host for my last two nights in Ubud.

I met Reza at Warung Ijo, an extra-local Warung served buffet style, the first of its kind that I have found. Most food is cheap here, but buffet-style Warungs are new level. You serve yourself a plate of whatever you want, and at the end of the line the lady gives you a tag with a price on it that is a rough estimate of the price of what you have put on your plate. The lady looked at my plate for about .5 seconds so I guess they have superpowers, or they’re happy for it to be close. I got a lot of food for only 20,000 IDR, which is only $1.50 USD, and though I couldn’t tell you the names of much that I ate besides rice and tofu, it was all amazing. Reza has lived in Bali his whole life, living the past couple years in Ubud working for a company that has him currently working on building a hotel company base on the island of Lombok across from Bali. I rode on Reza’s motorbike back to his place, dropped my stuff off at his apartment which is in a family compound similar to Ryan’s in another part of town, and then hopped back on his motorbike to go to his friend’s art workshop.

We arrived to meet Geed, from Ubud, and Dora, from Hungary, at Geed’s art gallery, filled with extremely beautiful paintings varying from abstract to portraits to cats, all of which were awesome.

Geed is trying to establish a painting workshop to hold at his gallery for tourists passing through who want to work on painting, which would do well in this hippie town of Ubud, and he wanted to practice leading a workshop today.

So of course Dora, Reza, and I were his pretend students, and we spent the next two hours painting, poking fun, laughing, and getting to know each other as we sipped tea and listened to instrumental rock in the background.

Lol, just suddenly painting a canvas in a beautiful art studio that I didn’t know existed 30 minutes ago.

HOW DO I KEEP FINDING MYSELF UPROOTED FROM ONE AMAZING THING AND THEN SHOVED QUICKLY INTO SOIL OF ANOTHER AMAZING THING.

Once us students reached a standstill of inspiration and decided our paintings were done, Geed asked me to model for a painting he was working on, which I did for him to get a basic portrait, and then we all packed our stuff up and headed to the river to hang out for the rest of the afternoon.

We hiked down probably 200 stairs to get down to a river bank in the middle of the jungle with a large grassy area to hang out at. Dora and I talked for a long time about traveling and how it has radically changed our lives while the boys did artsy things, Geed painting and Reza taking photos around the place. Again, instant friends. Couchsurfing is the coolest.

They took me to their favorite local night market for dinner, where I got some sort of vegetable and tofu combination topped with toasted coconut and these special peanuts that we don’t have in the states as I practiced my Indonesian with them, which is still terrible, and they took advantage of my ignorance and made me say things and laugh when I would think I was saying “please” and it was actually something extremely offensive. Also, apparently rolling your “R’s” is a huge thing in the Indonesian language, which Americans are terrible at doing, so they got extra laughs in at me not being able to pronounce Indonesian words where you have to roll the “R.”

It started to rain, so we drove home, getting a little wet, and I went to bed pretty quickly because I had to wake up to sunrise hike Mt. Batur, one of the holy volcanoes’ in Bali, for which I was getting picked up at 2:30am.

I ended up not falling asleep until midnight, so I got a whopping 2 hours of sleep, which was definitely not enough, but there was no turning back now.

We wound our way through the curves for around an hour toward the volcano while I caught up with Danielle and Lucas, since we hadn’t been together much the past couple days. (They have stayed in their own accomodation, airbnb’s and villas, and I have been couchsurfing separately). We arrived at a giant parking lot filled with people around 3:10am, met our guide for the day, and prepared for our 2-hour steep ascent through jungle and then up volcanic rock, which involved no talking about the trail, being given a water bottle, and trying to take a poop in a sketch bathroom tucked in between shacks that was a squat toilet that you flushed by dumping a pail of water into the hole to create a pressure gradient in the pipe to push the waste down, and there was no toilet paper, so the decision was made to hold poop until a later time. So off we went around 3:20am down the trail with baby flashlights.

Despite doing insanity in Australia, I could tell that we hadn’t hiked much since New Zealand. The hike was about an hour and a half for us, passing most of the other people on the way to the top, though after all of those steep steps up unstable lava rock, my legs were pretty tired once we got to the top.

I arrived at the top feeling pretty bad, with an ear ache and head ache and my sinuses full, lymphnodes sore. Oh no… what is it this time… I tried to shake it off, but it was hard to not feel anxiety about the beginning symptoms of sickness.

Part of the package of the guided tours is that they make breakfast for you at the top, so we were brought hot coffees, oranges, a weird slimy fruit that I don’t know the name of, chocolate bars, tim tams, egg sandwiches, fried banana sandwiches, and hard boiled eggs. Definitely way more food than you want to consume at 5am, but we nibbled and smiled and said thank you.

A significant detail about this morning is that it was Easter Sunday in the Christian world, and we were having a sunrise service on top of a volcano holding our broken relationship with Christianity with open hands, as we stood on a holy mountain revered by the Hindu people of Bali, while the Muslim call to prayer bellowed from the valley below. So there, standing at the intersection of faiths singing praises together, as hundreds of people were gathered on the summit of this volcano, we all turned our eyes to the horizon to watch the sun rise bringing a new day, a new day that is a gift from the God, and though the people around me might call that God different names, I prayed in gratitude for the power of resurrection in all of our lives, of being raised from death to life, of being born again, of rebirth, of waking up, of acknowledging the reverence that hums within us, the Ground of being, the source from which all things flow.

I didn’t have much time to reflect before the selfie sticks and poses and crowds took over, but the sunrise was gorgeous, slowly burning off the fog that remained in the valley below, revealing more and more of the land that we hiked through in the dark.

We went down a different way than we came up, walking by the other summit of Mt. Batur, where there were a dozen or so monkeys that apparently settled there because of the heat of the thermal vents and the excess of food dropped by hikers.

We were walking past, and before I knew it a monkey was climbing up my leg. Your first instinct when a foreign animal starts using you as a tree is to freak out and resist, but once I realized my guide was holding an orange slice on my shoulder, I realized he was just trying to get the food. And then suddenly a monkey was chillin on my shoulder chomping on an orange, dripping juice down my shirt, which was pretty gross, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Definitely a first.

We made our way down quickly, riding back to Ubud to take a dip in the K’s private pool where they were staying and then took a group nap in their air conditioned room since Reza was gone from his house and he didn’t have AC. It was glorious to sleep, my body still very deprived after all of my rushing around lately.

I woke up 3 hours later to a text from Reza asking if I wanted to go to the beach. In a sleepy daze I said yes and grabbed my stuff and tip toed out of Danielle and Lucas’s room to go off to another adventure. Shortly after getting on the motorbike ride I realized that my headache actually hadn’t gone away and my digestive system still felt off, so I probably shouldn’t have gone, but we were driving somewhere new, and new is hard to say no to in my life.

We went to a white sand beach that might actually be called “white sand beach.” The water was beautiful and clear, but I was feeling more sick and had chills despite the heat of the air, so swimming did not sound fun to me. I was just trying to focus enough to be able to talk to Reza. We were able to talk for a couple hours about traveling and his experience growing up in Bali. He has some pretty crazy traveling stories of connections and coincidences that come from kind strangers helping you out just when you need it. It’s funny how those are the moments we remember, the ones where you don’t know where you’re going to sleep and you haven’t eaten dinner and then you happen to meet someone who drives you to their house and then ends up buying you a free plane ticket to Iceland for a day just because it is your dream. (this actually happened to him in Amsterdam).

We grabbed food at a harbor nearby before driving back, nibbling on Lumpia Ayam (chicken spring rolls), Risoles Ayam (a minced chicken and vegetable mix wrapped in pastry dough, kind of like an Indonesian meat pie),

and grilled barracuda, rice, and vegetables, with pineapple sorbet for dessert.

The food and conversation was awesome, but I was not feeling good at all by this point. The chills had increased, my skin hurt to touch it, and my headache was still pounding.

Em you need to take care of yourself.

Basically the only way I found to survive the motorbike ride home was to meditate the whole time, because my butt was so sore from not being used to riding on bumpy roads on the back of a motorbike, but we made it, and I basically went straight to bed, though I barely slept consistently because I was alternating between extremely hot and sweaty to extremely cold, teeth chattering and body shaking.

“Bali-Belly” had found me.

“Bali-Belly” is a term for the mild form of gastroenteritis that many travelers get (I’ve heard numbers like 50%) during their first few days of being in Bali that can be from anything from unclean food, unclean water, or bad hygiene practices in preparation of food and cleaning. Basically you can get it from anything and preventative things include things like not eating raw vegetables and washing your hands a million times a day and eating at more established restaurants, all things I’m bad at. I probably should have been more cautious, but I’m not mad about it. I knew it would probably happen eventually.

I’ve had stomach illnesses so many times at this point that I just take a deep breath and accept that the next couple days are not going to be fun, and that there’s nothing I can do about it but find a way to keep the best attitude possible, especially considering I was about to take a boat to an even smaller, less-developed island called Nusa Penida.

I woke up, took a second shower in water to rinse off after my shower of sweat I had during the night, and then wobbled my way down, stomach grumbly and body fatigued, to hop in a car with Danielle and Lucas, in which we would be taken to the boat port to head to Nusa Penida. Depending on how my stomach sickness developed, it could have been totally miserable, so I was trying to prepare myself for the worst.

Radical acceptance. 

Continued in next post