Jenny and me at a water temple.
Our ride from the airport to our villa included several stop lights, an invention I'm not sure has yet made it to the Vietnam. And instead of there being about infinity motor-bikes, there were just lots and lots. What the drive to our villa did make me realize (and then later drives around the island further emphasized) was that the interstate freeway system that we have in the United States is the greatest, most underrated invention ever. From now on, instead of saying something is "the greatest thing since sliced bread" I'm going to say it's "the greatest thing since the interstate freeway system". Which makes way more sense. Sliced bread is ridiculously overrated. If you have un-sliced bread and want to make sliced bread, all you need is a knife and 45-50 seconds of free time. If you have the cluster-eff of Southeast Asian roads from city to city and want to make an interstate freeway system, you need divine intervention. If you replaced I-5 with whatever three dozen set of roads you need to get a similar distance in Bali or Vietnam, it would take you a day and a half. And that's if you miraculously avoid a head-on collision because the roads are only a lane and a half wide. Seriously.
It does prove that Americans are terrible drivers though. We're spoiled by lanes wide enough for our cars and unique guiding principles known as "traffic laws". Bali doesn't have these things. It's like the Wild West. At one point we passed a car with a twelve year-old driving. When I was twelve, I could barely be trusted to tie my own shoes let alone drive an automobile.
Despite the lack of a sophisticated highway infrastructure, we did eventual arrive safe and sound at our villa to meet up with Mike, Lynn, Mandy, and Josh. The place was amazing. A spacious kitchen and living room, opening up to a private pool and patio that overlooked the beach. Truly the stuff of paradise. Oh, and showers. Those are pretty critical after a billion hour plane ride.
View from our villa. Not fake.
We showered off, enjoyed a nice happy hour in our paradise villa and then had dinner in town. Candidasa, where we were staying, is a small, relatively quite town and there were plenty of restaurants within walking distance of our villa. We'd learn later that they could be a bit hit or miss, but the first night was a hit. Either that, or we were so sick of airplane food that anything else would've tasted delicious.
After dinner we crashed. I may have even fallen asleep during the walk home. Flying economy class on international flights makes you appreciate beds. Not that I have any experience with the rich-and-the-famous-classes, but economy sucks for trying to sleep. So after dinner we were ready to lie flat and truly sleep for the first time in a whole bunch of hours that I don't really want to add up because it will hurt my soul.
We had a relaxing start to the day the next morning. Breakfast was made fresh for us whenever we got up and we enjoyed in on the super awesome patio overlooking the water as waves crashed on the beach. Paradise, right?
Fueled up and ready to go, we called our driver and headed out to tour some water temples and try some poop-coffee.
I'll explain poop-coffee first. Luaks are a cute-ish mix between a minx, a rat, and a kuala. They eat coffee beans, which I think might actually be called berries at the time that they eat them, and then poop them out. Their digestive juices do something that allegedly improves the coffee beans. Low man on the poop-coffee-operation totem pole then digs through the Luak poop to find the magic beans. They clean them off and then roast them like any non-previously digested coffee beans. We decided to see what all the fuss was about and go to a coffee-tasting.
The poop-coffee staff strategically pairs the poop-coffee with what they call "bali coffee". Bali coffee is super crappy instant coffee that doesn't ever dissolve all the way and kind of tastes like brown water with mud in the bottom. It's terrible. By comparison, the Luak coffee was spectacular. I think it really was good on it's own too. The tasting also included an assortment of sweetened coffee and teas that were pretty meh. I'm maybe a bad judge for that though because I generally don't like anything sweet. Or fun. Or Christmas.
Coffee tasting
After the coffee tasting we headed to a couple water temples. The water temples are exactly what they sound like. Temples surrounded by water, sort of like in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Pretty pretty, Vishnu would be pleased. I'll save most of my temple talk until a later entry when we visited the biggest one in Bali, but here's a picture Jenny took at one of the water temples. It's even more impressive if you know how typically blurry and unfocused her camera usually is.
A water temple
To be continued...
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